I’ve just finished a weekend watercolor workshop and I have to say it was a challenging couple of days. First, I want to highlight all that I gained from this class because while it was a frustrating and challenging experience, I also learned a lot.
One of my biggest takeaways is how to select papers. When I signed up for this course a month ago, I couldn’t even understand the code-language that the supplies list appeared to be written in. With the help of a friend to figure out paints, I selected supplies the best that I could and arrived at my first day of class. It turned out I’d misunderstood the criteria for selecting the recommended paper, but I had an opportunity to try out the preferred paper and compare it to the 3 samples that I’d brought. I went out that night and got the softer paper for the second day of class. I learned what it is, where to find it, how to tear my own sheets into smaller ones, and how it differs from the other papers I’d been using. This is a big and exciting win!
We began the first day with a useful exercise for understanding the reactivity of my paints with one another. Having the ‘wrong’ paper worked against me in this exercise so I didn’t get as much blending information as I might have hoped. That afternoon we painted fruits and vegetables. I spent my time with a charming nectarine whom I very much enjoyed but also now consider my friendly nemesis. (Friendly in that we’re on good terms. Nemesis in that we haven’t come to any sort of understanding with one another yet). I painted the nectarine 3 times, and I’ve written more about that experience here. I learned about the benefits of letting pigments blend softly into one another on the page and to be on the lookout for places where I can add softness to an edge to help give an object more dimension or to make a shadow look more realistically diffused.
On Day 2, we shifted to landscapes and brought photos to use as reference. Despite bringing my own photos, which should have helped spark some excitement, I felt zero interest in painting landscapes. Truly, the only photo I wanted to paint was a lovely, brambly snail. We started by sketching out tone-studies. I started with the lovely snail, but felt I should at least attempt a couple of landscapes so I sketched out a couple of those, but my heart wasn’t in them. I did decide to give one landscape a go, with limited success.
The challenge of the Sunday afternoon portion of the class was many faceted. Frankly, I was feeling pretty brain-fried and exhausted toward the end of this weekend intensive. It was a lot of practice and learning for a medium still so unfamiliar to me. I felt like I’d had very limited success and not a lot of breakthroughs during the weekend, so I was on mental-overload. And the more friend I felt, the more stressful the environment felt. There were a couple of times when I’d start to proceed on my landscape in the best logical manner that I could think of just to bravely get paint on the page in a not-too-terrible fashion, and the instructor would rush over and exclaim dramatically and attempt to fix things on my page. I was already feeling daunted by the page, but these moments added additional reluctance to put brush to page because I was so worried about messing up.
When I’m alone at home I’m not afraid of the page and I have a curious explorer’s mindset with my paints. But I was all tense and controlling throughout my landscape experience and it shows in the painting. I know what I would change about it in a second iteration and how I would make those attempts, but it wasn’t something I felt like doing in class because I was tired, I couldn’t loosen up, and my heart wasn’t in it.
So I turned to my snail, which frankly I wish I’d followed my heart and started on from the beginning. Painting that snail was my happy-place and it got me through the rest of the afternoon. It wasn’t the assignment, but it gave me a safe way to play with my pigments and experiment with translating my values study into paint and to work with the paints on the page. Mostly, I felt like the instructor didn’t know what to do with me, and I didn’t know how to execute her suggestions to me, so it kind of felt like an impasse. I felt like a dummy for a lot of the weekend because I could hear what she said, and it could make sense conceptually but I still found I didn’t know what to do with any of the information to execute it. The snail allowed me to continue to be physically present in the room and finish out the class while giving myself a mental break from all the stress and confusion I was feeling around expectations and my limited understanding.
But now that I’m back home and I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I feel ready to face my old nemesis the nectarine, who I intend to paint again today. I feel ready to try the landscape again and do the things I wish had gone differently in the first one. At some point, I’ll probably finish the snail just for fun.
So I learned a lot in this class, even if I don’t feel like I have any tangible watercolor work [that I’m proud of] to show for it. Thanks to this class I will become a diligent sketcher of tonal studies and can’t wait to see how that helps me improve. I also learned through this experience that I have no interest whatsoever in being a painter. All I’ve ever wanted to be is an illustrator and painting just isn’t my medium of interest. Watercolor is how I want to lay down color, but I want to do that as part of an illustration, not loosely on the page in suggestive strokes of skies and clouds.
Once I realized that, it made sense to me why I was so drawn to the snail and why I found the landscape such an uninteresting subject to paint. So while I appreciate the experience that I gained throughout the weekend, I think part of why the instructor and I didn’t know what to do with each other is because she wanted to make loose and suggestive watercolor painters out of us, and I just have no interest in painting for painting’s sake. But I didn’t realize that until yesterday evening after the class had concluded. Perhaps if I’d figured it out sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so vexed and confused by her instruction and I could have opened myself up to the process more. Meanwhile, I’m back getting back into my curious explorer’s mindset and back at my own desk where I will be taking all the learning I received through the weekend into my future practice.