Bloom where you are planted!
Bloom where you are planted — it’s true! While it takes conscious effort, making friends when you move to a new location or somehow find yourself among a new community is definitely something worth the effort. I have been fortunate to keep wonderful friends on the east coast and add fantastic new friends in Arizona.
Do you remember the friendship song in Brownie Girl Scouts? Oh, well, now we are talking YEARS ago! Ha! If I recall correctly, it had 2 lines that said “Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” Great advice! Finding new friends requires not only effort, but patience as well.
Speaking of patience, in this post I am featuring a watercolor technique that takes lots of patience! I discovered just how amazing it is pretty much by accident.
The technique is to use coarse salt on a wet painting. I’d heard that you could do some interesting things with salt and watercolor and decided to play around with it one day. I had been using the fine salt (like on those 2 paintings I already told you about in previous posts) and decided to give the larger grains a try. I made a fun painting with lots of colors intermingled and sprinkled on some of the coarse salt. It was still pretty wet and it was lunchtime, so I decided to let it dry while I took a break to eat. (Great decision because that way I wouldn’t be tempted to interfere with the effect that would happen.)
When I came back to my painting table about an hour later I was shocked to see the beautiful “blooms” that had formed around the salt crystals. The salt pulls in the water and the nearby paint along with it and ends up making areas of much lighter color on the paper. When completely dry, the salt crystals are removed, leaving a small mark as the center of the bloom. I spent the next few days trying different techniques to see what would happen and had a great time learning even more about the magical ways of watercolor. The photos on the left are some of the really fun results.
The last 2 pictures show what happened when I tried to reuse salt crystals that had soaked up paint from a previous painting - the color actually went out of the salt and onto the paper while it soaked up what was already on the paper. Wow!
I ended up making many, many different paintings and turned some into the cards in the Bloom Collections.
If you ever feel out of place in your current situation, remember - look for new opportunities to bloom where you are planted! Enjoy!