And that's why I didn't post yesterday's art. I was way too busy DOING yesterday's art, trying to do more than one ACEO themed on "My Favorite Book." All the Theme Week entries have a starting bid of $4.99 to even up the contest (so that you don't get someone starting theirs at 99 cents) and no one's allowed to use extras to make their entry stand out, like bolding the entry and other display alternatives eBay sells, other than Gallery. Which I always use and so do most of my friends at eBay. Theme Week is from ACEO Art Cards Editions & Originals, which is the group I spend more time at because I'm a moderator in it now. But I can participate in Theme Week because two awards are by voting and the other is by voting by your dollar -- most bids on one. I think the artist who did Poe's "The Raven" is going to win that one.



ACEO Rose Dark Tower is from the third book of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The boy Jake finds a magical rose in a vacant lot in New York, it's in two worlds simultaneously and is surrounded by purple grass -- in his Earth it's been splashed with purple paint, in the Rose's world it really is purple grass. I gave it green leaves since it's not a purple-leaf rose. Quote is in the listing.



ACEO Zoltan Raven is from the first book of the same series, The Gunslinger, where Roland meets Mr. Brown, a Dweller on the edge of the desert, who has waist length strawberry blond hair, blue eyes and a foul-mouthed pet raven named Zoltan. I quoted one of Zoltan's lines in the listing.

Last, and one that took me as long as the rest, was this:



ACEO Raptor Red Sunset is from Raptor Red by Robert Bakker. One of my favorites and the only one that could really be called Romance -- it has a happy ending and a romantic plotline, though it's a nature novel set in the Upper Cretaceous and has no human characters except the dinosaur hunters in the prologue and epilogue. It's a wonderful, immersive book and I wish I could write a nature novel that well someday. I might try for my next Three Day Novel, and set it in Canada.

So that's what I was doing all day long yesterday, that and opening my Blick packages and getting some ACEO blanks posted, catching up with things on eBay... and making up for a disastrous lapse of memory. I told a young friend on DeviantART that I'd be the technical reader for her school paper, read her paper, it was wonderful. But I didn't send in the evaluation, while we corresponded about it I wound up reading it and thinking about it and planning what to write and it slipped my mind to actually write it up. It went into the fog and she got an F for the class. I sent it in yesterday after finding out I hadn't sent it in, horrified at what I'd done, and stressed to the teacher that it was not HER fault that it hadn't been sent in. That there was nothing she could do to make it happen if I didn't do it on time and it wasn't fair to penalize her for something someone else failed to do. I hope this gets her grade restored and that the paper gets an A+ as it deserves.

It was simultaneously content-packed and academically perfect and completely readable, easy to understand even for a layman. She used plenty of technical terms and defined them all in an easy flowing style that made it a joy to read. So she deserved an A and got an F thanks to my memory, that racked me up yesterday, I got some bad fog and hope I did the evaluation itself well enough. On top of it what they wanted me to do was as contradictory as it could get, fill out a questionnaire but also write my impressions of it while reading in line by line continuous format... couldn't do both, did the questionnaire after reading. I don't think in those terms let alone write in those terms, I guess a professor could have written out the questionnaire while reading and written it out spontaneously and consecutively while bouncing all over the place. Either I would've done the continuous-read reactions or the questionnaire, I couldn't do both. But then I'm not the one getting the grade and I really stressed that in the email that went with it. I'm not the one that has to master academic writing. I'm the one way outside colleges and academia out in the real world collecting and doing art.

So after I finished, the fibro reaction really got to me, so I cheered myself up working on the Raptor Red ACEO. I still had time before midnight and lost myself in colors with that. I worked on watercolor paper with 12 colors of vintage Eberhard Faber Mongol "Paint with Pencils" watercolor pencils. And found my memory was right. Those suckers are hard when dry! Really, really hard! I did some of the clouds by dipping the point, others I did a tonal layer and washed over them, fooled with it and eventually used a little orange from my Sakura set to brighten the orange areas so it'd scan well. Then went in with Pigma Microns for the silhouettes of the spooning dinosaurs. Artistic license with the eroded rocks they're perched on, there were rocks on the beach in the description.

And that was yesterday, a day packed solid with activity. I even started the day with a bath, which makes it doubly amazing I managed to do anything at all since usually after a bath I am wiped out and might as well go to sleep for a few hours. Instead I sat still, and after an hour of rest started doing the Theme Week artworks.

She did say that if I sent it in right away her grade would get changed, so it wasn't a permanent F and I was able to amend what I did. Gods. That is a nightmare not being able to do what I said I would, I dread it in everything I do, but when it's for someone else that hurts the worst.