So here I am having successfully completed the 2023 April Blogging from A-Z Challenge – yay!
I think this is the eighth time I’ve taken part in the A-Z Challenge, and over the years I’ve done a learning-about-photography A-Z, a couple of London A-Zs (one local, and one more extended, both completed when we lived there), a colouring-in A-Z, an Inverness A-Z (when we first moved here), a Covid A-Z , an all-about-me A-Z, and now this year my learning-about-painting A-Z. Phew! Maybe next year I’ll just totally wing it and do an off-the-cuff whatever-word-I-want-to-write-about-today A-Z…
Thankfully this year all 26 letters have been posted on time with both text and a relevant image to illustrate my progress (or lack thereof) in my ongoing quest to learn how to paint with acrylics, gouache, and watercolours.
I’d only decided for sure to participate quite late on in March, and at that point I tentatively decided on what topics to write from A-Z, but that left me with 26 images to create to go with each topic. It seemed a reasonable enough task to complete in a month, but I hadn’t really accounted for the real-time requirement to first create the art to be photographed for each letter – duh! Still, I managed to share 19 new paintings over the month, which felt great…
It felt quite helpful to have to focus so intently on painting for a few weeks, and one very pleasing outcome is that I seem to have got over my initial hesitation in just putting something down on the paper, making a mark and taking it forward from there.
Inevitably not everything I painted in April was shared – one or two disasters even ended up either in the bin (paper) or painted over again (canvas) – but overall it’s felt like a reasonably successful endeavour from a creative point of view as well as from the perspective of blogging.
When it came to checking out other A-Z participants, many bloggers I follow were already taking part, either officially or unofficially, so that part was easy. Otherwise I started off diligently checking out other blogs on the master list, and have even found a few new bloggers to follow, which is always lovely.
Although to be honest not every category listed interests me, so once I’d checked out those blogs that interested me most, by a couple of weeks in to the month I simply found I’d stopped looking. There’s only so much time I’m prepared to dedicate to blogging, and I also still had my regular (non-A-Z-participating) bloggers to read/ view, too, so needs must…
As always I’ve really enjoyed the experience, and I must admit I’m already looking forward to next year…! 🙂