Finding Just the Right Color

Recently, I decided to add a new self-care tool to my toolbox. Watercolor painting. Some of the results have been pleasantly surprising and some have been less exciting. In other words, my skill is still very much a work in progress. But one lesson I’ve learned, the right result is all about finding the right color.

And that isn’t always as easy as it sounds. I know I am lightyears from being able to make realistic paintings, thus I allow myself a little more artistic leeway. Finding the right color is about getting the image to be just the right blend, the right combination of pigmentation to please me. A lot of this is about the image I am going for in my mind’s eye, and thus a lot of it is about my mood. As I’ve been going through a bit of a low-grade depression recently those colors tend to be dark and shadowy, lots of deep purples and dark blues and black and brown.

That has been one of the unexpected benefits of this exercise for me: being able to give a color to my mood, specifically to my depression. Yet the real benefit of adding a new self-care tool to your toolbox, in my opinion, is that it requires more of your attention than something that you are used to and comfortable with. You are not just doing something, you are doing something new, and possibly lighting up new parts of your brain in the process.

Not every new hobby or new self-care tool is going to be just the right color for you. I don’t even know if watercoloring is going to be a long-term hobby or just something new and different for right now. Yet sometimes to find just the right color, in painting and in life, you need to add some new colors to the mix!

Have a good weekend everyone.

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