I Accidentally Tricked Myself Into Painting

I was quite certain I wasn't going to paint today. I was gonna use today to analyze the two paintings I'm currently working on, make some observations on things to fix before finishing, and just get a good grip on where I am with both paintings. So I scribbled all over some photos of the paintings, and then played around messing with the lighting scheme for both paintings - doing a very poor approximation of what a glaze might look like to darken areas of the paintings. I also converted the images to greyscale just to get a visual reminder of the light/dark patterns for each painting. Below is all the nice analytical work I put in on the paintings.

Then I walked into the studio, took a good look at the portrait of dad with my recently exercised analytical eye, and found several things that made me hate the painting and myself for making such a terrible painting... Once I got over that brief catatonic moment, I decided that the most egregiously wrong thing in the painting was how short his right sleeve was. Beyond that, the shirt wasn't quite right, and the pants were wrong. And then just generally everything else. Before I knew it, the paints were out and I was trying to fix some of these things immediately instead of trying to remember them tomorrow. So maybe it looks better now? I'm not sure - there's every possibility I was just having a bad day. If so, taking action helped me feel better about it. Action precipitates mood and all that.

-ZR