Wednesday, October 13, 2021 Artistic Delusions

I’ve been following some artsy Instagram accounts, as well as looking for ideas on Pinterest for a few years now. Every once in a while I see someone showing off their artsy travel journals and they are always beautiful and charming. Enter one of my moments of inspiration: I could do that when we go out west!

The goal was to do one page per day, so I needed to think about how to restrain my normal story-telling mode, which is extremely wordy. And the journal needed to include drawings, not just words. I’m not a very good sketch artist, tending more toward rather sloppy drawings with stick people. A lot of the journal work ended up being while we were driving, adding another wrinkle with the jolts and bumps of being on the road making it hard to draw straight lines. The key to pull it all together was going to have to be the watercolor painting after I finished inking in the words and drawings.

I hoped to have time to do some of the painting while we were out there, but as it happened, we were just too busy. I also discovered that each day’s journal entry was taking a LOT of time. I just couldn’t keep up, but I did do it for nine days before admitting defeat.

Yesterday, I finally had time to start the watercolor element – this was going to bring the magic! This was going to take a mediocre page of words and bad sketches and make it look really artistic!

I’ve always been somewhat of a dreamer. Real life provides bracing checks and balances to someone like me. I don’t look at that and think, “Ooh! Beautiful and charming!” I think, “Ugh, confusing and chaotic.” I have 8 more pages to paint, so perhaps I will find a way to have the painting redeem the pages.

“Behold, Thou dost desire truth in the inmost being, and in the hidden parts, Thou wilt make me know wisdom.” Psalm 51:6

This has been Workshop Wednesday with Lynniebeemuseoday.

I’ll probably paint over this blog post in the morning.