Moss Whispers

As night skies darken, stars come out and fog thickens. Dawn is waiting for it’s time to highlight the magical breaking of a new day! Learning to paint all these different moments in our daily and nightly lives is very humbling…humbling that we have the opportunity to participate in all these changes of light and darkness and mist and fog every day of our lives if we just participate and behold the displays of nature as they happen. Paintings can’t do justice to the awe of it all! 

Mist and fog are setting in during the Twigs’ time down on the earth. Took me two days of studying misty fog and adding night time to come up with this painting. The text still may get tweaked later. The darker it gets, the more difficult to use colors…we’ll see, or maybe we won’t see what happens as it gets deeper and deeper into the night! For now, there’s a glimmer of moon or starlight somewhere glowing through as the mist begins to settle in. I probably have more different images of this fog than any other setting in the story!

Been spending a lot of time and thought on the text to this story, tweak, tweak, tweak the twig story! And I’m sure I’ll tweak some more! For now the text is as it is in its evolutionary stage… Tried some different watercolor paper I had. Much better quality paper. Lots of adjustments for me because it seems to take the color and the water differently. And seems to dry out faster so I have to work faster before the colors set! Something about the log seems still a little ‘flat’ but I loved experimenting with the colors! And added some more lichens (cladonia crystatella, I think). These little guys are on the sidelines to cheer on Big and Little Twigs’ sidekicks. (is THAT where that apostrophe goes?) Guess it would be nice to have an editor besides ME!  Not sure how the perspectives from the page before match up if this and the previous page were to become a double page spread.  Anyway, the plot thickens, as will the darkness!

Perhaps I’m getting tired along with these Twig Guys as they run fast to get away from ‘the Being’! Or perhaps I’m tired of tweaking this text and not being satisfied with the complete story. Or perhaps I’m just ‘tired’ and am wising up to my non-nurturing habits of staying up wee hours until I can get my page of the day to come round right! Truth is that some pages just take longer, and after spending my energies on a page, I find little left to go through posting logistics.                                         Big Twig and Little Twig seem to be almost over this hurdle with ‘the Being’ if they can just ‘move on’ to finding Lacey Leaf!

I remember days of writing term papers in college and how hard I tried to discipline myself. I became very disciplined at washing clothes, sorting through papers, and cleaning up! Often I would ‘fuss at myself’ for not being disciplined and stifle my creativity even more! And as a teacher, I would end up with a clean classroom, way before I would finish my reports or evaluations. And then there was the teaching year I decided that parents would much rather have drawings of their children than pages of written evaluations! And now…today I found many ‘disciplines’ to exercise as the twig characters in my growing book, get frozen on their page along with words that I can’t seem to find for their next crisis.

Today, my ‘discipline’ was weeding! I weeded til my fingernails grew dirt and with courage and zeal to dug deeply into the dirt with no age old fears of snakes. The flowerbeds are nearly as immaculate as the next empty pages of this book! Yet what I’m learning is that this also is part of my process…sifting through ideas, weeding out ones that won’t work, and clearing away all the extraneous clutter in my mind that’s between me and the result I’m wanting to create. So ‘no fussing’ at myself this time. I’m trusting the twigs to show me next moments in their twilight adventures. And I’m trusting that they will make it back into their wise old tree before dawn. So as the weeds pulled easily from the wet dirt, and the rains soaked me and the dirt, I’m trusting that we are reaching the saturation point and that tomorrow will be a new day… for scattering seeds onto the fresh moist dirt, and sprouting healthy ideas for the fresh pages before me! Sleep well!

So now I’ve added the texts to this ‘double page spread’. Somehow it doesn’t fit and I think it’s quite redundant. For now, I think I’ll continue with the story and see how things unfold. For sure, I know I’ll either end up changing the illustrations or the text, or perhaps both! agggh! I think something will naturally ‘self correct’ but if not, I’ll tweak again and again until it comes round right. I’m also not sure how this will post, since it will probably post as the same size and a single page. So much to learn!

I’ve been experimenting for the last two days with both expanding my text and doing a double page illustration. Not sure yet how I want to incorporate the text yet, so I’m just posting the pictures for now.  Hmmm…I guess I’ll need to do a double photo shot to it to post as one here, and then do single photos to have on my computer rough copy. Sometimes, I think making it all by ‘hand’ would be easier. So I’ll experiment with how to add the text with it for tomorrow. Another late night! Big day of gardening, brick-laying, and cleaning house!…a lot for my little numbing hands. And now that I’ve posted it, I think I want to adjust the painting some more!