Thursday, June 18, 2020 Plodding Along

I just finished reading a book called Ploductivity by Douglas Wilson that was very thought-provoking for me in terms of how I approach “work,” and specifically creative work. I’m not a very exacting person. When I make a mistake, I laugh it off and call it “homespun charm,” instead of trying to fix it. Most of the time that works just fine, although my propensity to fudge and substitute when following a recipe has led to some notable failures.

But Wilson has a different approach:

“The idea of mastery is to develop genuine expertise within the radius or labor that God has given you…”

“Craft competence is a virtue to be cultivated.”

…the first step in achieving mastery is taking responsibility for the results. …Some want the results of mastery without all the tedious efforts that go into attaining to mastery.” (Ouch)

“Work for the work, not the reward.”

“Another key to mastery is realizing that the key to originality is imitation. …pick a good model to imitate… …it enables you to build on the good work that others have done…”

The third key to mastery is repetition. …When people do something over and over again – and this should not come as a surprise – they get good at it. But to some, this seems suspiciously like work.”

Again, ouch. Wilson is of course talking about any kind of work, whether it be the labors in the office, at the computer, on the farm, playing the piano…or watercolor painting.

I took up watercolor painting a few years ago and have dabbled, but not with any sort of systematic effort. As Wilson says, “…productive work requires a rhythm, a metronome.” He refers to this as “plodding,” or basically just plugging away at something a few minutes a day. I can always find reasons not to sit down and paint – I’ve got other things, easier things, effortless things to do (like watching a favorite show, checking Facebook, playing Spider Solitaire…). Another nugget from Wilson: “…an awful lot of us waste an awful lot of time.” Ouch for the third time!

I don’t expect to become a renowned “Watercolor Artiste,” but I do want to spend more time learning the craft. So to start out, I found an artist on YouTube who has put out 31 watercolor lessons that she calls “Jump Start.” My goal is to do one per day and see where it takes me. The first lesson was called “Selecting a Color Scheme.” This was mine:

Not too hard or tedious so far!! 😆

I also worked on the title page for my Grave Musings book, which is one of the reasons I decided to try to improve my skills. I worked really hard on those gravestones, but they don’t look anything like what I was seeing in terms of the shading and coloring. There’s a lot of homespun charm in this!

But we all have to work with what we’ve got, right? And I like how the letters turned out.

Thanks for coming along with me. I intend to subject you to future efforts.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning unless I decide that’s a waste of time that I could be spending working on the next lesson.