I bought my watercolors back when I was studying interiour design/architecture at the age of 21.
I only did one semester actually before I quit for different reasons. But I really enjoyed some of the classes we had, this first semester was more about art than architecture. We had painting and drawing classes and also art history.
So that was when I got my little box of watercolors. They are pretty high quality, we had to get a particular one for the painting class.
I actually haven’t touched them since then, it’s been more than 10 years. But I took them with me when I moved into my van. And now was the time to take them out again and they got me through some dark moments these past few weeks ^^
This visit in my hometown in Northern Germany right now is pretty challenging, but painting successfully distracts me for a while each day from my own thoughts and worries.
The vibrant colors bring me joy!
I’ve never really practiced with watercolors, so I don’t really know what I’m doing ^^
Right now it’s not about making something beautiful, but more about playing, expressing and enjoying the process. I bought two sketchbooks with 40 pages each, so I have an abundance of paper!
It’s not the best and professional paper and it gets wavy pretty quickly when I use too much water, but I don’t mind.
It’s not about perfection.
It’s the same with my writing journals.
I gave up buying pretty hardcover books a long time ago, because it turned out I never use them. I always want to save them for something "special", they seemed to good to just spam them with weird words while I’m processing my human experience.
Nothing ever seemed to be special enough, so they ended up staying empty until I gave them away. Nowadays I just get a bunch of DIN A5 cheap school notebooks, where I can just write whatever and whenever and with the worst handwriting sometimes, when I just need to get out emotions. I don’t worry about aesthetics the way I would with one of those beautiful leather-bound journals.
It’s the same with my sketchbooks right now. I need to feel the freedom to just start a new page when I feel like it, to rip out one, to ruin one, to make an ugly painting that I burn afterwards. The space to just play and experiment.
I also learn a lot in the process! At university I was so anxious to do everything right that I didn’t really allow myself to just play (might also be because we got grades for everything we did ^^), now that I do I actually learn a lot more about the way watercolors behave and move.
Those paints were exactly what I needed right now. I so missed physical, analog art in my life. I don’t feel like making digital art at the moment. But I still live in a small van (together with my partner), so painting on canvas or wood is out of the question. We just don’t have any space for canvases or any kind of large paintings.
But the watercolors and the sketchbooks don’t take up much space. The paintings can just stay in the sketchbook until I have a wall to put them on, if I choose to. I don’t know yet if I will be able to actually paint while actually living in the van, but we will have a house-sit over winter, so I guess I will continue my explorations there.
None of the paintings in this post in ‘finished’ or anything, some of them I don’t even like very much ^^. We’ll see if I will ever work on them further or if they just stay like this as a souvenir from these strange times until I let them go.
