Love of my life... I started using watercolours when I was about 9 and even though I like to claim otherwise because it sounds more romantic I did not actually fall in love with them at first sight. I used them as an alternative to colouring pencils, which I hated and also to explore paints, because we didn't own any poster paints. It did not go particularly well, not least because I tried to paint light on top of dark, before I found out that watercolours are not opaque... Tried them again when I was 15. First off, I painted really dry and just convinced myself that I was drawing with a brush. It was only when I added water that I finally started to love them as a medium in their own right instead of just a way to add colour to my drawings, which used to be almost exclusively black and white. Strangely, it wasn't some old school genius who inspired me to use water with watercolours, like Turner or John Singer Sargent, it was the amazing http://gold-seven.deviantart.com/gallery/# on Deviantart, whose work is beautiful.