Lent and Watercolor Painting

So for Lent this year I decided to concentrate on my productivity, or lack thereof.  As a sidenote, I am a Christian, but I am not the type that views Lent as being a religious practice, at least not every year.  I do view it as a good excuse to reflect on my life and figure out what I could do better.  And who knows, maybe this exercise will lead to more frequent communication with God and a better understanding of Jesus' sacrifice.

Anyway, back to my story.  What better way to increase productivity than to get rid of the time wasters!  Some of my biggest time wasters seem to be the internet in general and facebook more specifically.  I would often refresh my facebook newsfeed every two minutes (not exaggerating) and there would usually be 2 or 3 new updates from people that I probably hadn't talked to in years, maybe even decades.  Do I really need to know what they are up to?  Nope!  So, I went through my entire 'friends' list and 'hid' anyone that I hadn't talked to in a long, long time, and some I had talked to but didn't really feel the need to be updated about daily, let alone hourly. Don't worry, if you are reading this blog post, it is very likely that I didn't 'hide' you :)

The other goal I had was to stop reading the comments section on any article, video, photo, etc., posted anywhere on the web.  First, it is a big time waster.  I don't really need to know what random strangers think of the latest and greatest youtube video.  Second, not only is this a big time waster, but it generally puts me in a very bad mood because the third or fourth comment in is usually some inflammatory or ignorant post about politics or religion and the rest of the comments section just builds upon that one comment until you have people writing 'YOUR GOING TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' (And I am not exaggerating on the number of exclamations points and I left the spelling error in on purpose)

So, with those two steps done and out of the way, I figured I wouldn't spend quite as much time online...and it is true.  I can only refresh the newsfeed so many times before I realize nothing new is happening and I don't get sucked into reading 10 pages of comments about an online article because I don't read the first four comments to begin with.  I'm free!!! 

So now I have all this time...what to do, what to do?  I know...I'll learn to paint in watercolor, why not.

So after watching a few youtube clips (like this one!) I gave it a try.  And this is what I came up with:

Not too bad right?  I want to try a landscape next...possibly a lavender farm?  Wouldn't that be nice? But I'll start simple and practice my technique.  Also, I need to find a better paper to use, this one got wrinkly really quickly.  A higher weight should work well I think.  Anyway, I definitely like spending my time this way.  Who knows, maybe I'll give up facebook altogether!  Probably not, but who knows.