This week, a Facebook friend nominated me for the “Post seven black and white photos about your life” challenge. Christine, I’m sorry to turn you now, but I’m afraid I’m at max right now!

Stealth projects continue apace. I spent my painting time this weekend prepping for next weekend’s seminar by the estimable Bev Jozwiak. I’ve wanted to take a workshop from her for a while, but I never seem to get my act together. Then, a few weeks ago, she posted that her weekend workshop in Portland had a cancellation and I took a chance, got on the wait list, and actually got in.

The directions to the workshop say:

Bring photos to paint from (Come with drawings done, as I like to dive right in, and focus on painting!) Everything from people (I don’t consider myself a portrait painter, besides faces, think about the figure from the back, and slight profiles too) birds and animals. Feel free to paint flowers, still lives, or whatever you love. I can help. The lessons will be more about design, clean color, color mixing, values, lost and found edges, etc., than it will be about painting an exact subject so feel free to paint your passion.

It goes on to suggest bringing 4-6 starts, depending on how fast you paint. As I am a fast painter, I’m going to try for six and see what happens.

Bev provided one subject:

And I’m prepping the following photos.

That’s a total of five, and I may add another.

In addition to all this, I have taken on another challenge. This week I started the National Novel Writing Month Challenge (NaNoWriMo).

For those that don’t know the idea is to write 1667 words per day so that the end of the month you have a 50,000 word novel completed. The idea is NOT to write well or even coherently so much as it as to get people out the starting box and into the finisher category.

When I was in high school, I was obsessed with romance novels and wrote three complete novels (I don’t remember the word count.) But college, then life happened. I’ve started various stories over the years, but they have all gotten stuck on about chapter 3.

I’m taking this challenge for a variety of reasons that I actually don’t want to talk about right now. Let’s just say that while the timing could be better, sometimes you just have to act.

Wish me luck!

I should have some paintings to show you next week.