This weekend I finally faced my fears and did a watercolour painting, an art I’ve long wanted to try but was too intimidated to start. The result is not what I’d call a masterpiece, but I’m proud to be taking another step forward on my artistic journey.
The first intimidating thing about starting any art is finding something to actually make. I procrastinated for a long time picking up cross-stitch and calligraphy before landing on Pokémon sprites and Unicode characters respectively as subjects.
Fortunately, painting has a lot of overlap with the landscape photography I already enjoy doing, so I was able to overcome that hurdle by scrolling through my camera roll.
A view from the Hokuriku Shinkansen.
Before I could paint the landscape, though, I first had to sketch the landscape. Sketching is a whole art in and of itself — one which I have little experience in — so I could easily fall into a rabbit hole trying to perfect my sketching skills before even picking up a brush.
Tracing, though, seemed a little less scary. I feel like I could trace the essential outlines of my photo without overthinking it too much, at least digitally.
My traced outline of the mountain landscape. I didn’t use all the details in the painting, but it was quick and satisfying to put together on my iPad.
Once the outline was done, I used my Cricut to exactly reproduce my digital penstrokes on a physical medium I could paint on. This was an overcomplicated solution, for sure, but it also came with the peace of mind that I could always reproduce the sketch if something went horribly wrong in the painting.
I used a third-party adapter to attach a metal pencil to my Cricut.
And that gave me the courage to paint my first landscape.
