I went to art school. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. They taught me to draw. I learned perspective. I tried metalwork. I tried stained glass. Ceramics were therapy. But I fell in love with design.
But still, I did not know what I wanted to do when I grew up. My secret passion was oil painting. It almost seemed to be the only “valid” art. However, to get the effect I wanted, I would spend a year on a painting. That does not pay the rent.
A some point in college, I did take a watercolor class. I learned to soak the paper in the bathtub and affix it on a big board with brown paper tape. I rather hated it.
But in later years, things would pop up in my head and I would want to paint them – but not spend a year – so I bought some cheap watercolors.
I taught myself how to paint how I wanted to paint. It came along slowly but surely. I kept learning. In those days, there was no youtube. In later days, I did check a few youtube tutorials and while almost all of them were just wonderful, I could not get my warped brain to do what they were doing.
So I went back to just doing what I was doing and trying to get better with each painting.
I joined a Facebook group where you can get critiques of your work – the Accidental Watercolorist. I learned from that. But over and over, people would ask me how I did something. And I would try to explain.
And I enjoyed it. In college, I student-taught a design class. It scared me to death but in those days you could smoke in the classroom and I would sit on a table, chain smoke and give the lectures. And I enjoyed it. I started to think maybe I should be a college teacher, again, when I grew up. But I couldn’t afford grad school and so it goes.
But now, I find I love to pass on the weird bits of info, techniques and wisdom that I have picked up over the decades. I thought – why not write a blog? And then I found I had to learn WordPress and how to photo my work in progress and how to edit the photos and and and. I am probably doing half of it wrong, but hey. If you get something out of this, great.
Bear with me and we can learn together.