Dina Climatiano

This is going to be another disappointing offering, but here it is. I spent my evening doing a color wheel exercise with my crappy colored pencils.

The thing is that I never actually learned how to draw with colored pencils before. I kind of did whatever with them because we always had some lying around the house. I haven’t lived with my artist sister since 2004, but I still somehow always had colored pencils, water colors and pastels, even after I had moved to Romania and lost any aspiration to dabble in visual arts.

Anyway, it bugged me that I had no idea how to achieve somewhat passable shades in my water lilies.

I wish I could tell you that it bugged me enough to actively look it up and sit and practice it, but it wasn’t really a thought I had articulated to myself. More like a passing disappointment.

Well, apparently Youtube is tuned to my passing disappointments, because this morning when I was scrolling to see what Josh Johnson posted last, this video popped up on the list on the side and caught my eye. I watched it with my breakfast.

Then a whole day went by – meetings, errands, cooking, going to the gym (finally made it to the first leg day of 2025. I’m going to regret it tomorrow) – and I was still thinking about that color wheel.

But I still “owed” a creative endeavor for today, and my brain’s immediate thought was: “A coloring exercise is NOT good enough! You gotta be CREATIVE!”

To which I promptly answered: “But that’s what I want to do right now so suck it up.”

And so I sat down to do the exercise while Josh Johnson told me about his new year’s resolutions.

Turns out if you do those silly exercises you actually learn a lot. Who knew.

I learned, for example, that there is a very good reason why the fancy colored pencil sets have white and gray in them. You can mute and blend the colors with them. Did you know that? I didn’t know that!

Alas, mine is not a fancy set.

I have absolutely no memory of how I came by this colored pencil set or why I still have it, since I haven’t drawn anything since 2020 before this challenge, but I can 100% guarantee it is NOT a fancy set. It does not, in fact, have gray and white.

But I’ll tell you what does have a white, oil-based pencil… My brand new sewing kit. It’s not the best white pencil by any means, but it would do for the purposes of my continuing art education.

I learned what tints and shades are, how to create tones, how to mute colors, how to test out colors using the color wheel. I learned that oil based pencils can be properly blended. Yes, apparently even my crappy pencils yielded to excessive layering (though probably not nearly as well as those Lyra pencils I used to buy in singular units because they were expensive as hell. I really liked sketching with the sepia colored one. It was soft but didn’t smudge like graphite. Huh. I have fond memories of art supplies, that’s… New).

Now that I have the color theory down (ha! Let a girl dream), I just need to muster up enough patience, attention span and vision to apply it to deliberate shapes and compositions and I’ll be on my merry way to becoming a world-renowned artist.

Oh look at that, my 15-year old self is making an appearance. Yes, hi, you do not turn out the way you thought you were going to turn out. Now carry on.

Aaaaand I’m looking at colored pencil sets. Dina, you do not need one. Now close those 37 tabs and go to bed.