Timed Watercolor Painting Challenge
Does this ever happen to you? You have an idea and you are really excited about it. You spend minutes, hours, DAYS daydreaming about the process, the possibilities, the results, the feelings, the accomplishment. You even set a date and time to start said project. Then the scheduled moment comes, remember it’s written down in your planner because you dutifully set aside time to do it, and then you decide to do something else.
You have reasons such as:
I’m not in the right headspace.
There are other things that are more important.
I’m not sure this is actually a good idea
If it is a good idea, I would be more excited.
The idea was to do a set of timed paintings. I would paint the same subject matter, but I would vary the length of time available to paint. If you have been following along, you know that I do not feel like a very loose painter. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how I want to paint something. I create an outline from reference photos and I tend to paint rather slowly. With my recent painting Mushroom II, I wanted to push myself to paint a little faster and see what the result might be (check it out here.) The goal for that project was to see what I could come up with. It got me thinking about what other timed challenges I could try.
I hoped that a timed challenge would force me to:
Just keep painting.
Make decisions quickly and work with them.
Focus less on overall details.
Focus more on the overall aesthetic of the painting.
Try and convey a feeling with the painting as much as what the painting physically represents.
I was excited about the possibilities. I already had a couple projects in the pipeline to finish first, so I scheduled time in my planner specifically to work on this project. Since I was considering short periods of time: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc., I wasn’t even setting aside a ton of painting time. This felt like a great concept for days when I just don’t have a lot of painting time.
So the scheduled week arrived.
My painting nights are usually Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. On these days my husband, Vasya, doesn’t usually get home until 9pm so I had a good chunk of time to myself. Despite blocking off time on my calendar for both Monday and Wednesday to start, I just couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t. Monday I spent time writing and thinking about the reasons I didn’t want to paint. Wednesday I at least prepped my watercolor paper. Hurray for small victories! I wanted these to be smaller paintings, so that meant cutting up watercolor paper and taping it to my plastic painting boards. For this project, I prepped a set of 4.5 x 6 inch papers and a couple 3 x 4.5 inch papers.
Then came Thursday, my last painting time during the week. While the psyche was not high to start painting, I did the steps to get ready.
First, I pulled up my reference photo.
This is a place I have probably passed by a hundred plus times on runs, walks, and bike rides. It’s on a bike path about ten minutes from where I live. In the winter time, I love how the winter light shines through the trees. It seemed simple and moody.
Photograph looking upstream on Clear Creek Trail
Next, I prepped my painting space.
I filled my jars with water, picked out a limited number of paint brushes, decided on a color palette, mixed up some colors, and I even did a basic sketch on the two pieces of paper I was starting with. I started with the smallest size. I also decided that there was no way I was going to be able to paint anything in a minute. Do you know how short sixty seconds is?! There was just no way. Instead, I decided on five minutes. Five minutes seemed like enough time to get something done. Or at least I hoped it was.
Now it was time to paint.
So I set the timer for five minutes and this is what I created:
Clear Creek Bridge I
Five minutes
Not great, but not as terrible as it could be. I discovered five minutes also isn’t very much time to paint. I decided to double it to ten minutes.
Clear Creek Bridge II
Ten Minutes
Admittedly better. From the five minute painting, I knew how I wanted my first layers to look, but I had enough time to add a bit more dimension. There was enough time to start working on the trees in the foreground.
At this point something changed. I wasn’t as worried about the result anymore. Instead I was more focused on the challenge. I was considering things such as:
How could I move around the painting in order to maximize the drying time of each section?
What are the most important parts of the reference photo that I want to end up in the final painting?
Once I finished my ten minute painting, my plan was to jump to my larger paper size of 4.5 x 6 inch, but I actually loved the tiny size. So I decided to stick with it.
My next timer was set for twenty minutes, which felt like ages comparatively. I found that with twenty minutes to work with, I had a little more space to think about each decision I made. I also had more time to let sections dry in between.
Clear Creek Bridge III
Twenty Minutes
In keeping with my pattern, my next jump in time would be forty minutes, but that seemed too long for such a small painting. At this point, it was about 8:15pm and I didn’t want to be painting after 9pm. So I settled on thirty minutes. Thirty minutes actually felt like an eternity if you can believe it. I even wasn’t sure I wanted to keep adding details after a certain point.
Clear Creek Bridge IV
Thirty Minutes
After all of the internal angst of actually starting this timed project, I think I am in love with the concept and already want to try it again.
I love the small size of the paintings.
I love how each one is a small improvement over the last.
I love that these paintings feel very different from what I have completed recently.
I love that I did the whole project in a little over an hour.
So what have I learned? Sometimes it is hard to get out of our own way, but sometimes the results are worth it.
Which is your favorite?
Clear Creek Bridge I to IV
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