losing the will to live

Sorry to have disappeared for a while but the dots are killing me.

Death by dots- I could be the first.

My back hurts

My neck hurts

My feet are swollen from sitting in the same position for 800 hours

My thumb hurts from tweezer stress

I have not left the house except to go to Uni or to go to work every other Saturday in three months. I’m starting to fall apart, and I look like a wild woman who has forgotten about civilization.

If I had just thought of this idea a few months earlier I wouldn’t be going through this now Agh!!!

I’ll just post a few photos of what I’ve been doing and get back to you when I feel like a human again.

This bit I am doing now is really hard steps, people, dogs, it requires a lot of concentration this is the time where I am losing the will to live!

these two pictures have atken ten days and are not even finished, there is so much going on in this area it is really difficult.

Dotology

Over the past four days I have been sticking grass and bushes, and arranging full sheets onto the canvass. It is definitely quicker doing big sections rather than the smaller ones I was doing earlier. I just wish I had done this from the beginning because what I was taking up my time is definitely joining them on the canvass and the less edges I have the better. The problem is now that I have loads of the beginning edges still not sorted and that is taking ages, so I am doing an hour a day to sort them out.

Another thing I have learnt is that as soon as an area is sorted to varnish it straight away. I did not do this at the beginning and the bits I did seven weeks ago are finally starting to fall off in mass amounts, so now as I do a section I varnish it. Again I will have to go back and sort out the beginning sections as they have holes where dots have jumped off and tried to escape. Again I am doing a little bit at a time to fix this and will not be making these mistakes again. Very time costly! You can see the bits I have varnished and not yet varnished because the colour becomes slightly richer when varnished. I knew this would happen before I varnished as I did a sample back in February and compensated for that when I started choosing the colours.

I wish I had thought of this method years ago then I could have perfected it before I started this piece. But I didn’t so I will just have to learn as I go. The fact I haven’t done a big piece before maybe should have put me off doing this, but that would have been a shame, I’ll just have to do more when I finish this one so I can perfect one!
Yes I did really say that!

The thing that is bothering me is that I don’t feel that some areas are perfect. I have become addicted to sticking the dots and the fact the beginning areas are not perfect is annoying me. I want to fix them now, but I can’t spend the time on them now or I won’t finish anywhere near in time. But sitting looking at them is annoying me.

Fort instance one of the black sheets I have joined, one of the first ones I did, I did as a single sheet. Now I can’t get it to blend in with the surrounding black sheets. It has only happened on the really dark areas which I did early on, and hadn’t learnt to leave paper and gaps between the sheets, so the joins are raised and are really visible in this area. (See previous Blog – Catch up time) I will sort this out over the next few weeks, I need to think.

I really like the colours on the bit of bush I am doing at the moment. I have got better at mixing the colours which again makes me want to go back and change the first bits. But I can’t so I have to be careful not to get so good that it ends up looking like different styles. Although I did do the easier bits at the start for that reason.

I think the past two weeks I have done the same amount I did in the first five. But it is a "learn as you go" situation. I will be a “Dotology” specialist at the end of this!

Victor

Ages ago I named my hole punch Victor. Me and him have become very close over the past few months, and he has started to sound poorly, and that makes me sad. I really hope he makes it to the end of the picture so I can retire him. Feeling sad that victor has a bad coughing noise going on I decided to give him a face.

Maybe I am going mad!

Face off

I spent Sunday mainly doing grass, as a break from sitting at the canvas touching up areas. Monday since I didn’t go to bed from Sunday afternoon till eleven a.m Monday morning I had a long sleep and got up around five p.m. I decided it was time to attack the tidying up of the bits on the canvas, my back had recovered a little, and there is a lot to do over there. There won’t be as much in the future as I have learnt to do as much as possible not vertically now, as it takes three times as long because it is harder to stick the dots and one in three ends up on the floor.

I attacked the man on the left’s face and hands, I had been leaving this part until I was a little more confident about what I was doing since it is a focal point on the picture. After over 600 hours on this thing already I felt it was time to try. I am quite happy with the result but am not sure if the face isn’t too pale. On the canvas it appears lighter than on the photograph below.