This is done...

...the same as yesterday and the day before. But the container to hold the paint is much much smaller. But it is the top of a glue stick.

My earlier paintings were taking a long time to dry because I was using quite a bit of paint. So today I was experimenting with less paint, in fact just about a thimble full of the mixed coloured paint for the 20 cm by 20 cm canvas.

I noticed my earlier paintings with the WD-40 have cracked somewhat once they have dried. I thought initially this might be because I used too much WD 40 so I have used far less and I will see how this will dry.

I did have a couple of other experiments planned with baby oil and linseed oil, but I am fast coming to the conclusion that they may crack too. I understand if you use floetol, this will stop the cracking when dry, but it seems to make it quite an expensive way of proceeding with this kind of painting.

I have some other things I can mix with the paint so I will experiment with them first.

I will be trying a couple more paintings also with the WD-40 on the canvas, but I am liking the way it is working out on photographic paper. It seems to me that using this method on the photographic paper might be the way forward for me.

But this is just all experimenting.

The photo above... the top left photo is the size of the glue stick top when it is been upturned on the canvas with the paint in it. I poured white acrylic paint round it and spread it with a brush which you can see there.

The top right photo is the completed painting. This time I actually managed to leave white areas which I had been trying to do before. This was simply because I was using far far less paint and so I was able to do this.

The other photos are details of various parts of that painting on the top right.

So this is my painting for today for my challenge to myself of a painting every day in 2017.

I have been trying to listen to a Coursera course on the brain and but the person who is speaking speaks with such a strong accent and wrong words. He is not a native English speaker, and is struggling to find the right words for what he is explaining that he frequently comes up with the wrong words and this means that the subtitles come up with even more wrong wrong words.

This had the effect making the course impossible for me and my brain, which is still trying to adjust to the drastic new cochlear remapping from a few months ago. My brain is still trying to cope with having the English language, let alone cope with the person who is not a native speaker and using wrong words and re-correcting them with more wrong words, which is actually having the effect of scrambling my brain quite badly and causing dissonance within me.

However, the thing is I do want to do the course. This is because I want to find out more information about the brain and why my brain reacts to words the way it does another sounds with having the cochlear implant and having this new re-mapping.

So, I figured out to previously download the slides he is using onto my iPad into iBooks, and then watch the subtitles on my phone but having the sound turned off. Brain can deal with incorrect subtitles, that doesn't confuse it. It only messes it up when it is listening with the cochlear processor and trying to make English sense when there isn't any with this particular speaker. As the course is progressing, so far with the more complicated stuff the guy is struggling more and more to find the right words and failing in my opinion. All my processing power is used up trying to figure out and make sense of the words, that there is nothing left (no processing power left) to take in any information. I hope I have explained it well enough for you to understand what I mean. Deaf people anyway have this problem.

For those are reading my blog for the first time I was born profoundly deaf and I've never actually heard words as they are spoken until I had the Cochlear Implant some years ago. Even then it was just bits in the spoken word. But it wasn't until the recent drastic remapping that I was actually able to pick up more within the words which I've never picked up before. I am now approaching 70 years of age so this is an awful lot will me and my brain to get used to and adjust to, after a lifetime of not hearing words and getting by solely by lipreading.

So Brain can easily get knocked off balance by things that I don't expect to knock it off balance. This has the effect that I need an awful lot more sleep than I did before, (I needed naps in the day because of the tiring effect of my arthritis etc). And when I have been out listening and lipreading people once I get home I am absolutely shattered and I can go to sleep that good few hours. This is a heck of an inroad into my day.

It was worth going out this morning because I went to a charity shop and I bought five canvases, from small to quite big, for £5. They were good enough to experiment on.

I am using the microphone facility on this post because there is no way I can type all this, but once I finished saying something and I can see it has said my words correctly, but once I press 'done', for some reason it keeps rephrasing what I said into something different so there might be a couple of points in this post which might not make sense, and you just have to work it out because I am not reading through again!!!