I have a weird relationship with drawing and painting. I’m utterly ignorant, have never taken so much as a weekend workshop, couldn’t tell you if that Italian word describes a painting technique or a musical instruction. I’ve figured out some stuff, just playing—some stuff about light and shadow and perspective, at least. You can generally tell what (or who) it’s meant to be, and that’s the most that can be said about most of it.
Except this. I love doing it. Like my cross-stitching, it’s a matter of valuing the action above the results. The action and, in this case, the materials. I love art supplies. Love my box of watercolors, love the little tubes of pigments, love the ranks of sharpened colored pencils in their many shades. I even love the brushes, though most of my affection goes to the things with colors.
The only art-supplies for which I don’t feel a fondness are my charcoals. I don’t like the feel of them in my fingers, and I purely hate the sound and feel of the paper smudgers that give charcoal drawings their realistic shading.
Those are literally worse than fingernails on a blackboard to me. I’ve done charcoal drawings that pleased me, but I don’t enjoy the making of them in the same way I enjoy playing with my paint set. In fact, it’s rather a slog. I did charcoal portrait at a friend’s request last year, and then one for a gift, and then one for another gift, and by the time I’d finished those, I was ready to chuck my charcoal pencils altogether. I kind of wanted to do one more (of my two nieces, for my sister), but I haven’t been able to talk myself into picking up the charcoals again, either to do that or to finish any of the “partials” in my sketchbook. Apparently this is what happens when I value the result above the process. I don’t even want to finish.
So it’s back to the fun stuff, back to the colors. I bought a sort of guided drawing-journal at WalMart a couple years ago, with daily drawing prompts (or they’re meant to be daily, though I tend to sit down and do a handful in a row). That’s just about right because they’re not intended to be Great Art, so there’s not the pressure of the oversized blank page of a sketchbook. I can just start doodling with the paint set. Yesterday’s drawings were a swimsuit (“something you’re looking foward to”) and my laptop (“something you work on a lot”) and a blog-page (“a reflection”—I got tricky with that one).
I’m thinking about taking the watercolors to Hawai’i this month, to go for an illustrated journal like I did once before. That one (from a trip to Maui) has become my all-time favorite travel journal—but the balance seems to be that I need to NOT intimidate myself right out of writing/drawing in it. If I’m fretting about producing some “work of art,” I’ll avoid putting down anything at all. I’ve found a small sketchbook that has removable pages that can be reordered and reinserted, and that’s the best way I can think of to take the pressure off. If I start something and don’t like it, I don’t have to worry about “ruining” the whole book—which means I’ll be much more likely to make the attempts in the first place.
I tend to overthink things—can you tell?? If I just let myself have fun with the process, instead of focusing on results, I’ll probably end up with some sketches I’m fond of. When I fret about results, I give myself the visual-arts version of Writer’s Block!
Kana's Chronicles 
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