I hate this painting. No… I loathe this painting. This painting actually made me mad at it when I was finished last night, because I knew it was ruined as soon as I laid down the first wash in the sky. I kept going likes dummy, hoping it would somehow fix itself.

It didn�t.

I painted so many itty bitty details on this one, and every one of them is just pig lipstick. Effing…

I�ll show you what I mean.

First, I spent forever drawing this out because I wanted people to read this and see how I planned the composition with the time of this and blah blah blah I�m not as smurt as I think I am.

Then I took forever applying masking fluid. I even spent an hour or so with a file, sharpening a tiny piece of metal so I could use it as a stylus to apply super thin lines of masking fluid, and then use the same piece of metal to cap off my fine liner. It worked as a cap – but I�m growing to hate masking fluid.

I keep thinking I can use it correctly this time. Then, I apply it in all the wrong places, and add a billion crisp edges that I need to fix when I�m halfway through the painting because afterI remove the fluid, I don�t want the lines there anymore.

Anyway… this was about three hours of work, and at this point I was still pretending like it was gonna be awesome.

Then this happened:

Seriously, WTF. What was I thinking with that sky?! It�s a disaster! Too dark, super mottled, and ferociously ugly. The yellow ochre at the horizon is a useless mud stain for absolutely no reason. As soon as I painted that yellow ochre, I knew the painting was trash. So, what did I do? I kept painting it, because I�m a MORON.

You know what will make that abomination of a sky look better? FLOOD IT with the most saturated, staining, deep valued motley crew of blues I can mix on my palette.

Ok, enough about the sky. When that was thoroughly destroyed, I proceeded to paint the waterfall. Now keep in mind, this whole illustration is going to rely on a myriad of straight clean lines to render the image I�m trying to shake out of my brain onto STUPID EXPENSIVE PAPER. (Oh! GREAT! I just remembered how expensive the paper is that I used to wipe my ass for twelve hours! Yippee!)

As I was saying, this illustration is supposed to be composed of nice clean lines. So what did I do to paint the waterfall? Ragged dry brush strokes. Huh?! Seriously, was I having a stroke while I painted this thing?

Ok – the heron. Or is it a stork now? What the hell is a stork anyway? The heron started nice, clean, careful lines, and then I slipped and hit my head on something I guess because I just started painting ragged slaps of pigment for the legs. It�s like a schizophrenic painted this stupid thing.

Then I added some of the clean crisp strokes I envisioned originally into the water, and it actually looked good. Which turned out to be a terrible misfortune. Because the water ended up not looking like a dismembered body in a bag of phlegm, I figured I could reassure the rest of the painting if I just took my time.

So I did. I took my time. I grabbed the smallest brush I own, and loaded both stupid hairs with stupid pigment and painted a billion stupid lines.

All those stupid lines made the stork/heron/pickle salesman look moderately acceptable, so I put my head down and spent two hours painting lines in the waterfall.

At this point, I wanted to burn the damn thing, but I had already committed something like ten hours to the painting over three days, so I figured, what the hell, keep going.

Then I used that stupid little brush to paint stupid little lines on those stupid little trees. I even painted an avalanche of bricks for reason on – what is that now, a wall? And once the lines for the stupid bricks were painted, I couldn�t just leave them like that, could I? Oh… NO…. NoOOooOooo! I had to fill in every brick, individually, why? Because shut up, that�s why.

Then, I painted a bunch of rocks under the overhang that make the waterfalls, because – that makes sense. That�s totally how waterfalls work.

Omg.

This stupid thing took me four stupid days to finish (in between working full time, being captain homeschool, and completing what I could on the Honey-Do list). Once it was finished, I tore it off the gator board, and hid it thinking, �maybe it�s not that bad. Maybe I�ll come back to look at it later, and I�ll like it.�

It isn�t that much later yet, but I think the only way �later� is gonna make me appreciate this is if �later� I get dimentia, and forget what good paintings look like.

In short, I spent a really long time making something I hate. And now I know how God felt right before he flooded the dearth to kill every man woman and child on Earth.

And no… I don�t believe the flood was real.