It's been going slow with my restarted background painting.  I get somewhere and then I think of where I was before I had to redo it and I just get aggrevated.  I think I need a bit of a break.  So, here's a sky painting from yesterday, and some photos of what I gave as Christmas presents last year.

They're painted using porcelain paints, and cook onto the dishes so you can use them.  Anyways, I'm leaving for holidays tomorrow,  so I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and I'll be back in January!  Merry Christmas!

Have you ever had one of those days where you want to throw your computer out of your window?  For me, today is that day.  The past few weeks, I have been working on a digital background, taking my time because there are a lot of details and it was going really slow, but I was starting to get somewhere.  I was almost half finished. 

Anyways,  last night I got to see the Princess and the Frog and it was absolutely gorgeous! I was just so impressed with everything; the animation, the backgrounds.  Being inspired, I woke up this morning and wanted to get straight to work.  Well when I opened the file my computer froze.  I restarted and decided to get rid of a lot of things, to create space.  After I did that, I reopened my background file, and now it looks like this.

Yep.  File corrupted.  It is now a 300 MB file that has no layers, and looks like various shades of the rainbow.  Definitely not what the painting was.  The even more frustrating part is that when I open the file through Photoshop, it taunts me with a tiny little thumbnail of what my pre corrupted file looks like, but when it finally opens up it looks like this.

Of course, being the brilliant person that I am, I chose not to save different versions.  Yes, I made that stupid decision all on my own.  The smart thing would have been to save multiple versions... In the past I've saved 30 versions of the same background, but I thought, things will be okay this time.  I'll just save it as one file.  No, nothing bad will happen...

It's so aggrevating, and I guess I have to start it over.  So that's what I'm going to do now.  I learned my lesson.

The past few weeks I've been attempting to paint backgrounds, but then I found it difficult, because I thought I needed an idea to do background paintings for.  But I haven't thought of anything so I did some small value thumbnails instead.

Because of course, small tonal thumbnails make it easier to do colour keys, right?  So after the tonal drawings, instead of doing colour keys I just felt like painting. 

The painting didn't go very well (see above)  So I've put it aside unfinished with the hopes of finding some inspiration so I can revisit it... potentially.  The last few days I've been working with pastels.  I apologize for the blurry photos; the colour's not quite right either.

 

It''s hard to believe it's already December! This is going to be a good month, obviously with the holidays, and on the 12th it's Mieka (my dog's) 14th birthday.  It's going to be a bittersweet one.  In March Mieka was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, with only a few months life expectancy.  It's been a miracle how well she's recovered since then.  I really thought she wouldn't be with us at this time, but she is like her old self again.  She's even following me around, up and down the stairs which she hasn't done for a few years.  Anyways, I'm very thankful.

Also, I've decided that I'm going to face my fears and compete next summer with Lance.  We've known each other for 10 years since he was about 4 or 5.  I competed with him back then and we did well, until one show when we were in the ring doing our test, and he decided he didn't want to be there.  So he went ballistic, throwing a temper tantrum, bucking and then flying around out of the ring, jumping over the tiny dressage fences, and I'm pretty sure we would have attempted the 6 foot fence, but at the last minute he realized it was a lot bigger than him.  Since that day, I haven't competed with him because he was too explosive.   He's come a long way since then, and we know each other better now. So hopefully we can get him on the trailer next summer!

And lastly, I've been working on my own paintings with gouache and pastel.  I'll post some maybe next week.  It's going very slowly, and has been frustrating too,  but that's why I love painting.  It's problem solving and you can get mad but there's always a way to fix the problem--even if the solution is throwing it out and moving on!