Today’s watercolor experiment:

It is the time of year for sentiment. I was watching one of those seasonal movies that just put me over the edge. Actually, that’s not to hard to do. Sometimes Finding Nemo is too much for me.

Before I knew it, I was slapping paint on some big paper. A big swath of yellow ochre with a sweep of a 2″ brush. A big, drippy stroke, as wet as my face.

After my face dried up, and the watercolor paper, I thought about the faces I was trying to paint the other day. I already had the essence of a sadness on my paper. I drew stereotypical lips behind the ochre swath, with ghostly fading echoes. I carefully drew a rainbow swath interrupted by the sadness.  Within the sadness I drew storminess with sepias and grays and some red.

Let A Smile be Your Umbrella
12″x16″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

I never understood the saying “Let a smile be your umbrella.” The shape a person makes when he or she smiles is concave, like an upside-down umbrella. Personally, I always use an umbrella for its convex surface. One remains much drier that way.  It seems that the shape of sadness has the convexity to keep things out; perhaps it keeps the good things out and the bad things in.

But I still like the spirit of the original saying, inaccurate as it may be anatomically.