Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we write? Why do we volunteer? Why do we teach? Why do artists create? All of these examples are ways of expressing emotions, the way you think and feel.
I recently took an art class. It was watercolor painting. I wasn't really sure what I would get out of the class. I mean, you remember watercolors, they are the little paints that you bought as a required school supply in elementary school! How much can you do with that?
The first thing that I learned was that you could do a whole lot more than we did in elementary school! I have always considered myself an 'artistic' person. I love lots of creative things such as writing poetry, drawing, painting, etc. I love everything that there is to do with the creative process. But why? To me it is a way of expressing myself. Reading through old poetry journals from when I was young, it is easy to see what I was feeling at the time. The same can be said about any art process. Once I began to learn the process of painting with watercolor, I fell in love with it! We began with small little 2 by 2 inch squares to get the hang of it and learn the processes and techniques involved.
We moved on to bigger and better projects once we began to get the hang of the processes involved with watercolor. We even learned how to paint with coffee! I have to say that the coffee painting was one of my favorites. It was fun and smelled wonderful! To begin, you get a cup of expresso and pour it onto a saucer plate. You let it dehydrate until it gets to the desired consistency. You want the center of the plate to be thick, dark and still gooey. The outsides of the plates are of a thinner and drier consistency. Your painting is a monotone painting with the various tones coming from different thicknesses of coffee coming from the different sections of the saucer plate. I thoroughly enjoyed using this media to create! This photo was a mug shot that my son took of himself on his cell phone. I painted it in coffee!
The watercolor class only lasted a semester, but my love for painting with it will remain. I love to paint others and present it to them as a gift. I take photos and turn them into paintings. I have many favorite paintings, but somehow didn't manage to take pictures of the finished product. Two more examples are below. One was from a photo of my dad on his wedding day, he looked just like Elvis!
Another was from a photo of my grandmother when she was young. It was such a cute photo of her caught in the moment, not sure what that moment was but I love the photo, and it is now one of my favorite paintings!
My husband's favorite was my self portrait. I would never have believed that you could get such dark colors on the paper from watercolor!
Watercolor is one of the hardest types of paints to control. One of the most difficult parts to me in using watercolor was that once it is on the paper, it is not permanent! If you touch something that you just painted with a wet brush, it lifts the paint off of the paper. This creates a very big challenge in controlling the paint and where you want it to go on the paper. If you painted an entire painting and spilled water on it, it would be gone! So be careful using liquids around your artwork if you give it a try!
I love expressing my emotions through painting. I love making someone feel good by giving them them the gift of seeing themselves in paint. It makes me feel good to make someone else feel good.
This is what artwork is all about. It is all about getting your emotions out through your media. You can do that even if your paints only cost 98 cents!
