Watercolor pencils

I used to draw when I was younger, and I found that I'm equally mediocre in all the mediums I fiddled around with - pencil, charcoal, acrylic paint.  I never really practically understood the skills it took to imagine in well-rounded three dimensions, so even though I shade and highlight using whatever medium, the things I draw inevitably end up like two-dimensional things badly pretending to have shadows and depth.  Something told me that if I were to deliberately stylize my drawings to just two-dimensional things, I would end up drawing just lines and dots.  If, however, I were to do abstract, I would end up doing something concretely incomprehensible.

It also didn't help that I did not have shading skills, and that I purposefully choose the types of the mediums that require artistic chops to begin with.  For instance, I insisted on using mechanical pencils for sketching, so I end up straining my wrists repeating inevitably gossamer strokes just to produce what looks like a box when what I was laboring for was a tombstone.  I switched to charcoal, and hit the same problem - do I stroke using the pencil, or do I brush using the brush?  I do both, and end up with lines that seemed to have been sneezed at by a powder puff.  It only got more difficult with acrylic paint, since the shading and highlighting needs a surer hand, and the medium doesn't easily come off.   So after painting in acrylic what I've been trying to draw using both pencil and charcoal and still ending up like a berk, I put my drawing stuff away, where they stay sustaining two advanced fungal civilizations.  On top of my apparent lack of skills and my resistance to learning properly, I also didn't know what style to go for all the while, so, like how all semi-passions go kaput, I concentrated on drinking instead.  At least it is not the lack of three-dimensional artistic imagination that makes you miss your mouth altogether.

I've been trying watercolor pencils for a month now, as if I don't have enough mediums to be mediocre at.  They're hard, since it's like having two mediums all at once, and if shading wasn't difficult enough, I still have to worry about wet blending.  After watching tutorials on Youtube and trying to copy oranges and flowers and bananas and other small things you can just tear off paper, I tried drawing a scenery.  Here's how it ended up.

I don't know why it ended up being about Red Riding Hood, when all I wanted to do was some trees.  When I got to grandma's house my berkhood went to 10, so I just kept adding more trees hoping to hide grandma's house in metaphorical foliage.

Again and again, it is my resistance to learning skills properly that gets me stuck in most things - when I tried playing the guitar, when I tried playing console games (or even online games, come to think of it) when I try studying for my doctorate in philosophy.  So I went back to watching tutorial videos and looking for images on Google, when I found John Lovett's Palermo Geraniums.  He was using acrylic, and it was a beautiful piece, which I shamelessly tried to copy.  

In fact, I liked the piece so much (or maybe it's the only piece I could find which I could render somehow), I tried redoing it.

So here it is, my attempt at watercolor pencils.  The background sky is especially difficult, and my absence of  technique in using pencils which is supposed to be smudged wetly shows.  Ah well, there's always alcohol.