Watercolor Anxiety

While I was frustrated, I was looking at the watercolor sketches I did 15 years or so ago. I still like them so thought about how I did them back then. The reason I was using watercolor then was because I didn’t have any other options to paint except by carrying around a pocket watercolor kit and a sketchbook. It occurred to me that I wasn’t even seeing it as the watercolor media but just thankful to be painting at all with colors and a brush. I realized that I was struggling nowadays because I was looking at it as this “WATER”color that I haven’t used for 15 years which caused me to think way too much about technical things like how much water should go into the paint. Back then, since I was thinking of it as just painting and painting the same, I was subconsciously using the right amount of water as needed and never encountered problems I’ve been having recently like overworked smudges due to too much water etc. It’s easier if you want to do a careful rendering with modest amount of water but for watercolors I prefer the bold and carefree sketchy watery look which seems to me is the elegance of the media. Like Sargent’s watercolors. Zorn used it in a more careful rendering fashion too so I don’t like his as much. But to do the fluid sketchy kind, the trick for me seems to not think of it as WATERcolor painting but just painting