These initial “Updates” category posts are presented as a reminder to myself of the road along which I have been traveling to learn to be competent at watercolor painting. And, also to hopefully provide some common context for anyone who chooses to follow my journey. Learning anything new can be a challenge. We all will encounter obstacles, set backs and in many cases frustrations and disappointments. Persistence is the key to eventual success at anything. But along with being persistent, we all need some luck. In self-directed learning, you can go down a lot of dead-end paths or, at least, you can feel like you’re lost in a swampy bog. Getting lucky is stumbling onto something or someone that starts you down that often elusive “better” path.
About six months ago, I decide I wanted to try again to learn to paint with watercolors. The specifics of how or why I got restarted are a bit vague. But it probably had something to do with my watching DIY videos on YouTube and accidentally coming across some videos about watercolor painting. As an artistic type, I am predominately a visual learner. Pictures and videos are my preference when it comes to learning. So YouTube is a potentially magical place.
Like many topics, there are vast numbers of videos and channels on YouTube about watercolor painting. I just started watching one after another. Many of them are the “listen to music and watch me paint” variety. Somewhat interesting, but mostly not worth the time for learning purposes. Most of the important stuff is off camera and there’s little or no explanation. You may as well be watching a magic act. Then there are the ones mostly focused on reviewing and demonstrating products. Again somewhat interesting, but the doorway to a “rabbit hole” of making that beginner’s mistake of thinking success is there if you just buy enough or the “right” supplies. That magic paint brand or color and all those magic brushes and accessories. You need a friend standing behind you yelling “it’s a trap!”.
Then there are the YouTube channels that have a decent artist type that does a mix of things. They do reviews , try to be entertaining, do demo paintings and an occasional tutorial. Most of the time they follow the same instructional logic as the bulk of the books available on the subject of teaching watercolor painting: “watch me, do as I do, it’s easy, just follow the recipe“. They have thousands of subscribers who marvel and applaud and perhaps live vicariously through the videos but have little or no actual success on their own. My first three months or more was spent wading through a ton of these. A common misconception when choosing a video to watch is the number of views and likes and for a channel to follow is the number of subscribers. Those stats are mostly meaningless in terms of the real learning opportunity presented. They usually reflect the fact that the producer of that channel has an entertaining style of presentation and understands that most viewers have limited attention spans and prefer short videos (15 to 20 mins max).
In part 2 of this post I will reveal what happened that dramatically altered my learning path. Like I stated previously, it takes luck, which really isn’t magic but rather the result of patient and persistent work. You make your own luck.