A Picture and A Thousand Words-For the Love of Painting

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Tracy and Kelly write about what it’s like to write or paint everyday for a year, respectively.  Thursday is Kel’s day to write about painting.

I love painting and drawing.  The very first paintings I did were the paint-by-number sets that used to be so popular back in the (cough, cough) um, 70′s.  My dad would go away on business trips and he would always bring back little gifts for us.  Most often my gift was a paint by number set of horses or puppies.  I loved it!  I can still remember the smell of the oil paints in the sets.

I drew and colored for fun.  I usually got compliments on my drawings or paintings but I never really did anything formal with it.  I didn’t take any art classes and when I went to college I thought about getting an art degree but that wasn’t a “real” job.  I couldn’t really justify that kind of a degree to my practical engineer father who was going to pay for school.  So I went with my next love, wild animals in wild places for a degree.  I went to school to become a biologist.  I loved that too, and had some fun adventures with that degree but my first love is art, truth be told.

Many years later my mother-in-law gave me a wonderful birthday gift of some cash and I decided to spend it on a watercolor class at the community center.  IT WAS AWESOME!  I loved every second of it and showed every practice circle I made to anyone who loved me enough to say something nice about my pastel circles.  My children were little at that time and the class gave me alone time to spend on myself and my art.  But the class ended and we didn’t have the money to pay for another class.  I could have done it on my own at home….but of course I didn’t.  Which is why I am now on this path of doing, because I loved painting so much, and wished almost daily that it was a part of my life and that I could call myself an artist.

Then four things happened back to back that led me to start down this path of DOING.

1.  My life crashed in such a way I had to radically change what I was doing in my life.  I realized that one thing missing in my life was doing anything fun for myself.

2.  We replaced some bookshelves in our house and in moving around the books I found a Bev Doolittle book.  I LOVE her art work.  I wish that was how I could paint.  In the beginning of her book she talks about how she and her husband decided to take a year off and travel and paint everyday for a year.  She states that she was amazed at how much her painting improved in that one year.  It made me wonder what would happen with my painting if I did that for one year.

3.  I found 2 amazing blogs, one from a friend and one on accident (are there any accidents?)  The first blog is one my friend recommended for studing nature with my children for school.  It called the Handbook of Nature Study Blog.   It’s all about nature study and keeping a nature journal.  Well, I love nature and she shows beautiful pictures of nature she finds in her own backyard and sometimes her she shows her paintings of the things she finds as well.  LOVE IT!  Then, not long after finding the first blog, while doing a search for a school item for my children I stumbled upon this blog, Mary McAndrew Blog.  She has a wonderful blog all about her painting and love of nature.  She hikes and while she hikes she paints all the fun things she finds and even goes on to explain how she does it, what journals she uses and paints and step by step how she created her pictures.   Not only that, but she spends half her year in England!  I LOVE the site so much too!

This is one of Mary McAndrews nature journal paintings

So Cute!

4.  One night I was talking to a friend of mine about how I was needing to find a part time job to help with the bills.  After we left each other she texted me with, “Why don’t you not get a job and paint with the time you would have spent at the part time job…just see what happens?”

I decided to follow her advise and DO it!

Kel