Day 8 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
So far I’ve drawn parallels between painting and writing. It is also sometimes like yoga. Or maybe it’s just my writer’s mind (or my lawyer’s mind?) that can’t stop drawing comparisons between things.
In yoga, ashtanga flow-type yoga, at least, your instructor will tell you to have good economy of motion. You can transition from mountain pose to plank in four steps, pausing to wipe sweat from your forehead, fix your shirt, and adjust your hair or glasses. Or you can ignore all of that and make one graceful sweeping motion between the poses. You practice doing less and less with your body, stripping down the movements and focusing on the poses not as stopping points in a connect-the-dots picture, but as freeze frames in a flowing arc.
To paint a leaf, you can make an outline of a leaf and color it in, like a child’s coloring book. It will be flat and lifeless. Or you can make the same shape by pressing your brush lightly for a thin stem, then firmly so that the bristles splay out and the leaf gets thicker, and then, with a little flourish, lightly again, for the tip of the leaf. You can do this twice, once for each side of the leaf, and leave a small sliver of white down the middle for a natural highlight (I’m still working on this). If you get good at it, the leaves roll from under your brush like little green tongues, seeming to sprout from the curving stems and branches you’ve drawn like real growing things.
You practice. Slow, steady, with economy of motion, and put down your brush. You may even feel the urge to bow your head and say “Namaste.”