something I am grateful for today

Getting back into The Painting Groove®.

It's been weeks [months?] since I painted, largely due to adverse health circumstances, but also lack of ideas-slash-inspiration. But the deadline of Christmas looming has been making me fret, and I owe some people paintings as gifts, so I finally panicked enough to force myself once more into the breach.

I've noticed that, whenever I'm away from painting for a while, I eventually get to feeling like I have forgotten how. I lose what little confidence I've developed, and start to believe that whatever I produce now won't be any good. [Something similar happens with cartooning, but that feels more like gotten rusty than don't remember how.] But, in the last couple of days, I have finished the gifts that absolutely had to be done, and once I got about a third of the way into each one, I realized that they were turning out Okay Enough®, and I started feeling like I have a clue again.

I realize that the solution is “don't go so long without arting”, but this is me we're talking about here, so....