Leaf-Olympics: Day 5--Slow, Patient, Happy

Another big batch of small leaves were hand-painted and applied to the tree again today. To cheat the perspective, I concentrated the smaller leaves in the upper branches. The over all tree looks too uniform and is crying out for a larger variety of leaf sizes to look more natural. I will add them to the lower branches (as shown on the lower right hand sample branches) to slightly trick the eye into thinking the tree is more grand in height.

I did a quick count of what a batch size is and came up with approximately 300 leaves per, seen above lower right. Seems as though it should be faster to accomplish painting these, considering I am just roughing in the paint for cinematic effect.

It seems to take me about 8 hours to paint and apply each batch of 300 leaves. I use an olive green brush tip-marker to streak on a clumsy vein shadow on each leaf. I'm getting more familiar with how to make the leaves grow on the branches. Can leaves look jaunty? These are starting to look happy to me!

Things are starting to look up. Now we're getting somewhere! (Somebody say montage of the growing progress? I'm all over it.)

I can call adding the hand-painted leaves to Halfland's Answer Tree a bit of a "burning" passion these days. The only way I can position the clusters at the right growing angles is to pinch the blob of hot-glue with the stem held in position. Normally it is merely, au, warm but about a dozen times it was downright painful, with wincing. But hold on I did. (TOOL TIP: If one were buying tools to make a such a thing, I read about a cold heat glue-gun that might, if the glue works at a lower temp, save the feeling in fingertips. It's cordless too, a plus for getting into tight branch spots.)

I am so into adding these leaves, I can't get enough of doing it. There was that "Moment" again while working today where I felt as nature must feel when she makes a tree; slow, patient, happy.

Daisy Chaining

I came across these items bloggy jumping today. One is a brief article about a productivity secret from Jerry Seinfeld called a Motivation Chain, check it out! "...It works because it isn't the one-shot pushes that get us where we want to go, it is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes. You may have heard "inch by inch anything's a cinch." Inch by inch does work if you can move an inch every day." (via Not Martha)

The other great item was in the comments at LifeHacker, a link to Loopdo a little Motivation Chain tool that a bright fellow named Ben, living in Beijing (!), made to support those that want to try the technique and get clear community support to boot!

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard