Perhaps I write this post for my own benefit as well as for you dear reader! Last weekend I finished my watercolour project, for this text I would like to take a minute and possibly share some of my insights. After painting the last one, I counted the paintings and to my astonishment came up with the figure of 204 pieces!
When I started with the paintings it had been years since I used my watercolours, I had drawn but not as much as I wanted to. I saw this project as an excellent excuse to be more creative and to do more drawing and painting.
From the get go, my drawings were a bit fast and perhaps not so accurate, and it did not bother me at all; since these paintings were for my own sake, and solely to get me to learn the names of the plants!
In march I did my first painting and during the summer at roughly half way through the project I started to notice that some drawings were better than others. At that point my only thought were to not mess it up when I added the paint! During the course of the project my painting skills increased as well as my drawing skills, that is from where they were when I started!
In the beginning when I mixed the paints I had pools of paint in my watercolour set because it took so long time to find the right colour! At the end there were no pools and hardly even puddles! My blending skills had also increased. Perhaps an important note here to make is that I had previously painted with acrylics and when you do that you get to be a master blender, especially if the painting takes more than one session to finish! But, that was many years ago!
Something that I learned was to always mix my greens, I have the colour green in my set, but in comparison to a leaf or a stem, those greens were always a bit off. Even when I mixed them with other colours it was hard to find the right value. So after a while I mixed my own greens and never bothered with the greens in the set!
By the way how much time did I spend drawing and painting, you ask? Since I did not log my hours I have to make an estimate here. On an average week I could do from about eight hours to possibly twelve hours, there were weeks when I could do more and weeks with less. The important note here to make is that I did not spend every awaken hour to the project, it really was a few hours here, and a few hours there.
So, is there something I can leave to you dear reader that you can take with you from this project? Even if it looks like it I don’t want to be here and toot my own horn…! I think that if it is a lesson here to be learned it is that if you want to be better at something, you really will be if you go and do it! I included the total number of paintings above to make the point that if I had not made those 200+ drawings and paintings, my skills set would not had increased at all!
So, if there is something that you would like to do or be better at, maybe you should get going and do it, for an hour here and an hour there often turns out to become more…!
Below I have put my first and my last paintings, I thought that it would be cool to share it with you, and also to sort of show the progress made.
Fun fact! I only started this project to learn their names, that I would get better at drawing and painting actually did not occur to me…!
Take care!
P.s This time around I dabbled with the UK spelling of watercolours!
