Stocking Up

I have unreasonable hopes that I'll keep selling four books a time at the Military Ave. Market so I ordered 10 more copies of each book so I'll have enough. They came today. And also today I ordered stickers that say "Autographed Copy" to put on them. The stickers will come on Friday. That makes them more valuable, right?

It was another sunny day but today the temperature got up to 21 degrees. Heat wave! Instead of my usual backyard photo I thought I'll treat you to the view of the house across the street since that's what I see out my living room window.

Today's Daily Practice painting was the only painting I did today. It's three flowers and I love the way they turned out. At first I thought that the Ranunculus in the upper left wasn't so great but I left the sketchbook open all day so it would dry completely and now I like it too. My favorite is the Sunflower but the Tulip's leaves are nice. I sorted out a bunch of tubes of watercolor paint that I think are a very low grade, lower than student grade, and put them in the Goodwill box. I wish there was a way to clean the paint out of some of the wells in one of my palettes but I don't know any way aside from just painting all the paint out so I confess that I ordered yet another palette which I am going to be very discerning putting paint into.

I came to the last picture in 10-Steps: Nature today. It's pebbles and they were surprisingly fun to draw. Now I have to decide whether to crack open 10-Steps: Flowers or 10-Steps: Animals. I'm leaning toward the animals one but the same artist did the flowers book and the nature book and I seem to have luck following her directions. I don't know what to choose. I'll pick one. Maybe I'll draw the first figure in each one and decide that way.

There are two evening bunnies! One bunny showed up around 5 o'clock and then when I was eating supper about twenty minutes later I saw movement and another bunny showed up. The second bunny didn't stay long and didn't make it any closer to the first bunny. Maybe they're not friends.

I joined the Wisconsin Writers' Association today. They have online critique groups and writing contests and send information about writing stuff. I want to get it first hand instead of hearing about it too late to do anything about. Right now I have information about 2 essay contests and 1 novel competition. I think I'm going to pass on the novel competition as the entry fee is $75 and they ask for 2 copies of the book. I have a funny essay that's short but I think it's good. I'm considering entering it in one of the contests as the entry fee is $22, that I think might be worth the risk. This authoring thing is work!

--Barbara