This started out with a picture I found over on Pixabay that seemed like it might be interesting to give a shot. There were a couple of things I tried differently here than than the last painting I did. Namely, I used a proportional divider to and charcoal to lay the image out on the canvas rather than a tracing, and used WMOs again rather than acrylic.

Incidentally, I’m reasonably certain that I don’t like Golden Open acrylics. They seem to get into this “tacky” stage that persists for a very long time and makes it very easy to mistakenly pull up previous layers of paint. I might be able to get used to them and figure out how to use them, but more than likely I’m going to stick with the oils or straight acrylics instead.

Here’s another one that I spent a huge chunk of time on:

This one turned out amazing, but took me a month of painting sessions to finish up! It will likely be a while before I do another stint quite that long on a single piece.  Still, I’m happy with the way it turned out and will hopefully be able to get this one framed pretty soon.

On to writing!

I’ve had The Erasable Man back for nearly a month now and I’m about half way through my re-read after editing. The current plan is to finish this read up and send if off for a second round of beta reads. I might look into a follow up editing via Silvia’s Reading Corner if I have the spare cash by then. We’ll just have to see.

Until next time!

Overall, I think the paints are an interesting alternative to Acrylics. I also have the distinct impression that the small tubes of Berlin paint will go a good deal further than a similar sized acrylic tube. If you decide to play with them, make sure to pick up a bottle of Lukas’ modified water mixable linseed oil to go along with your set. They say that you can use water to thin the paints, which is true, but everything I’ve read seems to indicate that water thinning can be a hit or miss prospect. The modified linseed oil seems to do the trick quite well though!

On to the good part! This painting started I shot by Sandie Bell over on Paint My Photo as a reference. If you’re a photographer or an artist I’d recommend giving the site a chance. They have a large collection of royalty free photos for use as reference material for physical medium artwork (i.e. paint, pencils, pastels, etc. but no digital stuff). You need an account to login and see the reference, but they’re free and I haven’t run into anything overly obnoxious with the site as yet.

The painting itself took me three sessions to complete. My schedule allows for two to three hours in a late evening session during the week. Since the last session was a Friday night, I’ve probably got about eight-ish hours in the painting itself.

1st Night Progress

I did the base drawing by tracing over an enlarged printout of the photo with some carbon paper underneath. That gave me some very light lines to start with that I went over with white charcoal pencil to make them more visible. My tendency to write with an extremely light touch and a dark canvas left them almost invisible otherwise. That first night I had a good handle on the blacks (all chromatic), shoreline, water, and the main boat in the center.

2nd Night Progress

The second night, I finished off five of the other boats and did a little rework of the water and shoreline in the background. This is where I discovered that the Berlin paints become touch dry amazingly fast. From what I’ve been told, I was expecting them to still be pretty “damp” but it turns out they were too dry to work on their own. A little extra medium (modified linseed oil) and paint seemed to do the trick though. As a note, it was only the paints on the canvas that were dry, the stuff on my palette was still pretty workable.

Final Night Progress

And here it is, finished! I had a little trouble with some of the thinner paint globs on my palette being drying this time. Of course, I wasn’t doing anything special to keep them from drying out so that is probably to be expected. Since this was on a stretched canvas rather than a canvas board, I took all the left over paint and mixed up a big glob of “palette mud” and used it as an edge cover.  Unfortunately, no I have to protect the thing for the three months or so it takes for the paint to cure enough to varnish. Which is why I’ll probably be doing acrylics for a while, at least until I can come up with a good strategy for dealing with drying oil paintings.

On other notes, TEM is coming along nicely.  I’ve been working with a beta reader I ran into over on Good Reads doing a manuscript exchange. So far, we’re about half way through both works and well on the way to getting this editing cycle finished. There’s also a scheduled beta read with a professional editor (Silvia’s Reading Corner) that should provide some valuable insights as well. If all of that goes well, then it’s on to figuring out a more formalized publishing strategy. So, still a ways out, making progress!

Then took a shot at the stucco effect, minus the stucco effect medium. Mainly because I didn’t happen to have any on hand.  Well, that got a little away from me though.

That was a few days ago. Tonight I re-added a few of the bricks and went on with the second part of the tutorial. (Temporally it was the first part, but what the hey ;). In the end it came out about like so:

On other topics, the beta read of The Erasable Man is coming along nicely, but slowly. If all goes well, the book will be ready for publishing sometime early next year.

There’s about an hour to two hours a day that I can effectively write, assuming all the stars align properly.  In actuality, that’s broken up between my bus ride into work in the morning and what time I can prune out of my lunch hour. By the evening ride home, my brain isn’t very usable for working on the written word.  But, I’ve discovered something else that is just different enough from writing (words and code) to not add to my exhaustion and still in the creative vein.

