Nowadays we are finding that, all too often, life just feels overwhelming. The constant bombardment from all the different media competing for our attention raises our blood pressure. We often find ourselves assaulted by noise—whether from crowds, music, traffic, or building works—and, if you’re like me, you find yourself increasingly seeking the calm of a quiet room in your own home.
The noise, the constant pull on our attention, the sense that we should be doing something more, something better, something faster—it’s all too much.
That situation was very much on my mind when I sat down to paint the hummingbird in my latest video.
Recently, I’ve been focusing on creating paintings that don’t make demands. We don’t need that on top of everything else in everyday life. A hummingbird need not be an especially complicated subject, and I’ve simplified it here down to the essence of a bird, then embellished it—and that’s partly the point. A hummingbird has such a flightiness about it—a rapid, darting delicacy of movement—and painting it in watercolor naturally encourages us to simplify.
You can’t rush watercolor. It asks you to pause, to watch the paint move, to let the water do its work. In that sense, it gently insists that we step out of that hurried, restless state and into something quieter.
In the video, I left things unedited. You’ll hear the little background noises, the pauses, the cups of tea being moved about. That wasn’t an accident. I wanted to share something more real—not a polished, perfect performance, but the actual atmosphere of a painting session. Because that, in itself, is part of the calm.
We don’t need everything to be perfect to benefit from it.
As I worked on the hummingbird, building up the soft washes and then adding those slightly more defined doodles, I found that familiar sense of focus settling in. It’s a gentle concentration—not forced or pressured, but just a quiet absorption in what’s in front of you. And that’s where the calm really begins to return.
There’s something I hear again and again from people who paint along with me. They tell me that even a short painting session, with few demands on their skill, helps them feel more grounded. Not because they’ve created a masterpiece, but because they’ve given themselves permission to stop and simply be present for a while.
That’s really what this video is about.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, or a bit scattered, recovering from an illness or loss, or just in need of an emotional reset, I hope you’ll sit down with your paints and join in. Don’t worry about getting everything “right.” Let the feathering edges, the soft blends, even the little mistakes, be part of the process. They’re not interruptions or real mistakes; they’re part of what makes watercolor what it is. As Bob Ross said, paintings—like life—are made up of happy accidents!
And perhaps, like the hummingbird itself, you’ll find a moment of stillness in the middle of movement.
Diane