What I Did Last Year that Changed My Watercolor Practice
Last year, I participated in the World Watercolor Month 31-day painting challenge for the first time and it couldn’t have come at a better time. It was July 2020 and my family had been self-isolating since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both my husband and my son are high-risk, so my anxiety was the worst it has ever been at a time when we knew very little about the virus.
When it rains, it pours and my grandfather passed away that May. My family wasn’t able to attend the funeral in-person and had to look on as virtual spectators while the funeral director broadcasted grief into the living rooms of my siblings, cousins, and I via Zoom. When I am grieving, I need to be useful to others in order to cope; not being able to be there for my mom and grandma was killing me and all I could do was paint. In May, I painted the first watercolor painting I was truly proud of.
I found myself painting most days throughout June and stumbled upon the World Watercolor Month challenge. Somewhere to focus my energy at a time when the world was on lockdown and I had time on my hands. I invested in professional quality supplies and dove headfirst into the challenge, not coming up for air until August.
At that time in my career, most of my fine art sales had been fiber art pieces, but I had stopped selling my work for a while. I had taken a watercolor class in 2016, when my son was a baby, to get out of the house and do something for myself. I found myself challenged, humbled, and impatient with the medium and didn’t pursue it much after the course ended. The pigments were unruly and didn’t behave in the same way as the acrylics and oils that I was used to. Nothing can be hidden in watercolor. Every step of the process impacts the final painting: blooms, graphite underdrawings, and mistakes are all visible through the thin, transparent layers of color.
A funny thing happens after spending a month intently focused on one medium. You learn how much water to apply to get the effects you want and which tools will provide the marks you need. You become intimate with the textures of different brands of paper and with the pigments used in each tube of paint. It becomes a second language and you are fluent. Once you learn the rules, you know just how to break them to make a statement.
2020 World Watercolor Month
Paintings shown in the order in which they were painted