About a week ago, my wife pointed out a Painting With A Twist event happening on a weekend and we decided to give it a shot. She’d been to several of these before hand and I hadn’t picked up a paint brush since middle school. That led to this:

#pwatcptx first time behind a brush … pic.twitter.com/S3k7CXGszi

— Christopher Salch (@arlaneenalra) November 13, 2016

Which finally turned into:

It was fun to play around with and got me thinking … Overall, the picture wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t too happy with the polka dot ground. The entire process wasn’t that tricky to pull off either, six colors of paint (if I remember correctly …) two brushes, canvas, an easel, something to use as a palette, and a little time. More or less. So, I blew some money at the local craft store and came up with this:

Yeah, I was even less happy with that one, the water effect didn’t quite work out and I overdid the clouds a bit, but it was a start. Now I had the equipment and decided to play around a bit and spend a little too much time watching Bob Ross on Netflix.

That led to:

And then too:

Where my wife thought the waterfall was a little unnatural looking so I did this:

And last night to:

Which is sort of based on a Bob Ross composition (finally found the channel on YouTube ).  I wouldn’t call any of it particularly good (heck I’ve only been playing for a week!) but it’s interesting to work through and who knows where it will ultimately lead. Plus, it’s pulling me away from less productive forms of procrastination that were eating into my semi-non-productive time anyhow.

Keep your eyes out for the next update.  My current plan is to have TEM ready to go by late December to Early January. Or at least be well done with this draft by then and handing it off to someone else to edit.  We’ll see if I make it!

Home Made Kaiser Rolls

If you’re interested in giving the recipe a try, take a look at Sourdough Home.  I’ve been doing a bit of reading from their site and have my own starter bubbling away (you can see it in the upper left corner there).

Here’s the two big reasons the Bug needed new ones:

The drivers side headlight lost its lens and insulation on the wiring inside both headlights had started cracking apart.  I’d already tried fixing the lens once when it started coming loose several weeks back.  Unfortunately, it popped off somewhere on the road this time and disappeared.  It’s a touch difficult to re-attach something if you don’t have it to reattach!

I ran a few searches and called a place town to see what a replacement would cost.  A Bosch light was going to run me around $200 for one side.  That would have left me with a pair of mismatched lights and not dealt with the crumbling insulation in the other housing.  You can’t see it very well in the picture, but that lens is extremely yellowed and more translucent that transparent.  Definitely not conducive to good night time vision.   Beside, there’s a nasty crack starting around the bottom edge.

Thankfully, I found these guys: http://www.headlightsdepot.com

They had replacement assemblies at $85 a side and $155 a pair.  Much better than the $400 plus I was looking at otherwise.  They’re site isn’t the best in the world, but it does do a good job of letting you find the what you’re looking for.  Where it falls down is letting you track an order after completion.  I received an two emails (if I’m remembering this correctly) from the company, with a different order reference number than the the one their site gave me at the time of the order and two different FedEx tracking numbers.  One of which was for something being sent to Austin!  That’s a good five hours from where my headlights were supposed to be headed.

Needless to say, I was somewhat relieved when the headlights actually arrived!

If you find yourself needing to replace the bulb or full assembly on one of these, take a look at this video:

It’s a touch long, but he does a pretty comprehensive run down of how everything fits together.  The driver side light is a good deal more of a pain than the passenger side one.  Whoever did the layout for this vehicles engine compartment must have been a sadist to put the latch behind the battery box. SHEESH!  Thankfully, this is not something that needs to be done overly frequently.

Now that that’s over with!  Time to get back to writing!

That about sizes up what it feels like when you finally realize that there is no way you are going to be able to finish your National Novel Writing Month project in the time allotted. It’s a conclusion that I came to about a week to two weeks ago now as I’m sure (if I still have the little calendar posted there) can see by all the red on the progress calendar. This will be the second year in a row that I’ve failed at churning out a novel in a month.

Time seems to be the biggest issue. It takes me a good three to four hours to churn out that sixteen hundred words or so which burns the entire evening for me. If that were the only thing I had to do, it would be relatively easy to accomplish. Unfortunately, I have a day job that keeps me occupied and other elements of a reasonably diverse life that burn up the rest of the time. So, I’ve dropped the NaNo deadline and will be working through the project as time permits.

My current plan is to let my brain recuperate from Thanks Giving and the surge of writing the start of the month and pick it up again. The story was going to be set in the Zachary Artemas universe and I’m still planning to work in the plot there. It may wind up being background story for some of the characters that show latter in that story line.

My project this year is a actually taking place in the same universe as the The Erasable Man and will probably turn into a sort of origin story for Zachary Artemas. That is assuming that I can get the characters to agree to play along. I am discovering that the more I write, the less my characters like to do what I want them to. It can get really annoying at times to say the least. Still, you have to be true to who the character is or the story is going to go badly very quickly.

As a side note, I’m going to start some of the character and world notes that go along with The Erasable Man. Early next year I expect to have at least part of The Erasable Man ready for beta reading, if you’re interested, drop me a line here and I’ll get back with you.

Back to the day job and NaNo!

UPDATE: I’m right at six thousand behind right now, but that will probably disappear tomorrow over game night.