Peter TrúchlyWatercolor is not easy. To be more precise, watercolor is hard. Not to make look other mediums inferior, but the nature of watercolor, the unpredictability, the fact that you can never take total control over it, makes it a different beast. Bad timing, bad color consistency, or even a single brushstroke can ruin your painting. It will happen. It will happen often.
This comes with frustration, discouragement, the feeling that you might as well give up and try something else. And believe me, even after you will have many, many years of painting with watercolor under your belt, you will still fail. Maybe less, but you will. Remember, you will never take complete controll over watercolor.
There is one popular topic called “10 000 hours rule”, don´t really want to go in details as to who said it first and where, but rest assured, many people said different things about it. To make long story short, it roughly says “10,000 hours of appropriately guided practice is the magic number of greatness, regardless of a person’s natural aptitude. With enough practice, anyone can achieve a level of proficiency that would rival that of a professional.”
Now, I am not saying this because I want you to start to count the hours. To wait for a moment where you magicaly change to a profesional. Of course it doesn´t work like that. Some people can be there faster, some need more time perhaps, but the point is, with enough practice, anyone can get there. So are those failed paintings really a failures?
Here is a story of me painting. It´s often a process. I go out, make a sketch, and sometimes, if I like it, i decide to make it a painting in a studio. If I fail and still think I can do better, i take notes what changes I need to do for the painting to be better. Then proceed with another try. Not long ago, me and my two kids, went to take a ride on a historic train. It´s a lovely tourist atraction in Oravská Lesná, about an hour drive from where I live. During the ride there was a 20 minutes break and since I carry my sketchbook and portable palette almost everywhere i go, I decided to take the opportunity and sketch the train. This is how it came out.
Quick loose sketch, finished it when we went for a cofe after the ride. Kind of liked it and at home I proceeded with a painting. The result was far from satisfactory, liked some elements of it but overaly, I thought it was way overworked. To put it simply, I was not happy. Here is how it came out.
Some of the notes, things I decided to change:
- the light source was not apparent
- sky was too dark
- smoke coming out of the train too messy
- linework on the train too overworked
And this is how the third attempt came out.
Enough said, I wansn´t happy again. Some elements came out better, some worse, but overally, it lost the charm of the sketch for me and decided I won´t paint it again. So out of the three, I think the original sketch is the best, for it´s simple, spontaneous and it captures the moment. Was quite mad to realise, couple of hours spent at studio, with better tools, better paint, better paper, yielded worse results than 20 minutes spent outside with sketchbook on my lap.
But it was practice. By spending those hours, I tried many techniques, tested ideas, which will hopefully help me be more succesful in the future. So not a failure. Not a single moment spent sketching or painting, not a single unhappy result is a failure. I will end this with a quote from Vincent Van Gogh. It sums it up perfectly.
“As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.”
And what is your story? Would be happy to hear from you and discuss!
