Water is my favourite element. Unpredictable, it always finds it’s way, pits rock, destroys metal. It is essential to life, but it can wipe out entire cities.

There are those who are panic-stricken by water (I'm not talking about anti-hygiene fans, of course) and those who can't imagine life without going to the beach. Some prefer the tranquillity of a lake, others the liveliness of the ocean. It is an inexhaustible source of metaphors for authors and a curse for those who live in flood plains.

Immersion

The first time I encountered the term immersion was with computer games - when VR goggles started to become a thing. The term is an excellent measure of the quality of games, films, music, art, books etc.
It's not easy to drive narrative and stylistic or special effects in a way that allows the author to sink their claws into the viewer and hold them in check for long. We live in an age of fast news, short mesages, we look at thousands of pictures a day. We read superficially, look for summaries and are in a constant rush. To hold our attention for longer and draw us into an imagined, distant world - is not easy. Our attention is easily distracted and the clock is ticking!

When was the last time you allowed yourself to stretch out on the sofa and immerse yourself in the sounds of music?

Not to work while listening to music, not to knit, not to cook, not to clean, not to run.

To lie back and let the wave consume us. It devours our body, fills and stuns our senses.

With excellent music, I get chills. When was the last time you had such chills?
When was the last time you listened to new music that completely surprised you and you couldn't stop listening to one album over and over again?
When was the last time you watched a film that absorbed you to such an extent that when you saw the closing credits you sat in front of the screen for another half hour trying to understand what you had just witnessed?
Is there a painting or a photograph or a sculpture that, when you saw it for the first time, you could not stop looking at for hours and then forget about for a long time?
Have you played a game that so curved your reality that you saw the world in a completely different way afterwards?

About the drawing

I have a new toy! Thanks to my brother's generosity, I switched from a 'wacom intuos pen' to a 'Huion Kamvas 13' . no this is not going to be a review of both these tablets. The time for such a review will come when I have used the new tablet a little longer:) The most important change is that I switched from a tablet without a screen to one with one:D More details soon :)

To be fair - I prefer to work with paper and pencil/crayons. I like to break my nails, and get my hands dirty. I like to sharpen my pencils with a knife, and arrange them by softness on the table before I start drawing. I like erasing errors, blowing off the remains of the graphite and watching the drawing take on new dimensions and colours from different angles. So you won't be surprised that even though I bought a Kindle reader about 10 years ago - I've used it maybe twice :D I love paper and more than anything I love old books. Antiquarian bookshops are my favourite places on earth:)

But this was supposed to be a chapter about drawing.
I don't like my drawing. I took myself too complicated a scene for the first time playing with a new tool. I don't like to use ready-made stuff, so I treated the tablet like a piece of paper, and just sketched and slowly added colours. I mainly used the 'dry pastel' effect. It's my favourite 'brush' at the moment.
Let me know what you guys think!