The story of how God took me the long way around an instant miracle – Lisa.
It began with an aching silence…
There was a time in my life when I had many emotions I desperately needed to express or release, but words would not come. After I packed up writing as a career due to burn-out, words wouldn’t even come for a simple email, and I struggled to verbally articulate what I was feeling. My words had died within me. This went on for several years, but with our move to the UK, my need to create and to express was a desperation within me. It had built to a mighty force of a river wanting to gush from me, but it was constantly being held back by an impenetrable dam wall.
At the same time, I was developing a hunger to do watercolours, but I was really no good at either drawing or painting. I’m not saying that to be modest. I really didn’t have any ability and that’s not for lack of trying. I know you don’t have to be born with talent to make it; you just have to be able to learn and work hard. The problem is, it didn’t matter what course I took, my brain wasn’t “getting it”. I had tried countless ‘how to draw’ books including Betty Edward’s “no fail” classic in which she trains you to switch to the right-hand side of the brain. The idea is that the right-hand side of the brain is the side where a drawing ability resides and it can be tapped into. Everyone – she and others claimed – can draw, no exceptions.
I had a passing ability to draw some aspects of medieval illumination and to paint them in all their flat, vibrant glory, but nothing else.
But the desire to create when I could not write was deep and strong within me. The urge to give watercolours a go was a craving as intense as anything I’d experienced.
I know how many hours it took me to hone my craft as a writer and to be able to write in such a way that I could see when a piece of writing was of professional quality or when it was of novice quality. It took me thousands and thousands of hours.
I knew that learning to draw and do watercolours was a skill that would require a similar kind of dedication. I had spent a decade or more of my life getting to the level I did with writing, and I just didn’t have the energy to devote that kind of time to a new creative hobby. I knew I had a lot of learning to do but I needed to be able to paint now. To express my emotions and thoughts now.
My great cry to God
So I told all of this to God. I needed his help to be good at watercolour quickly, if not right now.
And with that, I purchased a few supplies and sat down to paint. I know I was supposed to play with paints and practice, but I had to release an urgency of creativity. So I opened my new cloth-bound hardback journal and I painted this:
Yes, this was my first watercolour ever. I was a little surprised at how good it looked for a first go. And my second painting was this:
And this was my third:
God had answered my prayers and met my deepest need at the time. I was just about instantly good at watercolours. And yet it wasn’t instant at all. God had been answering that prayer fifteen years before I even prayed it. My whole life had been stepping stones to this moment, only I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it in my creative careers, and I certainly couldn’t see it in what I thought were time-wasting indulgent creative hobbies that were cheap copies of a long-standing dream to be an artist, painter and drawer.
The journey to discovering watercolours
In my teen years, for a birthday one year, my parents bought me watercolour pencils and watercolour paper. It was, without doubt, my favourite present of any presents I ever received growing up. Maybe for nostalgic reasons, it’s still my favourite gift. (I still have pieces of that original pad of expensive Fabriano cotton paper and the large tin of Derwent watercolour pencils.) I loved the magic of the colour and water, but it was mostly experimental and I didn’t progress. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing.
I then went on to a sketching pen and started sketching patterns of a kind of old-world nature. It was there I developed an ongoing love for sketching pens and dip pens and the lines they make. I also did a bit of pen work copying the exterior images of house designs for people to frame. Nothing terribly taxing, but I learned to love sketching pens.
I then learned calligraphy to go with my pen work. I was still in high school and during activity week at the end of the school year when all my friends chose an adventure camp, I stayed at the school in the art department and learned calligraphy because that was what I wanted to do most. And I am so glad I did.
That led to branching into detailed time-consuming medieval illuminations using gouache and gold leaf or imitation gold paint. I felt I had found that ‘something’ that no one else could do. But the time involved in each one and the lack of a market for them, and then eventually having a time-demanding son, meant it got put aside.
I still remember the last illumination I ever did: a modern take on one and a gift for a friend. I had already invested days and days of my time in it, stealing time away from looking after my two-year-old son. I got up from my desk at one point to get something across the room and heard a scratching sound near my desk. A chill passed through me and I whirled around. I saw, to my horror, that my son had a texter and thought he’d have a go at the illumination too. He scribbled all over that design just as he saw Mummy doing. I fell down on the floor in a heap of tears because I knew my time to do that kind of art was at an end.
After that, I had a series of hobbies. Each taught me something about colours, lines, blending, balancing. Cross-stitching, stamping and card-making were two such hobbies. Stamping in particular became a long-time passion, but there’s only so many cards a person needs and only so many people to send them to. I managed to sell some at a local gift store where I worked at the time, but not enough to keep me going. When the leftovers piled up into the hundreds, it too began to feel like a waste of time. And so I gave it up.
