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Experience Journaling – Day 19 – First Marks

Day 19 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

It is the first marks that often have the most life. Practice strokes made in a hurry, round and round, while the brush is far too wet. Heedless drips, drops, and C-curves. Liquid whirlpools, leaping remainder-marks from brush cleanings and color trials. A scrap of paper cast aside. Wholly unofficial. Nothing.

But later, there it slips from the spiral-bound pages. And there they are, the pirouettes and sashays, soft pink asymmetry of a traveling ballet slipper. Still nothing. Not quite bud or petal. Too unintentional to be abstract art. But there is something there, within the nothingness. Some pure gesture and movement, unfurled from the brush like a banner and waved aloft, free of all expectations.

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Experience Journaling – Day 17 – Motion

Day 17 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

Painting a hummingbird is an exercise in slow motion. A whirring reel clipped to a single frame. Let loose a spill of inky blue for the fast-flapping wings. Your brain knowns the details there are unseeable. It will not protest. Save the fine tip of your brush for the feathered blue-green belly, radial starburst halo of the staring eye. There lies motionlessness, the part suspended beneath the drum-beaten air. There the circle of stillness, shared with a blossoming branch, calm eye of the storm from which all else is thrown. A sort of fleeting symmetry is at work here, centripetal and centrifugal forces tugging at the eye. And there, at the not-quite-center of it all, a tiny staring face, as surprised to see us in this frozen moment as we must be to be seen.

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Experience Journaling – Day 16 – Texture

Day 16 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

Paint a shape with clean water. Load your brush with color and touch it down. Watch it flow in little rivers of its own choosing, seeking out its boundaries. Work fast, before the shape dries. Move with intuition. Do not despair the puddles; they will dry. The wavy paper will flatten. Let your colors bleed and burst, seep, swirl, and soften into each other. Let the surface evoke a hide tough as leather, creased and scarred, pocked, chaffed, and mottled. But also let bloom there murky pools, light filtered through water, suspended clouds of interstellar dust. Let there be whole galaxies in the dimpled skin of this whale. And when it has all dried, come back. Give him a watchful eye that tells you he knows it all, and more.

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Experience Journaling – Day 15 – Pencil Sketches

Day 15 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

Sometimes I’m happy with the light pencil sketch done before I even mix my paints. Faint lines meant to dissolve into the painting or be lifted up later with a soft eraser. But I don’t mind the lines peaking out. It’s hard to think of watercolor paintings, no matter how complete or refined, as anything other than sketches. It seems natural for the bones of the painting to show.

The little hummingbird that is about to jump onto the page in a splash of blue and green must have some starting point. We must say, here, his round shining eye, here the curve of his body, rounded, arching away from the curve of the flower stems, mirroring their lines with his whole self, completing the circle.

And for the whale, lumpy and morose, with its great jutting forehead and sliver of jaw, the proportions must be just right. The placement of the eye is crucial, the relationship between the dark pupil and the white sclera, the direction of the gaze. That will be everything. And it is all there, in a faint trace of graphite, before the first drop of paint hits the page.

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Experience Journaling – Day 14 – The Cure for Writer’s Block

I read a picture book–Ike’s Incredible Ink, by Brianne Farley–with my son recently that reminded me so much of this month’s challenge. The main character, Ike, wants to write a story. “He had read many incredible stories, and he felt sure he could write one of his own. He was ready to start.” But of course, when little Ike sits down at his very nice desk, in his very nice, book-lined study, he is totally blocked. He cannot think of a single thing to write about. Sound familiar? Ike tries a lot of things, to no avail. He finally becomes obsessed with creating his very own ink to write with. If only he can do this, he thinks, then inspiration will surely strike.

Ike winds up making a very special ink indeed, from shadows he pulls from beneath chairs, because they are “shady and shifty and mysterious”; from the inky-black feathers of booga birds; from the dark side of the moon (here, he embarks on a small side project: building a space ship), which is “velvety and pretty and round.” He then makes an awful mess blending it all together. But, let me tell you, Ike is pretty happy with the result. He sits back down at his desk to write.

I know what you’re thinking. The fancy ink didn’t help, did it? That’s just what writers do. We are such extravagant procrastinators. But no, Ike sits down and writes his incredible story. All about shadows, booga birds, space travel, and the mixology of truly incredible ink. The cure for writer’s block? Living! Doing things–really doing them–and taking note of it all as we go.

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Experience Journaling – Day 13 – Arid Alure

Hello writers! So sorry for the long silence. Life got in the way of my posts. (One kid had  a tonsillectomy, the other started Kindergarten.) But I managed to keep up my painting and journal entries. I am going to try to post them retroactively and catch up. I hope the month has led you to write about some new experiences too! If you are just checking in or need a refresher, here is a description of this month’s challenge.

