So true! Or, you can do something like...switching mediums? Like switching from writing to art. Or art to music. The artist's growth is not always upwards. Sometimes it feels like you can keep going up but sometimes you feel stuck…
I’ve talked about patience before, but it’s blindsided me again this week and I thought I’d talk about it again.
I so badly want to be finished editing RBRP, I can taste the finish line, especially with twitter contests and PitchWars and WriteonCon and conferences and more more more fabulous books being published. I so badly want to be there.
But I am not finished line editing yet.
It’s so hard to be patient. SO hard to be patient to make RBRP the quality I know it can be.
And it reminds me so much of painting.
Again, I’ve mentioned this before, but with watercolor–ESPECIALLY with watercolor–you need a tremendous amount of patience.
When you lay down a layer of paint (called a wash), it has to completely dry before the next layer. Otherwise you end up with ugly squiggly marks called blossoms. You also have to plan out the painting, because removing mistakes is really hard to do. You have to incorporate them or scrub them out, which is not guaranteed to work.
Patience guarantees a higher quality of art.
If you’ve ever tried to pick up watercolor only to shake your fist at the ceiling lightbulbs screaming “I DEFY YOU UNIVERSE!” because, once again, your painting has been foiled and your paintbrush is permanently embedded in the far wall . . . chances are you’ve run into the key ingredient needed for successful watercolor paintings:
PATIENCE.
Yes, I recognize old men is an odd category for the letter "O". But there's nothing that warms my heart more than seeing a happy grandpa on a park bench eating an waffle ice cream cone on a sunny spring…
One of my most favorite subjects to paint are nebulas. I love their color variety and shocking etheral quality. You never know what a nebula will look like–anything is possible. They bring my imagination to life and inspire me like nothing else.
I thought for “N” I’d share a couple nebulas I painted recently:
The above nebula is done in mainly watercolor. Some of the stars are acrylic. The nebulas below are completely watercolor. The last one I’m toying with slicing into 2 smaller paintings.
Two weeks ago I attended a watercolor workshop taught by nationally known Susan Blackwood. I was astounded by how much the content related perfectly to writing (I wrote another post on it, here). By the end of the four days, my poor Evernote app barely functioned–I wore the sucker out. (Don’t worry, it’s happy again.)
I found myself ruminating over something she said:
And guess what I thought. Surprise: this is so my writing life.