After publishing my post, Be Gentle, I played around with my illustration a little more and came to like this sketched version better than the original. Maybe it’s a more accurate depiction of “gentleness” because of the softening of the colors.
I hesitated to share it because you’ve already seen the original, so it seemed kind of redundant, but then I got to thinking about how relevant revisions (tongue twister there) are to life. I mean, we’re always editing and revising ourselves in one way or another.
My son shared something with me the other night, from Robin Sharma’s book, The Monk who Sold his Ferrari, and it reminded me not only of how people are always working to improve themselves, but of how valuable those changes can be:
One night a father was relaxing with a newspaper in hand after a long day in the office. His son, who wanted to play, kept on pestering him. Finally, fed up, the father ripped out a picture of the world globe that filled a whole page in the paper and tore it in many pieces. “Here son, go ahead and try to put this back together,” he said, hoping this would keep the little boy busy long enough for him to finish reading the paper.
To his amazement, his son returned after only one minute with the globe perfectly reassembled. When the startled father asked how he achieved this feat, the child smiled gently and replied, ”Dad, on the other side of the globe there was a picture of a person, and once I got the person together, the world was okay.”
Another great analogy! It took me back to the start of my (real) recovery, when I came to understand that other people’s attitudes and behavior was not mine to change—but that I had the power to change everything about how I responded to it.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Rumi
My pondering also made me realize that the revisions I do to my images and illustrations are important as well, and definitely worth sharing. Nothing is ever really finished, as there is always room for change and improvement.
I think it would be interesting to take one image and revise it several times over the course of a year—just to compare the changes from the first to the last. I might just add that to my list of targets. We’ll see.
Anyway, I think that sums up my thoughts on revisions for tonight.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed!
Whether it’s art imitating life, or life imitating art… it’s all a work in progress.
Janet
A Little Note. My post title here is a little inside joke. When I worked in real estate, I was often involved in the advertising of homes for sale and we had to come up with headings for all of the properties. One of the most frequently used titles was less than imaginative and often totally irrelevant:
Location, Location, Location!
I don’t know. I thought it was amusing to follow the ‘repeat it three times’ rule. Maybe it’s another one of those ‘after midnight’ things creeping up on me again.
Until later,
Peace & Love!!
A Sprinkle of Faith 