I’ve been trying to play fewer games on my phone, do other things in the evening instead of staring at it. My goal is also to have my place a little darker at night. I’m experimenting with less light at night, to see if that will help with my sleep. Plus brighter light in the mornings.

Just saying that I want to play on my phone less isn’t good enough. Those games do specific things for me. Fill time and keep my heartrate low. (I won’t play games that aren’t relaxing for me.)

So what do I replace that phone time with? I read (a lot) but that hasn’t been enough.

I used to do a lot of drawing and painting at night. Now, I’ll still need light to do that. But hopefully I can change the bulbs in my lamps to produce a softer light.

However, I have some issues with trying to pick up drawing again.

At one point in my life, I was pretty good at drawing. If I practiced every day, I could pretty much sketch out whatever I saw. And I could make up things and draw those as well.

The problem is that, for me, I’m not a natural at drawing. It isn’t something I can just pick up and do. I have to practice—a lot—to be good at it.

This makes drawing a precise art, something I am trying to be good at.

For me, that makes it the opposite of being relaxing. Sure, I could probably get good enough at it to achieve flow state. But I still need to practice and I’m still pretty critical about the results.

Painting, though, particularly abstract watercolors, is a whole other matter.

I’ve always called painting my “bad” art. I don’t have to worry about being precise. It’s happy accidents with color. And I never have to show it to anyone. I’m the only one who will see most of what I do.

So I picked up some (very cheap) watercolors last night, along with some paintbrushes and cheap paper. And discovered something amazing: they now make these brushes that hold the water for you. You fill them, then squeeze the tube to get the water to flow into the brush.

The paints that I bought were inexpensive, so they don’t have a lot of pigment in them. It’s very difficult to get a deep color using them.

They’ll be good enough for now, though. Good enough for me to play at night, experiment with. See if this really is something that is going to bring me delight.

I also put a book on hold in the library, about doing abstract watercolors. Again, happy accidents with color. That’s really what I want. There are lots of books and classes about doing realistic watercolor, how to draw realistic clouds or birds or flowers or what have you. Sure, I’ll probably do some of those.

But I don’t want to have to practice and fill an entire page with U shapes. I want to paint squares and then put little dots on them, trying different color combinations. I want to get back to sprinkling salt on wet watercolor to get various effects. Or using plastic wrap (though I wasn’t ever that successful with that technique).

So moarh art in the world. Even if it’s just for me. Less time on the computer and phone. I think that’s all going to come together as a win.

How about you? What kind of art are you making these days?