On Being Terrible at Your Art

How watercolor is teaching me to write again

4:39 a.m. - Holy hell. I’m drenched in sweat again. Like this whole night sweat thing is a surprise. I’ve sweat through sheets nightly since 2020 and an open window, light fan, and cooling sheets do nothing to snap my menopausal body out of it, even in January.

Except, this morning I actually wanted to get out of bed before my 18-year-old had even gone to sleep. My last visit to the beach a few days ago had drawn out the dragons. Vancouver’s misty mountains get all dreamy this time of year, and my favorite beasties called me out to the edge of the veil. A three-hour walk left me with all kinds of inspiration. No surprise, Tiamat and her winged crew showed up in my dreams and refused to let me go until I finished a poem I started while perched on a piece of driftwood.

So, I flopped out of bed, slid my toes into fluffy slippers, and pulled out the watercolors.

Paint. Yes. That’s right. It’s probably, in most people’s eyes, very wrong. But, that is indeed my poetic medium right now.

I honestly shouldn’t even touch the stuff. My husband is the artist. He’s worked on incredible properties including Beast Wars, Stark Trek Online, Star Wars video games, Barbie, Doozers, Bob The Builder, Grendel War Child—the list goes on.

I suck at it. Stick figures are my creature du jour. Imagination is where all the beautiful things in my head remain locked away. I want so much to get all of the visions I have out and onto paper. I have lamented it deeply, since like sixth grade when the school art teacher, Mrs. Bus, told me to stick to reading and my studies. Until . . .

To AI or not to AI

When generative AI such as Midjourney first came out, I thought I had finally found my salve for being an absolutely terrible artist. I could craft a mother of a prompt and finally visualize so much that lived in my very full head. For a while, I adored it. Found character and clothing references, prompted for weapons and magical tools, tried to recreate ancient worlds.

I even tried a few of those creative writing bots in the midst of massive writer’s block to see if they could snap me out of it. Every time I used one of them, something emptied out inside of me. There was no “co-pilot” effect. There was only the “I didn’t create this” effect. Those got ditched within weeks of my first try.

But, the image generators felt more like magic. Yes, I got tons of garbage from them. Yes, I had to get what I got. No refining, no modifying, no tweaking. Some of it, though, proved really enchanting. But, when it came out that they’d been trained on stolen artwork, including that of artists my husband has worked with for decades, I soured on it.

I found myself visually adrift once again in the land of stick people. However, I knew whatever I created needed to be from me. No bot would replace the soul every artist puts into their work.

Making Terrible Art

I blame my dreams for the foray into getting really comfortable making terrible art. After dreaming about a giant mother moose who held me close and nursed me back to health in early 2023, nights became about more than sweating. By fall, I couldn’t ignore the nocturnal visitations from the moose and others. I started journaling and working with them. My inner world grew rich and colorful and the words I had always relied upon just weren’t enough to get it all out.

My girls and I spent many years in love with Waldorf crafts and watercolor when they were little. So, I headed back to what I (peripherally) knew. Somewhere around the first of December, I asked my husband if he had any watercolor paper. After 22 years together, I should have understood that meant Amazon would deliver watercolor paints, paper, brushes, and pencils the next day. That’s how he rolls.

I sat there and stared at all of these lovely new supplies. Like, what next? I can’t even draw a proper circle? I didn’t want this to be about becoming an amazing painter or taking it seriously at all. I just wanted to get the pictures, in whatever form possible, out of my head. I loved the notion of them made by my own hands, letting whatever came to me move through me. I needed something relaxing and creative that had nothing to do with the writing that I had begun to hate because of the pressure I put on myself to craft something important.

So, I just started in.

My first watercolor painting

See, barely got the circles right. However, a literal zen settled over me and I just knew—like I knew the first time I saw my husband across the room all those years ago in Seattle—this was it.

Watercolor is (because I only choose the hardest path) an insanely unforgiving medium. I continued to suck. Watched a whole lot of videos. Picked the easiest elements of painting possible (trees are actually a breeze). Painted some literal crap, and then some more. Occasionally, a piece turned out just by magic. I got a wee bit cocky. And, I fancied myself a holiday card maker. Watercolor had transmuted all of the sweaty nights, the day of self-doubt into a softness I didn’t even know existed. I was progressively more laid back (not really a thing for me), and even (gasp) satisfied with all of this sucking.

