One of the things I want to learn in retirement is watercolor. I was feeling down a few weeks ago and started wondering – wait, why am I waiting until retirement? I’m still in this city for another 2.5 years. That’s plenty of time to learn a skill and get rid of any utensils I’ve collected for the hobby.
So I ordered watercolor materials. It was cheaper than I thought – barrier to entry was lower than I thought, which is great. While I was waiting for my stuff to arrive (a whole 3 days – oh the humanity!) I started looking at watercolor tutorial videos and within them I saw that a lot of people like to create calligraphy with watercolors.
This led me down a calligraphy hole where I discovered “faux-lligraphy”, which is where you write something normally and then outline and color in the down stroke so it looks like calligraphy without a calligraphy pen. I got a little obsessed with it and now have a whole notebook focused on me practicing.
I’ve always loved fonts and beautiful writing, but I never thought I was great at it and we live in a digital world so I moved on, but this love has been awakened in me and I’m happy to say I might have 2 new hobbies for the price of one! I’m making a list of the letters I want to work on the most, which are currently “R” “T” “M” “N” “O” and “B.” I’m curious what style I’ll prefer and how much I’ll improve in the future 🙂 ! Let’s find out.
I realize this blog post was ages ago, but how did your watercolor aspirations turn out?! Are you still pursuing this?
I also want to get into watercolor painting and have started several, but I never finish them. Partly because I hate doing anything ‘badly’ or ‘wrong’, so I’d rather leave them unfinished than disappoint myself. But I need to overcome that somehow!
It was pretty fun! Though a friend pointed out that I shouldn’t have bought the cheapest brushes I could because apparently that makes it impossible to properly use the paints (who knew!) I need to finish up my paints and paper before we move in July so I’m back on the wild watercolor train! I totally feel you on hating to do something badly. To combat that personally I’ve just been doing more abstract paintings instead of trying to make it look like something in the world because I still suck at that 🙂 . Let me know if you find another approach and good luck!