I had a change of heart.

Last night when I wrote my blog, I didn’t image that I’d ever be showing the painting I did yesterday. But as I proceeded with working through the technique it sought to teach me, I changed my mind.

So, here is the painting:

Yep, it really is that bad. It was never meant to see the light of day. And yet, I feel like my blog is a good place to put it before it gets destroyed. Not every painting has to work, just like every scene is might not remain in a book. I think I wrote one of those today too.

So what was the grand technique it wanted me to really learn? Well, it’s in the image at the top of this post. When I first started that, I thought I might be doing lamp posts or maybe candles. Instead, I decided to keep them like the fairy lights this tree was meant to have.

Okay, I thought about adding another layer of leaves to the tree to make it more three dimensional and possibly cover some of the fairy lights, but I decided not to invest any more time in it. I had learned what I needed. Honestly, it’s not too different from the technique I use to create nebula paintings. Just slightly tweaked a little.

Then, I carried on and here’s how it ended:

Now, just imagine how much prettier that first painting would be if I’d done the lights like this to begin with. There are a few adjustments of course, but this is a start. I’ll probably have to paint on a larger canvas if I give it another try, but that’s workable.

I also started an 8″x10″ painting on Bristol board and 3 new ACEO’s. Just got them started and now they are sitting to dry.

I also wrote 1,200 words today in about 3 sessions. During my first one, I was only going to write for 10 minutes and I even set a timer so I could just focus on the writing. When the timer went off, I was flowing very well and wrote for another 5-10 minutes. I figure I wrote nearly 500 words on that session. I’m wondering if the timer might be the way to go. But, as I said above, I’m not sure this scene will stay in. It feels like an odd detour to the story. I thought it might be going somewhere, but now that I’m done, I’m not sure. So, I’ll work on the next little bit and see if I need to roll it back or not.

Of course, that brought back the previous dilemma of what to do with cut words. I did pick up a spreadsheet that someone designed for keeping track of multiple projects over the year. It’s a simple thing and I’ve been using it this year (or at least when I’ve been recording words done, not page counts) to test it. I have thoughts on redesigning it and now that I’m back to word counts, it might be worth doing. Part of the redesign I’ve been thinking about it the carryover of words from prior year and then to the new year. Perhaps for the spreadsheet’s original creator, this person stopped writing around the holidays, finishing every project for the year during this time, and then starting new projects in the new year. I don’t know. It was just a guess I had since there was no way to keep track of word counts from the prior year. But, it should be easy enough to pull in the word count when the story is published to come up with a written to publishing ratio. It might be something I could even include in my awesome PowerBI dashboards.

But, that’s for another day.

Cheers.