Then, one night, my daughter and I decided to paint a sunset landscape. She had no preconceived notions about what her final piece ought to look like. An hour later, she had a gorgeous, vibrant piece that wasn’t going into the National Museum, but made the refrigerator (a big deal in our house). Three tries of mine made it all the way to the recycle bin. I had plans in my head. Plans I could not execute because, let’s face it, I have the watercolor skills of a three-year-old finger painter.

So, there I was, in love with this new-to-me medium, itching to get out all of these beautiful scenes and botanicals, a little Beatrix Potter sweetness, those hand painted storybooks by Elsa Beskow I read to the girls until they fell apart. My dreams, my limited talents, and my former need to instantly master anything I put my mind to had to come to some sort of agreement on how to proceed.

The Three Ps - Possibilities, Process, and Patience

The only way to proceed was to be okay with whatever came out; to believe that I could make ugly things and, as a result, learn how to make the next one better. As I worked, I found that my writing and the projects I chose to take on began to reflect the same sense of making to learn rather than making to win. I started to look at simple, everyday bits of life with more magical eyes. Suddenly, the stories that had not flowed with any consistency in 2023 poured out of me.

Possibilites.

Watercolor is all about value and layers and learning your brushes. I have spent a whole lot of time this holiday break making marks on pages to see what a brush can do. I learned a bit of paint mixing. I made my own beginner palate. Still so much to learn. With the softness I found in applying these new skills, I considered the layers contained within a story. The reworking of every layer over and over again until something beautiful emerged. Poetry, especially, has gotten this treatment with me. The jotting. The original working. The reworking and reworking. The naming. The final draft.

Finally, and I suspect most importantly, watercolor teaches one to create a layer, leave it to dry, and come back again later. There is no instant gratification. It is one slow and time-consuming step before the next slow, time-consuming step. When I skip those steps, I trash the piece without fail. I had, this past year, wanted so badly to bang out a winner of a second novel. I had always wanted to have somehow “made it” with my first novel. My dad, at the beginning of February, told me that this was not the book that would do that. He was brutally honest. But, he was also right, and I just could not see my way out of having to go through it all again just to prove myself. So, I stopped loving writing. Learning to take my time again and see each layer of the work through to its best possible end made me fall back in love with the process of creating and, ultimately, is teaching me that those layers are the story beneath the story.

I'm going to have to pull out a little Fletcher at this moment:

Which Leads Me Back To 4:39 a.m. This Morning

So, I got up from this dragon dream and proceeded to paint. I had a poem to go with it that was nothing more than point-form ideas. It had already been marinating for several days. There were so many possibilities at this crack-of-dawn moment. I chose the one that will now prove to you my point about making terrible art.

OMG, what is that? I had this vision of a cool Chinese or Coast Salish sea dragon shooting across Vancouver’s North Shore (well beyond my beginner status). So, I tried to paint fog in the form of a dragon. Clearly, I failed at this YouTube lesson for the simple reason that I cannot draw, at all.

It delayed the rework of the poem, but happily did not phase me much beyond it sucking and requiring a coffee warm-up (because, patience).

Round 2. This time I made some important choices. No dragon (because, drawing). Get an actual tutorial that I can follow (because, process). Drink four more cups of coffee.

Wet-on-wet required me to let it dry and return to paint the foreground after Ken gave me a crash course on color values. In that hour, I began reworking the poem. I laid down the foreground, reworked the poem about six more times.

Around 4 p.m., I texted my sister-in-law, a dragon expert, to weigh in on its title. Her insight into a beautiful ritual between high priestesses gave it the last nudge to make it really come together.

Here is the final product:

I had one of the most relaxing and satisfying days in the history of me. I made some art. I wrote what I think is a pretty lovely poem that is vibing with my Tintagel Arthurian motif right now.

So, I am declaring this the year of sucking at watercolor. Its softness has given me back my writing voice. Its nature requires me only to show up and create. It doesn’t need me to prove myself. I’m not competing with anyone. I’m just here, making terrible art, and relearning a love of the craft of writing as a result.