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Day 13 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

There is something about painting the desert that is just right for watercolors. The muted palette, odd traces of color in the sky and striations in rocks, the way a low-swinging sun can paint the land surprising colors. Books on beginning watercolor techniques are full of cacti, distant rolling mountains, little hummocks of sand and vegetation. Nothing intimidating. Not the layered growth of forest or jungle. Nothing as illusive as trying to capture the proper shape and color of water. Everything is straightforward, stripped down; simple forms in a simple light, repeating themselves on into the distance.

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Experience Journaling – Day 12 – Working Small

Day 12 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I write in defense of small sketches, in writing and in painting. Gesture drawings, a tiny tree, small studies of herbaceous leaves. Like character sketches, flash fiction, sketch stories, drabbles; they hint at whole worlds.

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Experience Journaling – Day 11 – Depth

Day 11 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

Painting with watercolors is all about achieving depth through layers. You learn to think in stages, planning and blocking off white space, setting down light washes, waiting patiently for them to dry, and then resisting the urge to keep them just as they are, working up the resolve to paint right over the tops of them, giving the piece depth. Preventing it from lying there, pretty but flat.

As an exercise, prescribed in a book, you choose two colors, blue and orange, their light and dark cousins, and you paint leaves and branches, petals and buds. Each layer filling the page, but also submitting, ready to be overwritten by the next, like transparencies placed on the glass. The result should be like a handful of wildflowers, you’re assured, tossed in the air and let to lie where they fall.

But the last layer is too vivid, too Cookie Monster blue. You wait, paint over it, and now the color is right, but the forms are heavy-handed: slopping handfuls of wet seaweed slung atop all the rest. So it’s not what it was meant to be. But underneath you see some of the depth you were going for. You think, yes, next time, I’ll choose that midnight blue color from the start. I’ll make test swatches, use more delicate shapes. Next time it will be better.

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Experience Journaling – Day 10 – Composition

Day 10 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

What we like and what we don’t, what is pleasing to the eye, is not random. There are rules for it. And the rules–ironically enough–prescribe randomness, asymmetry, and imperfection. Take the Rule of Thirds, for example, which instructs that, if you imagine little dotted lines dividing your page into thirds, top to bottom and left to right, the four points where the lines meet are the ideal locations for focal points. Why have such a rule? Because our brains–the logical, precise, orderly central processors that have managed to clothe, feed, and shelter us over millennia–they appreciate nothing more than order. Left to their own devices, they would put a focal point right in the middle (eew), or pairs of them arranged in a row (nope).

This leads to the next rule: The Odd One Out. Focal points must exist in odd numbers, so that our eyes, frantically roaming the page for static pairs, can never rest, is always left with that one odd point of interest to move on to. This keeps things dynamic, asymmetrical, and interesting.

For the same reason, between warm and cool colors on the page, there must be a clear winner. Because equality and balance, things we strive for in so many other areas of our lives, are just plain boring when it comes to painting.

Now, these are called “rules” for a reason. Guidelines, principles, precepts, doctrines, maxims, credos … those are all so serious-sounding. But rules? Rules are made to be broken.

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Experience Journaling – Day 9 – Basic Training

Day 9 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I began to feel I should go back and learn some basics, rather than flitting aimlessly from YouTube tutorial to YouTube tutorial. So I opened up a book: Everyday Watercolor, by Jenna Rainey. It appealed to me because it was based on a 30-day learning model, with a different lesson each day for 30 days. I did some basic color swatches, experimented with saturation, value, shade, and tone. I did this one night when everyone had gone to bed. It was a serene experience, just me and my paints in the glow of a lamp, at a table in a dark room.

And, because reading about doing something is the irresistible enemy of actually doing it, I made a cup of tea and read on about value scales, split-complementary color schemes, the way pigments are valued (4 is the best, 1 the worst), grades of paper (weighed in pounds per ream and grams per square meter), and how the really good stuff is not paper at all, but cotton stretched on a block.

I knew about the wet-on-wet technique, where you paint a shape first, invisibly with plain water, and then quickly, before it dries, nudge drops of color in to swim about in the wet surface you’ve created. But I hadn’t yet learned the best little trick of watercolor painting: bringing two shapes together, both wet, closer and closer until, they leap to embrace each other, paint from one exploding joyfully into the other. The exact path seems the result of fate or, more probably, the mysteries of fluid mechanics: volume, viscosity, surface tensions. I spent  a lovely half hour corralling bubbles of whale blue and honeydew green paint into little “kisses” of this kind.