I currently have a 30” x 40” canvas on my easel and plans for an even larger painting once I finish this one. I’ve got multiple floor-to-ceiling cabinets filled with art supplies for graphite, ink, watercolor, oils, and a few bits and bobs for assorted other media. I’ve taken more art classes as an adult than I can count on both hands and feet, attended art shows, painting conferences, and workshops, and do something with my art almost daily.
None of this would be true if I hadn’t helped a stranger test out their family-fun activities before a homecoming festival that I didn’t even want to go to.
Today, I want to break down how I found and nurtured a deep, fulfilling hobby, and see what we can learn from this example about the process of finding the kind of hobbies that become passions.
Reverse-Engineering Acquiring a Deep Hobby: A Case Study
Step 1: Go places and do things.
This story starts in September 2017. The spousal unit dragged me to his college homecoming (what is this “school spirit” thing?). Wandering at loose ends while he caught up with old friends, I found some engineering grad students setting up an outreach activities booth. I’d volunteered with my school’s outreach program for years and knew debugging is always useful.
I tested out every activity set up across multiple tables. My favorite, by far, was melting wax crayon drawings into paper using a hot plate and then watching the water-based dyes run through whatever maze I drew and baked into the paper. Foreshadowing!
Of note, there is no way, at that point in time, that I could have realized the impact that that one little activity would have on my life going forward. The first step is often so subtle that it is invisible as it happens—and still hard to see in hindsight if you aren’t looking for it.
If you want more direction than “leave your dwelling,” what did you find fun when you were too young to care about what others thought of you?
Step 2: Pay attention to enjoyment and interest. When something grabs you, take the next logical step.
The day after the sportsball thingy, I bought a small set of paints, some paper, and a wax pencil at the university bookstore. I recall the total being around $20. Of note: I didn’t go online and buy a complete set of everything that could possibly be useful, nor did I get bogged down in researching what was best. I picked up the smallest set of things that would let me further explore the fun I had. I took the next logical step, and no others.
In this instance, I started by buying the most basic equipment of the craft. In other cases, the next logical step might be finding a community group or meetup with people who do what you are exploring—even mentioning your new interest to your existing friends might allow one of them to share something they already love with you. If the thing that interests you is investment-heavy, look for a venue where you can try something using someone else’s equipment. You might look for maker spaces, classes, shops or studios that provide tools (and, ideally, someone competent for health and safety) and have options for public access or training.
After we got home, I played with the paints, enjoyed myself, and tried following some online tutorials, but I wanted to do more that I was figuring out on my own.
Step 3: If interest continues, escalate as indicated.
Some interests don’t take root, some will root but remain shallow or casual interests, and one or two may grow into highly compelling avocations.
The key to taking the next step seems to be a combination of engagement, enjoyment, and frustration. You are actually doing the activity and enjoying it, and also you are frustrated with a limitation that you are hitting. This frustration is a natural part of growth, and it tells you that you want to grow in that direction.
This “doing” part is critical. We are often time-starved yet still want to engage in the things that interest us. The easiest way to do this in a resource-rich environment is through consuming: We buy more materials, maybe an online course or ten. Boxes land on the porch, but stuff doesn’t get used.
Acquiring things you don’t use—especially if they sit there reminding you of how much you wish you were using them!—is not the path to happiness.
If you catch yourself acquiring when you are starved for time, do what you can to strike at the root of this problem: lack of time for engaging in your hobby. I won’t lie: It can be damn hard, but everything you do to make it easier will pay dividends.
In this example, at this point, I was having fun with internet tutorials and playing around with the materials I had. Also, I was frustrated with not being able to have an idea and make it exist on the paper in front of me.
So, in October 2017, I found and enrolled in a beginner watercolor class. I optimized for the lowest total cost: The course I took had higher tuition than other classes listed on the course aggregator but had the smallest (and therefore cheapest!) materials list. When I took this course, I played with mixing colors at home because I found it so deeply enjoyable.
Step 4: Repeat. As engagement/enjoyment/frustration continues, keep taking the next logical step.
Despite having made one not-completely-terrible watercolor painting of an apple, my lack of drawing skills was the obvious limiting factor for any further progress I wanted to make.
