New hobby for winter

 The other day I was having an online chat with a friend on FB, and mentioned drawing.  They asked me more about what I do and I said I draw cards and pictures, using coloured pencils and Sharpie-type pens mostly, my favourite subject being flowers.  Having said that, I haven't done a lot of drawing or card making recently, hardly any in fact - the past year or so has been a bit full on with moving house, getting this new place sorted, starting the garden (which was pretty much a blank canvas and sea of gravel) from scratch, and maintaining it.  My friend asked if I do any painting, I said no, it's not something I've tried, although we found out quite late in my Mum's life that she was actually quite an accomplished watercolour painter.  Anyway, FB was obviously spying on our conversation (it's quite scary really just how much our computers etc know about us!!) and shortly after I noticed a little video, one of the little 'reels' they show on our pages, to do with watercolour painting.  So I had a look.....and was instantly hooked (funny that!).  It was a brief - couple of minutes - video of someone doing a watercolour A5 size painting of flowers.  Several things struck me - the amount of water used, both on the paper to begin with, and the brush being dipped into a plain jar of water often, how quick and easy the painting was, and just how effective and beautiful it turned out to be, with just a relatively few strokes.  This probably sounds very naive and idiotic of me, but I hadn't actually realised that watercolour painting is done using quite a lot of water!  I'd never actually seen my Mum doing any painting, just the finished pictures.

Well, having watched one video, my FB page was then bombarded with loads more watercolour artists and a couple of evenings ago I fell down a rabbit hole of them, spending an hour or two watching loads of these little videos.  I think I'm in love!

So when I've got a bit more time (after the kitchen is fitted and I've put everything back in the new cupboards....and probably rearranged them several times, and gone shopping to restock everything), I'll be watching a few more videos, both the little reels on FB and others on youtube.  I'll concentrate initially on instructional ones, talking about the type of paper and brushes used, to give me an idea of a few simple supplies to buy to get me started.  I don't intend to rush out and buy up all the art supplies in Hobbycraft, I'm not going to spend loads of money on something I might turn out not to like much after all, or be any good at!  I feel quite excited about giving it a go though, it'll give me something to do when husband is out at the gym 3x weekly, or he's watching some noisy film on the TV - or rather dozing in front of a noisy film....and why is it that all the films he watches have to involve lots of shooting, shouting, car crashes, buildings being blown up, people screaming as they're being hacked to pieces by swords or big ugly alien creatures tearing them to shreds? 😒😠.  If it's not noisy and violent, he's not interested!

We haven't had the bad storms down here, just a few short but quite heavy rain showers and some strong gusts of winds (it's raining at the moment) - none of it lasting very long, and no damage, we've got off very lightly.  I hope none of you have suffered any damage.  Actually, as I'm typing this, the rain is easing off and the sky is getting a lot brighter, I think we're forecast some sun this afternoon.