Dina Climatiano

Today’s offering took me a lot longer than I care to admit. Along with the markers, I ordered a coloring book, and it arrived today.

I never colored as a kid. Always went straight to drawing. My big sister is an artist, and growing up we always had art supplies and half finished works of art around the house. Somehow it always felt like coloring books were a form of cheating. This was never a conscious thought until I articulated it to myself a few years ago and went “Huh. That’s stupid”. Anyway, today was the first time I ever did one of these:

First impression?

Coloring books are not cheating. They’re so not. It’s a completely different skill set, one that I apparently do not have, nor have the patience to develop, if I’m honest.

Is there something symbolic about not being able to color within the lines? Or can I just blame the damn paper that bled through to the other side like there’s no tomorrow?

I can’t believe people do this for relaxation. This was… Annoying.

Maybe if I had a plan, a scheme to follow, I’d have that dopamine hit you get for a task fulfilled. But I just felt… Aimless. And it shows.

My color choices, I now realize, are somewhat awkward and unbalanced. there’s too much contrast in some places, and not nearly enough in others. There’s no movement and no flow whatsoever, and I could have totally done that with a bit of planning. This is partly because I’m still learning to use my own markers, and they don’t all act the same on paper, certainly not paper that’s clearly not meant for liquid media. But it’s also because I really struggled to care about the end result here.

I spent two thirds of my day running around town doing errands. I was exhausted. But when I got home, instead of taking a nap, I sat down in front of the computer. I took the time to learn some basic marker techniques, since I clearly lacked those in yesterday’s attempt.

That didn’t seem to help on the mandala’s small scale, where every segment is about the size of the fine tip of my marker.

It did open up an appetite for further experimentation, so bear with me 😉