You pick a spot and start. Doesn’t matter where, as long as you do.
Guidelines are there already, but you get to choose the colour. You have a lot of freedom, but it’s still best to keep inside those lines, if you want it to work out in the end.
Now you’re into it. The minutiae of colouring. Carefully colour evenly, stay inside the lines. Pay attention to detail. The small things matter, you realize, because that’s all the big thing is in the end.
After some time you stop and lift your head up from the page. Pull back. Zoom out. You have to see how it’s coming along, because the detail is meaningless without its context.
Hey, it looks nice. But. It’s time to get back to work. Back in the trenches, the day-to-day, “the grind”. You can’t get anywhere without it. Maybe you’re lucky and lose yourself in the process. Times flies. Maybe you’re bored and struggle to make it through.
But make it through you do. You always do. So you’re back out again – bird’s eye view. Take a good look. Hopefully you can appreciate what you’ve done so far. What’s the point, anyway, if you can’t appreciate it sometimes?
But don’t appreciate for too long – that’s not how the picture gets coloured in.
Head back down. Maybe with a different colour now. Careful, repetitive movements, step by step. Day by day. Colour on paper, one tiny little scribble at a time.
Back and forth, in and out. Balancing the micro and the macro to create a composition of infinitesimal, innumerable little parts.
And then one day you pull back, take it all in and it takes you in, and you realize you’ve created something beautiful.
That’s the idea, anyway.
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