The Mouse Market

I’ve been working on a painting project on the weekends, and wouldn’t you know, there was a handy life lesson hiding in plain sight…

First, the project: I’m painting a Little Free Library for our front yard, and me being me, I had to make everything as complicated as humanly possible. 🫠

The goal? Transform the library into Wonderland.

My initial plan was to draw the design onto paper, then use transfer sheets to easily get it from paper to wood before painting.

But what actually happened was a big ol’ pain in the butt.

My first mistake was choosing gift wrap—specifically the backside with the ready made grid—for my paper. I thought having the grid would make sketching the design easier, so I cut out pieces in the exact size as the library panels and got to work.

Problem was, as soon as I erased a line, the already slick gift wrap only became more slick and seriously un-fun to draw on.

So did I regroup? Nope. I just kept going! I can get awfully stuck on a particular method, simply because I’ve decided This Is the Way, even if all evidence is pointing to the contrary. 🧐

Another personal tell that all is not well? I start procrastinating like nobody’s business. I’ve learned this with my romance writing, too. If I’m avoiding the page, 99.9% of the time it’s because I’m unclear on what I’m doing—maybe a scene goal is muddy or I haven’t figured out how to fix a character’s arc.

Until I outline how I’m going to address the issue, my brain comes up with all kinds of reasons to do something—anything—else. (Hey, I know! Let’s scrub the shower grout with a toothbrush! 🪥)

Then I made another mistake

I decided to test out the transfer paper before I got too far into the design, and good thing, too, because it totally didn’t work.

The smooth finish of the wood resulted in exactly none of the design transferring. Yippee! ☹️

This left only one option: drawing directly onto the wood, and I had to redo one entire section of the design that I’d already drawn on the gift wrap.

Only this time…it was amazing!! The feel of pencil on wood was sublime 🤤 it wasn’t nearly as hard to draw without the grid as I’d feared, and I went from loathing the project to loving it.

It’s a little hard to see against the wood grain, but here’s the first side panel:

Welcome to Wonderland

And here’s the opposite side panel with the Cheshire cat, the shovel bird, and those little horn ducks.

This is the back panel with umbrella vultures splashing at the base of a waterfall, the accordion owl, broom dog, and the drum and cymbal frogs.

I’ve only done a bit of the painting so far, but here’s the Cheshire cat’s tree!

I’ll be painting in all the background details first, then I’ll tackle the characters.

Lesson learned! If a process is sucking, big time, STOP. Reassess. Don’t just plow through, hoping it’ll get better.

Said another way: Just because you thought/hoped/wished something would work doesn’t mean it will. And carrying on, insisting that reality conform to your rules…Good luck with that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A slice of pie before we go

Speaking of not making our creative projects harder than they need to be…

If you want a cute, satisfying project you can finish in under an hour, my new chocolate cream pie tutorial is just the ticket.

It’s a full-color PDF tutorial showing you how to sculpt a looks-good-enough-to-eat dollhouse pie from polymer clay, plus a tiny pie tin to go with it.

make a tiny pie!