Warm Weather and Watercolor Woes

 We've been lapping up these last warm days of autumn here at Chez Bee. I go for walks at least once a day in the prairie park down the street and Mr. Moose wants to go out for more walks now that it's not so hot, but not cold yet. He has a terminal heart condition, so he doesn't go very far or very fast, but I cherish his little Mr. Tudball sojourns around our block.

I usually have an urge to do some spinning come October but our 70-80 degree temps have put the kybosh to that so far. I am working on an afghan for our sofa that will be done soon so maybe then I'll feel more like greasing Mabel up and taking her for a spin. Lord knows I have lots of wool to spin even though I haven't been to the Sheep And Wool Festival for 2 years!

Aside for that I've been arting-mostly Zentangling and art journaling, but a little watercolor here and there. I want to love watercolors. I love the way they look in other people's work, but so far we have a like/hate relationship. I think that since I'm wielding the brush, I should be the boss. Watercolor thinks otherwise, throws caution to the wind, and dances with mad abandon exactly where I don't  want it to go. I'd be happy if we could come to some kind of middle of the road truce, but so far, I haven't seen any signs of playing nice on watercolor's part. 

I did find out about the catch-22 of trying out watercolor painting though.  I thought that I wanted to try it, so I got some cheap paint and paper. The end results were abysmal. Turns out that you need to invest in a better grade of both paper and paint to get anything other than yuck. An investment that one is hesitant to make when one only wants to try the medium out. But I did invest in a couple of tubes of good paints and I won some good paper in a contest, so now I am making a better grade of  abysmal art. The colors still don't go where I want them to, but they do it to a higher standard! I'm call that a win in this journey.

It's not just the paint, and the paper...watercolor painting takes not 'a little water' and not 'a lot of water', but the Goldie Locks 'just right' amount of water. I'm still on the uphill climb of that learning curve. It seems like there is a fairly small sweet spot that is fairly elusive. Things are going ok and then I realize that everything dried out and you can't just add more water willy-nilly because that spells disaster most of the time. Or I think 'this time, I'm not going to dry out so fast' and liberally apply the water which makes all of the paint slide to the bottom of the paper. I've done some stuff I was initially happy with until it ran into a 1/4 inch wave at the very bottom edge of the paper. 

But I keep at it because I think we all need to learn something out of our comfort zone; keep challenging ourselves, you know?  How do you challenge yourself?

With Grit, Grace and Gratitude,

M-