In an attempt to focus on colouring and get my enjoyment back I decided to run an experiment. I wanted to colour a page entirely in pencil. After watching Colouring with Alena on youtube, she'd mentioned using polychromos to burnish her prismacolour work, and I figured I'd try it out. I usually use markers (water or alcohol based) or watercolour pencils with a blender to get rid of the white spaces of the paper for a cleaner, more cohesive look, but I thought I'd try it out.
I worked on just the pug's face at first and it went okay, so I just kept going. Honestly, I like how the page came out, but in truth it was really painful to make. For those that don't know, I have nerve and tendon damage related to the antibiotics I've had to take over years (sometimes one month on/one month off cycles) due to my cystic fibrosis. I was even involved, and compensated, in a class action lawsuit against the makers of ciprofloxin (it was like... $70, there was a lot of us in it) because of these issues. The point is, my hands are kinda fragile. My joints are even worse because of arthritis, so to say that I'm going to do multiple hours of detailed colouring in JUST a hard-to-use medium like pencils is rough. While I don't colour hard, because I'm physically unable to add pressure at all to the page, the repetitive nature of the colouring was hard on me. It sounds dumb, because it is. Disabilities suck; I think most of us with them can attest to that it'd be nicer to not have to deal with them.
That being said, I might still incorporate more just pencil colouring when the mood strikes me. It required me to be very slow in colouring, to the point of skipping entire days to allow my hands to recover from the pain, but it also gave me time to reflect on what I was doing, and refine the direction of the page, which is what I've been looking for. Worrying about completion time to line up with the livestreams has been a huge pressure on me mentally, but also in regards to what I'm "allowing" myself to colour and the time I'm giving myself. It's stupid, and I'm trying to break my habit. This method, as frustrating as it can be when I want to colour but cannot, alleviated that issue. There was physically no way to rush, so I didn't rush.