Procrastination Cessation

100 Day Project Day 7

I wholly recommend naming your procrastination publicly on a daily basis, as I finally broke through and opened a tube of oil paint today. I tried all the excuses have been running in my head for the past however long it is, things like “oh it’s too late in the day (11am) to start with oils”, or “I won’t be able to mix the same colours as last time”, or, and I kid you not, “there’s too much daylight”.

I had some words with myself.

Then I persuaded myself that I only needed to squeeze out a wee bit of my darkest dark, and just do a wee bit of work on the shadows. It worked, and before I knew it I was lurching between full-on immersion in the process, and deep anxiety over doing it wrong, but in the end I got to a place where I am hapy to leave it until the morning to decide if it is finished. I feel like there’s more to be done, but I will know better tomorrow.

This is my second response to a portrait class I am participating in, and I am really enjoying the way my focus on realism in portraits is playing into my messier, more abstract work.

Oil painting aside, I acquired a new sketchbook, which is just unecessary given how many empty and half-filled books I have lying around. It’s just a wee one tho, and it was accidentally smaller than the one I meant to order, so I confess I felt compelled to order the correct size. If you want to know whether I sent the wee one back, well let’s just say it already has seven pages of figure and portrait sketches in cheap black fineliner, making it impossible to return.

Fit a shame, oops.

Til the morn,

Suzanne