DAY TWENTY-ONE

I hope, if you’re following along, that you’re seeing a pattern emerge here. Not every day requires a massive act of chaos or a dramatic breakthrough. Some days, the deepest, most powerful work is quiet, and I’ve slipped easily and without any kind of fanfare into treating the process as a devotional, where the small, focused effort you offer becomes energy you extend to yourself.

Today that tending focused on a micro-adjustment that changed everything.

I came to the page with the intention of honoring all I’ve learned so far. This meant focusing on the area around the “adorn the flaw” leaves we worked on yesterday. I used the iridescent fine gold, not just to highlight, but to push back the old line of her eyebrow, allowing the leaves to replace it. This is a powerful act: letting a new, organic form replace an old, rigid boundary. Who knew our paintings could become our life coaches, eh? WELL NOW WE KNOW.

I want to thank Deborah Rymer for emailing me to point out that if I did that, the “flaw” would disappear, and she was right! Which reminds me to tell you: If you see something in the painting that you think might shift things or improve things, you are MOST WELCOME to email me! I won’t take every suggestion, but I will consider them!

Okay, back to the process.

I added grounding and depth with Dark Sepia shading around the leaves and the eyes.

But the central, most potent action was this: I shifted the gaze. 

I lowered the iris and ensured that it filled the area, so there was no more white of the eye showing. This tiny, focused effort took the figure’s gaze from slightly upward and away, which made her look a bit avoidant and distracted, and to my eyes, slightly annoyed, to looking more present and compassionate. This shifted her from seeming to seek elsewhere to communing here.

The gold gel pen I added to embellish the eye wasn’t a fix. It was a little offering, like a silent “thank you for showing up”.

The lesson for all of us, I think, is this: The quality of our attention is the quality of our devotion. Sometimes, a tiny, careful adjustment—a single, quiet act of tending—is all it takes to bring us from distraction into full presence.

Where in your life or your art can you apply this little shift? What small detail are you ready to adjust to shift your focus from avoiding what is hard to fully engaging with what is here?

That quiet, focused effort is energy offered as love.

See you tomorrow,
xo
Effy

P.S. I know y’all are going to see the em-dashes in my writing and say AH HA! She uses AI! And you’re correct, but not for writing. I was delighted to discover the proper shortcut for em-dashes since all these years I’ve been using a dash instead, and I’ve adopted the use of the proper em-dash because GRAMMAR! *Giggles* In case you want to know, it’s option+shift+- on a Mac.

P.S. Again: Folks who are in my classes over on Into The Wild (my teaching network) or Patreon are getting video content every day throughout the course of this challenge. Folks who are subscribed to my YouTube channel will be getting video updates weekly or so. There may be stuff going up on TikTok. There will definitely be posts going up on Instagram.

Of course, this spot right here will ALSO serve as my studio diary, so I hope you’ll bookmark the site, and hey! EVEN BETTER! I hope you’ll sign up for the e-list, which I’ll use to let you know when a new post goes live. If you want the project PDF, here you go!