Painting foresty things, and some blendering!

 It's still hard to believe how nice and peaceful life is, for the past two years. Can experience ever be taught? Can I save someone else decades of unhappiness by saying 'you don't actually have mental issues; maybe your parent is toxic and you live in daily fear, get therapy to help you cut them off and you will find out you're actually sane, and a rather optimistic, happy person'?

It's not the romantic love. I had three very good, sweet and fulfilling loves in my life (the two marriages, and the one non-sex-but-absolutely-romantic love with a woman, in 2020-2024) - and each made life infinitely better, but never removed the cause. The cause was dad. 

I never thought the death of someone I love would be what made me feel free and happy. I never thought the parents I loved, who loved me, were also the direct and daily maintenance of my depression. That's so weird. 

Life is very nice now. 

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It's another thing to understand, too - they were toxic to me, and I was just as toxic to others. To many people around me; until I got the right therapy in 2016. Many apologies have been said since, and some friendships were saved. I wish I hadn't been that kind of person. 

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This is becoming such a maudlin entry, and it was unplanned. I actually picked up the diary to write that I'm still painting nonstop, even though I stopped posting in social media because... well, I forgot. I think it might be because it's more fun to spend the time painting than posting. And my art is crap, it's crap in a bucket, but I don't care. It's the process that I enjoy, and the feeling of my brain exercising. I enjoy the mental effort, even if it's very different, and more subtle, to what I felt when I did 3D art.

This month I binged Painting the Secrets of the Forest with Watercolors by @jenny_illustrations, whose art is wonderful and instructions are lacking. It was a frustrating experience, but the art is so beautiful that I couldn't put it down. The issue is, of course, that while I'm learning a ton from painting all the book's tutorials, it's not really my art. I can't take credit for it, so posting it in the regular social media feels like dishonesty, so I don't. This being my diary, with its grand total of one reader, and after this disclaimer, I  feel it's okay to show a bit ‐ so here's some of it:

 

 

  

 

Gorgeous designs, aren't they? I wish I could come up with such beautiful story pieces of my own. And I've no idea how to get there. It was all much easier when I was drawing roleplaying stuff from all the D&D campaigns, but I'm not good enough an artist; accurate stuff like characters or items isn't easy for me to paint, and when I do, it's hardly ever good enough in my opinion. So no characters, no items, no accurate stuff - which means I have no idea what I want to paint. It's like I don't have an inner world. How odd to think that, after all those years of thinking I was imaginative.

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Yesterday a friend asked for a Blender commission. I don't take them nowadays; I'm way too obsessed with watercolor to have time for Blender. But it's a friend, and it's a wedding surprise for his soon to be spouse, and I like them both a lot, so I want to make the picture; not as a favour to them, but rather because I'm honored he wants me to make something this meaningful. 

So today I'm doing something unusual - I'm blendering! And (a) it's like riding a bike, but (b) the bike is hella rusty and I'm trudging my way through it like a soaked fluffy dog in a swamp. Somewhere in the back of my mind this slowness is frustrating - it always has been - but this is the first time I can recall where I'm on Ritalin while I blender, and the medicine dulls the frustration - it's as if yes, it's annoying, but the annoyance is over there. It's not actually inside me. 

I shouldn't be on Ritalin (plus caffeine and a Red Bull, which I drank as well, as if I was a nutty teenager) at midnight, but I'm enjoying the blendering while alone in the house so much that sleep will wait. I've spent the past 15 years oversleeping, so being wakeful and productive is a pleasure I learnt to be very grateful for.

(The sleep lab actually discovered I have a super common thing called sleep apnea which might be the cause for the chronic tiredness, and there's simple stuff that can be done about that, which is awesome and I'll do it soon, and goodness, modern medicine is awesome.)

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There's more I wanted to write about, mainly about having made myself an online gallery for watercolor art - it's belvane.art, can you believe it? Who'd have thank it was available? And the point isn't that I have a gallery, but how it was made; this post, however, is a bit too long as it is - and Blender is calling. I'll gush about making the site another day. 

It's nice to Blender again. I wish I had time for all the things I'm excited about doing. And it's really nice to be excited about stuff, and have the peace of mind to be able to indulge in it all.