All four of these are ACEO size. Egret Reflection is on gessoed masonite from painterscorner at eBay. Fluffy Ari and Flying Hawk are on ACEO size canvas boards from sharksyardsale at eBay, and Twisted Tree is on the other sample I got from painterscorner, canvas glued and wrapped around masonite. All three of these surfaces are wonderful for doing little oil paintings, and each has a sheet on the back to fill in title, medium, artist, signature and all the good ACEO/ATC information.

Best of all, I painted these last night and finished Twisted Tree at about ten, just before Lisa left. I set them out in the bathroom to dry, knowing it might take 24 hours according to the product descriptions. Wow. When thinned with loads of odorless thinner, it's even faster. They were all dry to the touch this morning when I got up at about eleven! So I was able to scan them and post them and I'm very happy about that. I love the Alkyds and will be using them a lot.

Flying Hawk is featured on a WIP thread at ACEO Art Cards & Originals eBay Group, where I posted the sketch back on March 2 and took this long to get around to doing any actual painting on it. Very frustrating delay, but other things were happening and other commitments interfered.

I did not manage to keep up my "Writing First" plan yesterday, and don't know if I'll be able to manage it today. But it's still early, it's a quarter to three. I might still do both today, I hope to. It takes effort to push myself to write when I'm feeling rotten. It's especially hard if I have other things I need to do and people are expecting them, they're scheduled, they need to be done. Even though my writing is that high a priority in my life, I've got a responsible streak that'll make commitments push ahead of it till I clear the deck and give myself time for my stuff.

This has its up side, when writing is accepted I'll push that to the front of the queue over anything else.

Hey, I did it... counting editing, that is. I gave a thorough line edit to a piece kkitten42 sent me, and that counts as writing. So I did do writing first today. It's okay to do more writing, but I don't need to beat myself if I spend the rest of the daylight doing the images for ACEO Magazine and getting those in on time. I need to get my album set up against a nice background with enough light to get a good photo of it, both closed and open, and then do an example of burnishing and creating light effects. Maybe a still life in colored pencils would be good, it could lead to another ACEO in colored pencils and that'd be fun.

Then maybe do an eHow later, if I still feel like it. But I'm feeling drug out and the photo shoot will take some physical activity, so if the rest of what I do is curl up and read, that's all right too. I should not push so hard on this that I wind up going beyond what my body can manage, or I'll hit the boom and bust cycle hard. Trying for it is a good way to hold my priorities. But if I don't make it every day then I'll have an accurate view of my current health limits and adjust accordingly. The information is what's valuable.