Here's a shot of the lovely gerber daisies that grace my studio table this morning. I saw them at Whole Foods and, well... I'm a sucker for saturated colors, especially hot pink. They've been brightening my work space for five days now.
And even though I said I wouldn't, here's a shot of the current page in progress...
I figure if the composition is this early on, it's not really giving anything away, right?
While most of my layouts will be one scene spread out across the entire surface landscape-style, this is one of the few pages that will actually be two separate images in one. I used blue painter's tape to create the divide in the middle and was really pleasantly surprised to discover what a clean edge it left. I thought for sure there would be some seepage to clean up (especially since my surface has an element of texture to it) but no! It worked like a charm. The canvas you see below the painting is just there to give me some extra height while working. My easel does raise and lower but not to that degree.
As I mentioned last week, this is still only the second page of approximately 30. I try not to spend a lot of time dwelling on that fact, however, because it can quickly collapse into discouragement and then paralysis. Instead I'm setting short-term goals. I'd like to finish the first five pages and then begin to incorporate other work into my days as well. Hopefully, this will happen sometime in April.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that this may very well be a two or three-year project. But so be it. The nice thing is that there are no deadlines other than the self-imposed kind and the true task is to learn to be gentle on myself during the process. I think that lesson can flow over into most aspects of life, wouldn't you agree?
