I’ve often said that messing with art helps me de-stress and since perhaps you can tell from my previous blog post that the last few months have been stressful, you might wonder if I’ve been following my own advice?

The answer is: ish.

Every year Liz Hedgecock and I do a challenge for Lent, and this year we decided to try mixed media art. Unlike Liz who is a much better artist, and more disciplined, I apply the same approach to learning art as to learning most things: that is, I fiddle until I’ve figured it out, or something’s exploded.

This year, I wanted to experiment with a combination of watercolour, acrylic, fine liners, markers, and modelling paste. As I didn’t have modelling paste, I wondered if I could make some using stuff from home. Thanks to an internet ‘recipe’ I produced a sort of gloop using cornflour (cornstarch) and PVA glue. Did it work? Nope. So I bought some and started again.

It was well into Lent before I got going, and then I worked on it for thirty minutes a day until it was as finished as it was going to be.

Even though it’s not quite what’s in my head, and only one of the hares (yes, they’re supposed to be hares) looks like a hare (ish), the process was happy and positive, largely because I was enjoying messing with the colours, and experimenting without overthinking what I was doing. I think I might do it again to see if I can get closer to what I envisioned.

So that was April.

Some time in May I saw some prompts for a sketching challenge based on finding positivity in nature.

As a lonely, bullied child, I would find my peace, reassurance and grounding in the local woods or by the local river. There I discovered comfort in being part of something so big, that my problems seemed small, hidden in a beauty which made the ugliness of school life recede. Although I don’t do that sort of wandering as much as I should now, I do have a lovely garden in which the writing shed hides surrounded by greenery.

So with that in mind, I decided to create something from the first prompt, which was ‘Sanctuary’.

Time went by and I couldn’t even find half hour an to do anything, but after work on a particularly stressful day, I took some art stuff and a glass of wine down to the writing shed aiming to start a small simple watercolour painting.

However when I arrived at the shed, I set out my small selection of brushes, a little bottle of water and my glass of wine, but couldn’t find the little pallet of watercolour paints that I could’ve sworn I’d put in my bag. I went back to the house but couldn’t find them anywhere, so gave up, and using watercolour pencils instead, did what I could, periodically dipping brushes and pencils in my wine instead of the water (which doesn’t improve the flavour). By now, however, I was mentally in the wrong zone and don’t really know what I’m doing with watercolour pencils.

I was aiming for an image of myself in the writing shed being creative and happy as seen through the branches of our rather overgrown cherry tree.

This is what I ended up with.

Me, stuck in a birdcage in the middle of a jungle.

(Naturally as soon as I got back in the house, I found the little watercolour palette disguising itself against the black background of the basket which I called sac magique, in which I cart things around sometimes.)

I gave up trying for a bit.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I spent a few days in the Languedoc. I needed a break from writing and editing, but not creativity. So I took my travelling sketching kit.

My husband and I, despite both being city born, are country mice by nature, and usually rent places in the countryside. But this time, we stayed in a place with a balcony overlooking Place Carnot in Carcassonne. We enjoyed people watching and listening to the buzz of conversation from below, and wandering the area. Wherever we went I sketched little scenes from what I saw in front of me.

It was so freeing making myself capture something as best as I could quickly without working out composition or what the picture was trying to say. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story – or couldn’t be a story – behind each one, but I was simply having fun and resting my mind.

Last week turned out a good deal more intense than I anticipated when I wrote the previous blog, however everything on my rationalised to-do list got done, albeit a day behind schedule.

So afterwards, I thought, ‘Now I’m feeling calm, if tired, I’m going to the shed to try my sanctuary painting again’ and I did.

The result is below.

You can make of it what you will.

I showed photos of both ‘Sanctuary’ paintings to my oldest child’s partner, without any context.

He said ‘Pretty colours and shapes’ about the first until he spotted someone inside at which point he said ‘Ah – a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage all the same.’ He then looked at the other one, still no context. He said ‘The water droplet makes me think of freedom, free flowing. It seems peaceful. It’s a place of rest and safety not a cage.’

Now, it’s true that he has a psychology degree, but at this particular moment, he was squinting at my small phone in bright sun while drinking cocktails, and despite being very short-sighted, hadn’t brought his glasses. So his assessment possibly has the psychological robustness of a ‘What sort of boy will make my ideal partner’ quiz in a teenage girl’s magazine.

But I like it and I’m sticking with it.

What do you think?

All words and pictures copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. None must be reproduced without express permission or credit. No permission is given for any to be used to train artificial intelligence.