Watercolor

I never used to think of myself as artistic.

I was (and still am) horrible at drawing and I concluded that I was horrible at art in general.

Being a perfectionist didn't help because I would get so frustrated every time I attempted to draw a picture since it never turned out the way I had envisioned.

So when my mom signed me and my sister up for water color classes in the Fall of '10, I was not happy.

Linking up the above photo to Sweet Violet's Photography Challenge the theme is "something different".

But you know what? It turns out I LOVE painting with watercolors. And my paintings actually turned out okay. In fact I loved watercolor so much I decided to take another class this past fall.

The class finished at the beginning of December and yesterday I pulled out my paint supplies for the first time since then.

It felt so good to be painting again. The first dip of the brush in water. Mixing the blues and yellows and reds to get the perfect color. The first stroke on clean white paper. Blending the colors on the paper and watching a picture begin to form.

Painting was a well-needed break from life yesterday. I can forget my mountains of homework and chores for a few hours.

Yesterday I did the painting on the right (inspired by this image on pinterest: here)

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And I finished the following snowman picture. (The one on the right is from one of my classes this past fall)

Last night when I was taking these picture I decided to photograph my other favorites because I haven't shared any on this blog before. So here are some of my favorites from the past year:

These aren't perfect and they definitely are not the best watercolor paintings but I'm proud of them. I'm proud that I can paint watercolor since I used to believe that I could never be an artist of any sort. 

A bokeh Christmas tree is a lot harder to paint than I thought!

Another thing I'm trying to remember when it comes to both my painting and my photography is to be myself. There are a lot of times this past fall in the watercolor class when I would try to paint like somebody else in the class. And each time that I worried about painting like other people the picture didn't turn out.

 

Inspiration comes from everywhere. My photography, photos I found on pinterest or google images, photos from books. Usually the photo is simply the base for the picture. I think that's one of the reasons I like painting so much. I can take a photo and then make an almost completely different picture through painting.

So it turns out that between my painting and watercolor, I am artistic. :)

Although, I do I have many "what was I thinking?" paintings.

I put a collage of four of them together.

Okay, first picture in the top left corner. That paining was going to be great but then I went and added that strange thing/animal in the middle. It's like a cross of a bird and dolphin :). (Now you can stop wondering why there are no paintings of animals). The next one isn't too bad, it's the very first one I did but those things in the middle, well they are supposed to be rocks in the ocean. Yeah. ahem. Moving on clockwise, the bottom right one, why did I piant a brown background? And those flowers are not very good. And I saved the best worst for last. What is it? I have no idea. See it started with the moon and then the sun and then the earth and so on, but then I have that weird white area with weird colored planets and then I have so random transparent boxes and a bunch of splashes of paint. I told you it's the worst. :D

What do you think? Do you have any artistic outlets besides photography or writing?

~Mary Kate

(My lightroom trial ended which is why my watermark is different. So it's back to picnik until I can buy lightroom in a week or two.)