Playing with Paints

My home health care duties are changing - The Knee That Went Bad went to the hospital yesterday and came back with a NEW knee replacement.  No more concrete spacers!  YAY!  I posted about the spacer here.  It's still creepy to think about a hunk of concrete being deliberately put inside your body.

Because That Knee will be more and more mobile over the course of the next two or three months, my time should be a little freed up, and I intend to get back to some of the things I've kind of put on hold.  One of those things is my attempt to learn to paint watercolors.

Some of my attempts have been not terrible and I've even framed them and hung them in the living room.  Then there are the others - hideous, flat things with bad perspective and weird proportions.  Oh, well.

My new Crayola paints!

Here's the synthetic flat and
Crayola squirrel's hair brushes.

I was getting kind of disgusted and then I read an article that flipped a switch - if I wanted to have fun doing something, I needed to PLAY at doing it!

So I put away my artist's watercolors, brushes, and paper, went to Walmart and bought a box of Crayola watercolors, a synthetic flat brush, and some lower-end watercolor paper.  Then I went home and followed along with a YouTube video JUST FOR FUN.  No expectation of a picture good enough for the wall.  And here's the end result...

Even though the colors are kind of too bright for my taste, they're not terrible, and I like how some of the details came out - the weedy field looks weedy, the bushes look bushy, and the trees actually look like trees!  And the rock isn't terrible, either.  I'm not excited about the sky, though, and the one tree is smack in the middle of the picture where it really shouldn't be.  But it was FUN to try painting something with kids' paints.  From now on, I'll try to remember to PLAY more.