Side note… does it sound fancier if I spell it “Watre Colour Basiques?”

When I started with watercolor, being an artist was NOT going through my mind at all. My husband was in law school, we had moved to the opposite side of the continent, and I had four young children at home who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom alone, much less do something as interesting as painting without wanting to crawl into my lap and do it for me. I knew I wanted to paint, but acrylics dried quickly and stained everything, oil paints didn’t dry quickly, needed a lot of equipment and tools that I didn’t have, and still stained everything, and pencil sketches felt too bland.

Watercolor checked all the boxes, though! I had water (check!) and paper (check!) and the cheapest elementary school watercolor paints from my kids’ school supplies (check!). Bonus: they didn’t dry out, meaning I could start and stop at the drop of a hat. Extra, extra bonus: my kids could smear it everywhere and I could wipe it up with a rag, no bad staining. At least at the time, haha.

The first time I tried it, I had just put my kids to bed and had a few precious minutes to myself before my husband would get home. One of my kids had picked some flowers and put them in a glass on the table, and another child broke said glass right as I was trying to get everyone to bed. I walked over to the table to look at the damage, and thought that the flowers and broken glass were actually quite pretty, so I sat down with some printer paper, water, and Crayola watercolors, and painted some of the blossoms.

And then I was hooked. It was such a friendly medium to my tired mom brain! I couldn’t stop after that!

If anything I want this to be a message to you, that if you feel like your whole day is taken up with caregiving, working, driving, cleaning, counseling, cooking, and all the other things that busy people do nowadays… pause for one minute. Enjoy the beauty of the broken things. And grab the crappiest art supplies if that’s what you got, because making something beautiful is what you’re created to do. It doesn’t take much, and gives back a WHOLE lot!

Note: Painting with printer paper and cheap kids paint got frustrated after the first two days, and I quickly made some slight upgrades that were a lot more satisfying. If you’re looking for art supplies, see my list of recommended supplies HERE.