I like watercolor painting
Yep, that’s it: I like painting with watercolors. As a hobby. As a student, I thought hobbies were lame. Because: why be a hobbyist when you’re developing a skill that you can get really good at? Surely the old masters weren’t painting as a hobby.
Drawing (and barely any painting) became something I only did as part of design. I had another thing that started as a hobby: photography. A year or two after I started with that, I took on paid assignments. I learned building websites, because I thought it would be useful when designing for the web. And do side projects with.
Turns out only having work-adjacent creative pastimes isn’t always relaxing. So the last years I often found myself consuming media a.k.a. watching Netflix/YouTube. Now I wouldn’t call of that a waste of time, but it’s not really living life to the fullest if it’s several times a week. I read books too! But rarely I can keep that up for longer than an hour or so.
So I needed a real hobby. For reasons I don’t remember, when lived abroad for a while, I once bought a small traveling watercolor painting kit. I guess I saw some images on Pinterest and thought I could learn to make some like it. It turned out I found it really, really difficult to paint with watercolors. Or aquarelle. I really think the fancier word for it does it more justice, because, boy—I haven’t used any medium that I found this hard to handle.
But watercolors being so hard to master is the reason it makes it a great hobby for me. It’s been over ten years since I started with my set of little pans and I’m still really shit at it. There’s just no way I will ever be good at it. So I have no ambitions whatsoever. But every time I’m painting wet in wet I’m so excited about what’s happening. I sort of roughly can predict now what colors mix well, but how the colors flow is always a surprise.
I’ve learned (the hard way) that some things are easier to paint than others. The natural environment, especially clouds and trees are relatively easy. Because I’m not used to identifying specific skies or trees (who is—they change all the time!), I think it’s totally acceptable to paint a nice sky that doesn’t like much like the sky I had in mind. This is totally different from how I do design work, where I try to justify everything with research and reason and where the execution is always based on brand and product guidelines or even design systems. And exactly that makes watercolor painting so relaxing; I know I’m only partly in control of the end result. The best way to enjoy it is to be curious and accept what’s happening on the paper.
I could justify how this hobby actually makes me a better designer. Like that mixing real pigments and learning their archaic names makes me see colors differently or something. But the point is that I’m not doing that. It’s more like the other way around: because I already know some things about color and composition and I can make a rough sketch with a pencil, it makes me better at hobbying.
Highly recommended ★★★★★
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