In January 2018, I signed up for an evening Drawing Studio class at the local high school. The teacher was … okay. I made progress in the first six-week course and signed up for another six weeks. By the end of that second six weeks, it was apparent that I had gotten whatever learning I was going to get from that teacher.
While enrolled in this drawing class, I kept browsing that same course aggregator. I came across a class called Color Mixing, taught at the same place where I took the watercolor class. Your mileage may vary, but to me, this sounded like the best use of a dreary March I’d ever heard of.
This class was also where I learned why you need to use the good stuff in watercolor1 and had the first real “yikes” moment when I had to decide whether continuing with this hobby was worth the tangible costs. In short, tradeoffs were required.
The point where you have to start choosing what to sacrifice (time- or money-wise) is when casual hobbies will fall off. They may be interesting, but they aren’t more interesting than the other available options. But if you look clearly at the tradeoffs, take a moment to feel the “ouch” that comes with the realization that nothing comes for free, and still feel it’s worth it, you might have found your avocation.
Also note, at the time, this investment still felt pretty darn speculative. Six years down the road, I can tell you how the story has turned out (so far), but at the time, it felt like I had no clue what I was doing. It seemed nauseatingly expensive, but missing this opportunity felt like a tangible loss.
From the comfortable vantage point of my armchair six years out, I can easily connect the dots and say that this subject tapped into an interest I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and I had already shown sustained interest and action for six months, and it really was an incremental step from where I was at that point in time.
Still, it felt intimidatingly big at the time.
Also, it was, indeed, the best use of a dreary March I have ever found. The teacher was brilliant, the material was challenging, and I was good at it. What is more satisfying than that?
But still, my drawing sucked, and I’d reached the end of the road with the drawing teacher I found in the city’s community course calendar. Having taken both a decent course and a great course at the same place, I checked their schedule and found an outdoor sketching class in July 2018.
Outdoor sketching was when I first experienced not needing to buy every dang thing on the course list because I already had most of it. Again, I made some progress on my drawing skills, but mostly, it was the most enjoyable use of a string of beautiful Saturday mornings I could think of.
By this point, it was clear that I found arty stuff more fun than most other uses of my discretionary time and money, and I figured my skills would continue to creep along as I used them.
And then, in September of 2018, a year after that seemingly benign yet fateful day at the tailgate activities booth, I started a drawing class with the same teacher from the color mixing class.
Instead of having a hundred tactful ways of saying, “Try it again, but this time make it suck less,” she had a hundred different techniques to break down problems into their component parts and rebuild from there. This was when I realized that I not only enjoyed all this arty stuff, I might become quite good at it. I had spent a year nursing an ember into a fire, and this realization doused that fire with jet fuel.
The rest, as they say, is history. I took the next year off of color completely to get my head around value. This constraint led to a wholly unanticipated love of ink as a medium2, and when I came back to color, I was several large steps closer to being able to make manifest the ideas in my head.
Six years later, I spent a small part of my morning today reading about applying color interactions in landscape painting and am working up the gumption to dig into a difficult part of my current large-scale painting this weekend. (Or perhaps I’ll procrastinate a little longer by dashing out for some plein air painting, instead.)
I wish you the very best of luck in finding and nurturing something you truly love, and would rather do than most other things.
Step 1: Go places and do things.
Step 2: Pay attention to enjoyment and interest. When something grabs you, take the next logical step.
Step 3: If interest continues, escalate as indicated.
Step 4: Repeat. As engagement/enjoyment/frustration continues, keep taking the next logical step.
Tradeoffs will be required; make the ones that feel worth it.
Artist-grade paints are made with pure pigments, no fillers, and generally have only one pigment or a consistent mix and ratio of specific pigments. Student-grade paints may look the same when squeezed out of the tube, but the quality of pigment and which ones are used is often inconsistent, and they use binders that affect how the paint behaves. If you aren’t mixing colors, this might not be a problem. But when trying to mix an exact match for a color, it is NOT helpful if someone has already added extraneous things to the mix.
Given my natural proclivities, I expected that I would love pastels and colored pencils and detest ink. Turns out it’s the opposite. I love walking down the pastel and colored pencil aisles at the art store (so many pretty colors!), but it drives me up the wall to use the darn things. The colors don’t mix how I want them to, are never what I want them to be, and setting money on fire is probably cheaper than a serious pastel habit.