I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again. I cannot be left unsupervised with paint. Ultramarine blue (my favorite color) got me this time. I had several small, wrinkled, and generally used up tubes of the cherished color in my stash, so I decided to soak the remaining color out by placing the caps and tubes (not together) in a small glass of water. Then I prepped a sheet of watercolor paper with Halloween webbing and poured the diluted paint mixture over the webbing and on to the paper.

The next morning, of course, I was dying for a look and so lifted up the webbing to inspect the result. Things looked good, but there was so much water still on the paper that I decided to take off the webbing to let it dry. Then I got to wondering… what would happen if I re-used the webbing.

When I pulled the webbing off this one a few hours later, I was pretty pleased. The paper sat drying on the table beside the other. And every time I passed it I thought the same thing: “That’s a flying horse.” This is the same king of thinking that made me paint “I Feel Pretty”; in other words, following this voice has a long, LONG history of getting me into trouble.

So, naturally, I went for it.

Let me state that this is an excellent rendering of a horse head. In fact, cropped it has a lot of potential.

But it’s not what I saw in my head. I got sucked into rendering a proper, proportional horse and forgot what I was seeing. My friend Sandra said, “Try again” but it was a random start. I can’t redo it. I could try, but the confidence of the original idea is gone.

That’s the problem with painting, at least for me. I have an idea, but fully realizing the idea is, at least so far, beyond my grasp. So, I have to pause regularly and say, “Okay, this isn’t the idea, but could it be another idea?”  And repeating this question, I tiptoe toward the finish.