Last year I decided I was bored with my old acrylics. You know how it is when you've just had enough of doing one thing and want to break out and do something different? I never had enough white, and the newsagent down the road only stocked a few colours, and I'd buy it all up, but then they wouldn't reorder white and black until they had to order every colour, and blah blah blah.
I guess that's a part of the whole "I'm not a serious artist" thing that was happening in my head.
I'm an autodidact. I teach myself. I've never done any form of art schooling, I don't belong to any clubs, I've never displayed my work other than here, on Facebook, and on Myspace (although I haven't been on Myspace for quite some time now). It was easy to tell myself that art wasn't a big part of who I was... I'd displayed no real interest in it as a child, and only took it up after a mental breakdown. It wasn't a calling, it was a vent.
Last year, someone I worked with commissioned me to paint something for him. I'd given him something for his housewarming, and he'd gone "WOW! I want you to paint THIS for me! I'll pay you $200!" At that point, I could no longer say I wasn't serious about my art. I've filled up my house with $5 discount canvasses from the bargain stores that I covered with acrylic paints. No wall goes unfurnished. I'm an artist, and I'm serious about my art.
So I figured it was about time for me to actually learn something about painting.
I couldn't find any books about painting with acrylics. Not from the discount bookstores I was looking in, anyway. But they had books on watercolours, and they also had cheap student watercolour tube packs. So I bought everything I could lay my hands on to do with watercolours. The first couple of weeks I made some really nice paintings and some really dreadful ones. I knew nothing about complementary colours, or colour mixing, or even about paint conservation. I got to find out about all those missing concepts from the books I'd picked up.
At the same time, I picked up a book on oils and a few tubes of oil paint. Trying to learn them both simultaneously was a nightmare, so I've put oils aside for the moment.
Today I took a look through my watercolours, as I've recently picked them back up (having for some time reverted back to my old standby of acrylics, which I still know very little about). I have 56 tubes. 56! What the hell am I going to do with 56 tubes of student watercolours? I suppose I'd better go paint some stuff.