My intention, when I started the Instagram account, was to use it as an art diary; but the interface isn't 4k-word-article friendly, and I'm too embarrassed to post five reels about how excited I am with today's watercolor experiments.
It's still weird to me that my delve into the Paint The Secrets Of The Forest turned into filling an experiments sketchbook. A practice-book turned everything-book. Maybe I got a bit burnt out with the serious stuff; it feels good to paint noncommittal nonsense right now.
Besides, yesterday I couldn't paint anything serious because I was Tired. Hear that capital T? It's because I've been Tired since 2013, with being able to sleep 15 hours a day, but in the past five years it got silly: get Tired an hour after waking up, be too tired to do more than the essentials for the next three hours, go to back to sleep. Having only four hours of wakefulness every day is ridiculous, but! Two weeks ago I stumbled upon a possible way to handle it and have been enjoying having so much time again, and today some sleep-test results came in and apparently I got Old People Sleep Issues which can be solved with Magical Medical Gear! So hopefully soon I'll have a normal life again.
Actually, between doing Pilates thrice a week, to losing 20 kgs with meds (I'm still obese though), to peace of mind, healthy relationship and feeling (being?) safe, my life's more normal than it's been in years. Certainly since the divorce in 2018. I'm also the happiest I've ever been in my life, and have been for two years now. At the age of 49! With years of depression in my baggage! To think that I might have missed on all that, if the depression had won!
But I was about to ramble about watercolor - so since I was Tired yesterday I couldn't paint, but still wanted to play with color and brushes, so I tested masking tapes. Explanation for Watercolor-muggles: Paper buckles when wet, right? Even thick watercolor paper. So you use painter's tape to adhere it to a board before painting. That tape also creates nice, clean, straight borders for your art.
If you don't want to pay extra for a tape just because someone called it 'painter's' you can use regular masking tape, but it might rip your paper. And if you're a girly girl who doesn't care that washi tape is (a) flimsy and (b) expensive, you can use that - but when I use it in scrapbooking it peels so easily I never bothered to try it as a resist on watercolor paper. 'Resist' means 'not letting any watercolor leak under it and ruin your edges'.
The results weren't what I'd expected! The best was the washi tape (wtf), and the worst was Paul Rubens, an artist's tape designed specifically to keep the paper's edges spill-free. What a fail.
The two under it are industrial masking tape from Aliexpress, a different tape from a local hardware store, a washi tape that didn't do so well, and then the medieval-art looking washi tape I thought was too exotic and tiny and detailed to use in scrapbooking, and turns out to keep the neatest edges in all of neatland!
So I got to splash pretty colors on papers and swish around with a brush and learn something while at it. Time not wasted.
That put me in the mood for experiments, so today I tested two things I keep failing at - the salt effect, and blending medium ratio; but I just realized it's midnight, and I'm tired - note the lack of capital T there, this is normal, human tiredness - hooray! - so the excitement about the other two experiments will wait for the next post. In the meantime, here's a random page where I tried to figure out the shape of lesser celandine flowers.
This writing-not-in-private-and-being-excited-in-my-journal thing is nice. I hope I keep it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment