I’ve long loved the look of watercolor painting and wished I could do it myself. Seeing a friend share some of her beginning watercolor work on Instagram made me want to do it for myself. And then, I ended up in the U.S. without my other crafty and hobby supplies and facing a stay-at-home order. I knew I needed a project to give me something fun and relaxing to do.
So I started to research supplies and watch youtube tutorials on watercolors, leading to buying my first paints, brushes, and supplies. As Michigan shut down back in March, I started to paint.
The first piece I painted that I really liked!
Five months later, I’m still probably considered a beginning water colorist, but I’ve learned a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time mixing colors and making shapes on my paper, watching the color spread on the wet paper. I didn’t know until I’d been at it for a few weeks that a lot of people think watercolor is the hardest medium to paint with, because it is harder to control than acrylic or oil. I haven’t used acrylic paint for anything since I was about 12 and have never tried oil points, so I can’t make that comparison. It is probably better that I didn’t know, because it might have scared me off.
Instead, I’ve discovered there’s a lot to learn from the unpredictable quality of watercolor.
Watercolor is hard to control. Sometimes you put wet paint on wet paper or one color of wet paint on to another color of wet paint. When wet hits wet, you never know exactly what’s going to happen. There are general expectations, but you can’t actually control it. It might spread just the way you were imagining. Or it might not spread at all. Or it might mix with the wrong color and make brown in a place you didn’t want brown. Or it might spread much, much farther than you expected. Even watercolor experts don’t know exactly what will happen.
And isn’t this a life lesson for this season in the world? I still can’t believe how much in life I took for granted, like the ability to get on a plane and travel across the world, open country borders, being able to go to a coffee shop without running a risk analysis first, joining in a circle to pass the bread and cup for communion, the feeling of being able to somewhat plan my life, and so many more things. Living in China was already teaching me how little control I have over things, and pandemic living is taking it to the next level.
I hope that some of what is true of not controlling watercolor is also true of not controlling life. Controlling it isn’t tightly isn’t the goal. The goal (at least for my watercolor style) is to hold is loosely and see what happens. Sometimes it looks worse than I had hoped and sometimes it looks a lot better. Sometimes it is just different. But trying to control too tightly and overworking it generally leads to disaster. In this season, I am also holding many of the pieces of my life loosely, not trying to control or plan too much, but see what happens when our creative God starts to work.
The other thing that has surprised me is that even as you are painting, you don’t know how it will look when you’re finished. Watercolor usually dries lighter than when you put it on the page. I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve finished a painting feeling let down by the damp mess it looks like on my page, only to come back after it has fully dried and find out it looks so much better. And sometimes my pieces look better from a distance than close up. The perspective adds something important.
In this season of disorientation and change, I’m trusting that life can work the same way. When you’re in the middle of messy situations, you can’t see what it will look like when it ends and you’re too close to see it clearly. But with some time, looking back it is often so much easier to see what God might have been doing during that time when it just seemed a messy failure. Time gives some perspective that can make it easier to see. It reminds me a verse that I’ve been clinging to during this season: “Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen” (Psalm 77:19).
Watercolors have become a creative outlet for me, a chance to practice something that I’m not an expert in, and a form of stress relief (usually). They’ve demonstrated to me the beauty of holding things loosely and waiting until things have settled down to judge their success. In a season of uncertainty and questions, these are lessons that I am thankful to learn from something as lovely as vibrant colors mixing with color on a page.
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