Woodpecker In Winter

When I needed something to paint, I looked at pictures and decided to paint the first one which appealed to me. This winter, I took some pictures (thanks 60x zoom on the camera) of a little woodpecker tapping holes into my neighbor's tree and one of these pictures caught my attention. It might have been the fact that it was over 90 degrees outside at the time with a miserable level of  humidity in the air.

I drew this one and started the trees last night and finished it this morning. When I stopped last night, I was not pleased at all. In fact, I would have given it a negative 12 on a scale of 1 to 10.  I'm not sure why the negativity dial in my mind was on maximum last night. This morning when I looked at where I had left off, it didn't seem so bad.  Now that I'm done, I can say that it's not going to go down in the record books as one of my favorites, but it was a reasonable attempt.

My takeaway is that I need to work on my self-talk. When I'm in the middle of working on something, I need to change the commentary in my head to something along the lines of "I'm working on this piece. I'm not done. The time to evaluate it is after I'm done and have taken a break".

#243 - Woodpecker In Winter - 8" x 8" - paper