Hi writers! If you’re new to the website, here is what we are doing this month: experience journaling. We’re trying something new (or maybe a bunch of new things) and writing about it. For my own challenge, I’ve decided to try my hand at watercolor painting. I’m going to paint a bit every day (or at least a few times a week) and write about the experience. It’s something pretty simple. It’s portable. It lends itself to self-instruction.
Remember writers, this is a choose-your-own-adventure challenge! Just make sure you choose something you don’t already know how to do. Or if a new hobby seems daunting (or too tame), choose some new experiences to embark on and write about (check out this list of examples). I’m going to do some of these on the weekends, just to break things up.
The point is to practice using a journal to record your experiences and expand the range of things you feel comfortable sitting down to a blank page and writing about.
Have fun!
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Day 1 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
I wound up with a little travel case, small enough to fit in a pocket, with a dozen Winsor & Newton half pans. The art supply store, the massive Dick Blick’s on State Street, was an overwhelming, two-story affair. Towering shelves of paints, brushes, papers, and canvases were set close together, so that you felt almost like King Kong set lose on a scale model of New York City. You had to press yourself close to the merchandise to let other King Kongs shuffle past. As I did so I read the names on the little tubes and blocks of paint, like the recipe for a chemical formula, or a list of ingredients to toss into a witch’s cauldron: Bismuth Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Scarlet Lake. There were a half-dozen rose-reds and pinks alone: Rose Madder-genuine (a color prone to counterfeit?) Opera Rose, Permanent Rose, Rose Dore, Potter’s Pink. I chose a little synthetic brush with a water reservoir, because it looked manageable, like a pen, and went off in search of paper.
Professional-grade watercolor paper feels like pebbled velvet butter. It is priced as if it were made from the bleached and pressed wings of rare Amazonian butterflies. I moved on to the student-grade section, where I considered tablets with tear-out sheets versus spiral-bound books. I decided on the latter–twelve large sheets of Strathmore acid-free cold press, “for mastering techniques with wet media.” I wanted to own the results of my month-long experiment, the good and failed attempts bound neatly together.
As I was leaving the art store I ran into someone I used to go to law school with. “What are you up to these days?” he asked. “Oh, you know, buying art supplies on my lunch hour,” I said, acknowledging that maybe this was a little unexpected. And he, a new father himself, said quite innocently, “hashtag mom life, huh?” I laughed, and we parted, and it didn’t register for another block. O yes, he assumed I had just bought art supplies for my children. At a fancy art supply store in the city, no less. Well, yes, that would make me quite a mom, wouldn’t it? But I hadn’t. I’d bought them for myself: a middle-aged woman, trained as a lawyer, working for a judge, with lots of busy lawyer friends and two small children, with a writing hobby I barely had time for already. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to me, in the face of all that, to begin something new.
But why not? Words beget words, if you only let them find the page. Why shouldn’t it be that hobbies beget hobbies? And so I walked back to work with the paper, brush, and paints knocking together in my bag–the little thump, thump, thump of something new.