32 Colors

Don’t you love art supplies? When I was a girl, I used to love the beginning of school mostly because it meant new school supplies– scissors, pens, crayons and pencils. Now that I’m all grown up, I thought I was past all that, but I find I’m not. Not at all.

Maybe it’s because I’m a student again. I recently began a program to become certified to teach yoga. I now have a lot of homework. Mostly it’s reading homework, but we also have something that’s both teaching and fun– an anatomy coloring book. You color in the anatomical features along with their names, and it’s a great way to learn how things interconnect. But it’s also really fun. I reconnected with my former love of coloring books in a big way.

At first I thought I could get by with 12 colors. After all, this is business, I thought. No sense getting all wild and crazy. But I quickly found I was completely dissatisfied with just twelve colors. I couldn’t make the illustrations as aesthetically pleasing as I wanted to, and it bugged me. Within a week I was back at the store buying a set of 32 colored pencils. They fill a cup on my desk.

And just sitting there, they are calling me to do more. Soon I found myself thinking of other things to do with them. I began doodling on the desk calendar I use as a blotter. First just stripes of color to see what shades worked well together. Then little pictures began to appear in the margins.

On Sunday, Mark and I went to the Sackler Museum of Asian Art here in Washington. A new exhibit opened last week with more than 100 artworks by Hokusai, the great Japanese artist best known for the woodblock print called "The Great Wave". It is undoubtedly one of the best art exhibits I have ever seen. Hokusai lived to be almost 90, and worked prolifically his whole life. The exhibit was full of sketches, paintings, prints and illustrations in almost every medium. A great many of the works were drawn from nature. One that particularly captivated me was a painting of spring greens in an overturned hat. Each work made me think "here was a man who really saw– who truly looked closely at the world."

Last week I bought a new journal to use as this year’s garden log. For more than ten years I’ve used a looseleaf binder to keep notes about my gardens– what’s growing or blooming at a given time, what I planted, what I used against various pests. But I’ve gotten bored with the format, and last year I was halfhearted at best in keeping my usual notes. The new journal has a sewn binding, and pages that are lined on the right side and blank on the opposite side. Already I’ve been sketching the daffodils blooming in my garden, coloring in the many shades of yellow with my new pencils. To say my sketches are amateurish is being more than kind, but I had so much fun, I hardly care. No-one will see this log but me, and I can’t wait to try illustrating my vegetables, my flowers, the insects and birds in my garden. I have no aspirations to art, but I can at least enjoy the effort of looking a little more closely at my own world.