Looking at my latest artwork like:

"Self Portrait in a Green Wig" oil on linen, 12x12 inches When I was younger, my dad would famously say "First comes laughing, then comes crying." But now as an adult, sometimes those feelings come all at once. Without giving away too much - this portrait is about just that. Thank you for looking :-)

In the spirit of this challenge, I wanted to play with bold colors, deliberate marks, distortion of leaning towards the viewer, and these dumb evil glasses that seemed to capture light differently every time I looked back. I used soft pastel on a piece of 9x12 Sennelier la carte paper over two sessions. Bonus photo of sending a goofy WIP photo to my friends. On another, more museful, note: I catch myself reflecting on how it's been four years since I watched Proko's video on how to draw an eye and began taking this journey of teaching myself with the abundance of online resources seriously, moving from lecture doodles to sketchbooks and now finding myself in front of an easel, working up the courage to move into a career in the arts. I've been in a rut for a couple weeks; I've found self portraits a helpful way to clamber out of these in the past. For it to be the subject of this month's challenge felt a sign to push myself to actually finish one, call it a painting, and get over my terror of sharing. I've got my first little local feature over here in Montana coming up in July, some on-faith support from the local frame shop I used to work at, but for the past two months I've started maybe nine paintings and finished none of them. Even here, I see three things I would change, but I have a feeling I would fix those and find nine new things to change in their place. Despite those, and in light of working on that moment of release to call something "done", I'm genuinely thrilled with how this turned out and feel overwhelmed with this hope of a curse being broken and ACTUALLY FINISHING SOMETHING (on time even!!!) WOOOOOOOO oki thats all thanks for seeing me, looking forward to seeing the rest of the submissions and, you know, just being here