Trying something new is hard. That’s my observation for the week. It’s not a new thought. People have stated that many times over the years. But it’s a thought that came home to roost for me last Saturday (April 29, 2025). I tried something new. At least it was semi-new.
The biggest risk in trying something new is that you won’t be any good at it. When you’re younger this is less of a risk because almost everything is new and you’re not going to be good at much. Youth is when you’re learning a lot of stuff. When you’re older, like I am, there can be plenty of stuff that you’re good at. Trying something new means taking a risk that you won’t be good at it. When you’re used to being good at stuff it’s not easy to suddenly be bad at stuff.
The new thing I was trying was making a complex watercolor painting. I’ve been working at getting better at watercolor over the last couple of months but it’s mostly been simple stuff. Small 5×7 inch paintings of faces and such. This time I wanted to take one of my complex 11×17 inch drawings and use watercolor to make it.
I even thought I was making it simple for myself. I wasn’t going to render the whole drawing in watercolor. I was going to make a complex ink drawing and then do some basic coloring with watercolor. I had done things like this way back in the 1990s and I was going to try and do that again.
The first thing I did was to dig through my scans of drawings. I have a lot of them. I only wanted to spend a day or two on this project and didn’t want to spend the time coming up with a new drawing to work on. This was a bit of an experiment after all. I found a drawing named “Leg Competition” from back in 2012 that I liked. I printed the drawing out in blue line on watercolor paper and spent the first day inking it.
Also I looked it up later and it turned out that I had done a finished piece from this drawing back in 2012. I made a Big Ink drawing out of it.
Here is where I made my first mistake, I thought it might happen, but decided to try it anyway. Most of the drawing I inked with a brush and waterproof India ink. That waterproof part is important because I was going to go over the top of the ink with watercolor. But for a small part of the drawing I used French curves and a small black marker.
Some small black markers use waterproof ink and some don’t. I refill all my small black markers with waterproof India ink but this marker was a new one. Though I had already refilled even this new marker with India ink I didn’t know if that first bit of ink would be waterproof or not. It wasn’t.
The second day, Saturday the 29th, I started in the morning by putting in some colors with my watercolor paints. It was going okay until I hit the parts made with that pen. The black line of the pen started bleeding into the paint and greying out the color. That was not fun.
What was even less fun was using the watercolor in general. It turned out that I had no vision for it. With most pieces, when I’m not trying something new, even if I don’t have an exact vision for how it’s going to turn out, I can, “trust the process.” With tried and true methods that I’m good at, even if something doesn’t look good in the moment, I know that it’s going to look good at the end.
I once was told that some famous artist said that art should look finished at every stage in the process. I’ve never found this to be true. Often as I’m working on a piece it looks terrible and unfinished. This is because I’m laying the groundwork for it to be finished. Plus it’s okay that it looks unfinished because I know it will look good in the end. That’s what I’m working towards and I’ve done it before.
All that was not so with this watercolor painting. I was putting down color, some of the black line was bleeding into the paint, none of it looked good, and I was not happy with it. It is tough to work on something that you’re not happy with but I kept going. I didn’t want to give up.
After struggling with the painting for a couple of hours I came to the conclusion that something had to change. I realized that my idea for what the painting should be was too blurry and incomplete for me to follow. Plus I had no tried-and-true process to use. This watercolor method was new to me.
The first thing I did was to stop putting the watercolor down neatly. I started throwing watercolor all over the page, letting the black line bleed in some places, and letting the color bleed into the color. Exactingly putting the color in for two hours got me nowhere so I decided to wreck it all in about fifteen minutes. At first it seemed like I had ruined the whole piece. And I kind of did.
I ruined the piece but it also freed up my thinking. At that point I decided to use acrylic paint markers to finish the piece. Since watercolor is transparent I thought the opaque acrylic would make a nice counterpoint. And it did. I spent the rest of the day using the markers and black ink to finish the piece. It took a while to get it into shape. I worked on it from eight in the morning until six at night.
The struggle was real with this one. With no process to fall back on I had to invent one as I went along. That takes a lot more time and energy. In the end I like the piece but I’m not sure if I love it. I like the big main face best but the little face in the bottom right lets me down a little. It’s not easy doing new things.