Painting is something I thought that I’d like to be able to do for a while now, but it’s been a very slow process for me. When I was learning to use markers (and I’m still learning) I had tried initially to use color and the drawings turned out like poo. So I stopped using them for a while. Then I thought I’d just add some gray highlights on my black and white ink drawings for emphasis. After doing that for several months I thought, “Hey I can add a little more variety of grays here and there. No problem.”
Before long I was doing fully rendered graytone pieces. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was learning value, and learning to use values in graytone was going to make the transition to color much easier. Once I picked up the color markers after a year of using only various grays, it was suddenly apparent that the time spent learning to utilize value was well spent.
So now with a few years of understanding how color works, I’m trying to learn watercolors. Watercolors are difficult, I think, for anyone to use in a way that renders things semi-realistically…at least it is for me. I’d like to learn oil and acrylic paints one day, but I’m starting with the cheaper of the mediums right now. This afternoon I finished up my first watercolor painting that I think works, though it’s far from perfect. But given the magnitude of my past failures with the paint, today was a bit of a break through in learning how to manipulate it.
Far from perfect is still far better than the average Joe.
Roger
October 2nd, 2008