Carbon Paper
A few days ago I was telling Mira about my high school social studies project where everything had to be handwritten and assembled into these thick, illustrated binders.
Most of us weren’t “artists,” so we relied on carbon paper to get those perfect sketches from the encyclopedia into our projects. I remember watercoloring those carbon copies of photos.
She stopped me mid-story.
“What’s carbon paper?”
I laughed out loud. Sometimes I forget how her childhood is so different from mine.
Obviously, I bought carbon paper sheets the next day. That evening, we hunted in the craft closet for images that she would want to make copies of. I found an old oil painting landscapes book from the 1980s—the kind with very dramatic skies and very confident brushstrokes. Some of them had grid lines on them…memories of paintings I’d made when I was in high school.
I showed her how the paper works, and we traced one of the scenes into my watercolor sketchbook. The left side of this spread is that copy. The right side is what I extended it into.
I used gouache and Karin watercolor markers. The whole thing took a little over an hour. And when I finished, I hated it.
I’m sure you can guess why. I couldn’t stop comparing it to the original oil painting. It felt like a poor imitation. Like I had tried to stand in someone else’s shoes and tripped.
I left the studio feeling slightly annoyed with myself even as Mira exclaimed: “Whoa! How did you get that effect with gouache? It’s such a different medium!”
I dismissed that as my child loving everything I attempt … and ignored that she still speaks the truth, like children do.
But then, I walked into the studio the next morning and saw the sketchbook lying open on the desk, in the morning light and actually gasped. My first thought was, "Oh, this is actually really good. Dang! I made that!"
Nothing had changed except the distance. The evening prior, I was only seeing the gap between what I made and what I thought it should have been.
When I looked at it with fresh eyes, I didn't see the 80’s oil painting I was trying to copy; I saw a vibrant, textured experiment that was purely me.
This piece isn’t something I would normally paint. It isn’t perfect. Parts of it still feel awkward to me.
But it also holds something I love:
a conversation between generations,
a tool from my past,
a child’s curiosity,
and the quiet surprise of liking something you almost dismissed.
And that is all that matters.
માનસી
