My brush hit this canvas for the first time in November 2024. And I’m STILL working on it. On one hand, I’m proud of myself for being able to stay motivated on a single project for this long. I think I’ve broken my record, haha. On the other, I can’t believe it’s taking this long.

This painting is taking longer than any I’ve done yet. It’s probably the most complicated scene I’ve ever tried to paint, with a lot of parts I didn’t know how to do.

While everything I attempt to paint is always a learning process, this one is offering more challenge than anything else so far. I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever feel as if I actually know what I’m doing! I thought it would be hard to stay motivated to finish something that takes so long, but that hasn’t been the challenge.

The challenge has been to not get in a hurry. To let the painting and life itself dictate the timeline. I just don’t get hours of time to work on my art anymore, let alone a full day at a time.

Anyway, in spite of all of that, I like how it’s coming along. In this pic, I’ve been adding shadows to the shed and working on the ground on the left-hand side of the canvas.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to keep you motivated to care whether or not I ever get it finished… but that’s why I make these update posts. Hopefully someone out there will love it an want to hang it on their wall whenever I get it finished. I think, given how long the first half took, that it might be as late as January 2026 before it’s ready to ship out.

Sigh. This is definitely a new feat for me in how to stay motivated.