Before I had my son, I studied interior design and did several jobs. It taught me more about colour theory and about visual weight. I learnt to see rooms and scenes as quadrants of space. I learnt about dominant colours and about blending or combining them, and how to reflect themes and colours in a space to make the room look harmonious and the design look deliberate. I was asked to do more and more jobs, word of mouth working entirely in my favour, but I had to give it up when my special-needs son came along. I just could not take this socially anxious child to client sites or leave him with someone else. It felt like another waste of time and another dead end. All those years of training for just a handful of jobs and then … motherhood.
And then photography came along. It taught me light and shadows and composition. It taught me about visual interest and visual focus, varying angles and understanding the viewer’s eye. And it taught me about images as a representation of a concept, emotion, or word.
I started to put the photos online for others. It took off, and I have been adding to the collection since. It helped me to put my work ‘out there’ without being paid or without giving away originals.
“I learned that it is okay to ask God to be good at something. He might give you an instant ability. He might take you the long way around. He might have been taking you the long way around to that prayer already.”
And then I discovered the colouring book craze. Oh my! Colouring taught me more about colour mixing, colour layering in lots of light built-up shades, and values than anything else I’d done. And it allowed me to put colour into almost any image I desired as I collected more and more colouring books. Not only that, but I was staring at lines and lines and lines of a huge variety of objects. I did not realise it, but my brain was learning to draw by staring at those lines.
I then decided to try progressing with my coloured pencils into original art. So I bought a book on botanical art using coloured pencils. I didn’t end up doing any botanical art because it required a level of being able to draw I just could not master, but what it taught me about shading, tones, light source, and shadows was beyond price. I had more ‘a-ha’ moments from that book than all my other art and drawing books combined. (If you are interested in that book, it is “Botanical Drawing in Colour” by Wendy Hollender.)
And then I did about five minutes of Joanna Basford’s ‘how to draw’ class and it altered my world. The course is actually about how to draw in a ‘Johanna Basford colouring-in book’ style – patterns and whimsical imagery – but she said one thing that was a light-bulb moment. She said that she couldn’t even draw either, and that she wasn’t the best drawer in school. But she could draw some things very well, and she stuck with that.
I had always believed that if I couldn’t draw everything, or even enough, I shouldn’t draw. And if I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint, which was what I really desired to do. It was a totally wrong way to think. I realised that I too could draw a handful of things well in a particular kind of arty or naive style. I could do anything that clearly used basic shapes, e.g. a pot, or a window, or a bowl or a box. I could draw outlines, and I knew how to use colour to fill in the spaces. I should focus on what I could do, and do it well.
And that’s when I made the leap to buy the watercolour paints and sent my cry for a miracle to God. And so I drew the outline of those images above and painted them. And it was a watershed moment.
How God went ahead of me
I didn’t sit down to watercolours knowing I had learnt everything I needed to know now to pull off some great art. I didn’t look back at my life and think, “What great preparation for this moment.” I didn’t have any inkling that God had been working on the answer to my cry long before I cried it. That understanding came later along with the realisation that much of what I just automatically pulled off with watercolour was not something that should come naturally at all. It is something you normally slowly learn over time and with practice. And even with those thirty years of preparation, there was still so much I didn’t know I didn’t know. Things very specific to watercolour art. I didn’t know how to mix colours, how much water to have on my brush, the different thicknesses of paint and when to use them, the right kinds of papers, the right kinds of brushes, how to manage layering and drying and the all-important timing, and a huge range of techniques that normally come later in the learning journey. I just did it. Later, I watched lessons on Youtube and other places and realised in hindsight why what I was doing worked. God truly instantly downloaded an ability to paint, but he had been working on the bigger artistic picture, the preparation, for so much longer.
I realised that for my whole mostly disappointing creative life, I was being taken the long way around the Promised Land because there were things I had to learn first. If I hadn’t gone that way, I would have jumped into watercolour as a novice to so many concepts, and convinced myself I was no good at watercolour and definitely no good at art.
After painting those images above, and armed with all the background experience, I simply painted the next thing I felt I could, and the next. I discovered that with each painting I longed to paint in order to express what I had to express, when I asked God for the ability, he gave it to me. Whole new drawings emerged I had no idea I could do.
That doesn’t mean I can draw well and draw everything. If you sit something in front of me to draw, I probably couldn’t. But when I need to draw it, when it is the next thing I need to express, I can draw it. In this way, my skill is never far from God who is the source. I depend on him for each picture, and I invite him to paint with me.
I learned that it is okay to ask God to be good at something. He might give you an instant ability. He might take you the long way around. He might have been taking you towards that prayer already. He knows before you’re even born that you will ask him for that skill. And he knows exactly when you will need the skill most. He will have you ready for when you are meant to be ready.
Can I suggest something to you? The next time you hear yourself saying, “I wish I was good at …” or “I’ve always wanted to be good at … but I just don’t have the talent” try instead saying, “Father God, I really want to be good at … I need your help.” Ask God for help. Tell him your longings. And see what he does with it.
All of those artworks above are now cards. Go to our shop www.thelonelycreative.com/shop and choose your region for cards: US &CA or Original (everyone else).
About the Author: Lisa Saul
