Hi, I am updating my journal because I should.

Well, well, well,
I need to stop bring a yucky painter....I must practice more diligence, but oftentimes I feel that I am getting nowhere whether it's painting or with schoolwork or with my music practice.... I must keep patience
patience is very valuable, so In that case, I am going to get sketching now
I've been doing lots of sketches of hands and figures, I find that sketching with my non-dominant hand helps me in a way that I cannot explain at the moment, so I've been using both hands for a couple months now. I can write fairly decently with my non dominant hand now too--but only because I have practiced a lot. Colors give me a hard time when painting, colors are very tricky. I tend to get tight after doing lots of figure drawing without a reference, so to loosen up I do some referenced figure drawing from posemaniacs.com (I have it on my favorites toolbar in fact). Sketching from that kind of reference tends to loosen me up or warm me up for doing figures without reference. I also have a book of American landscapes that I am now using for sketching. I've only sketched the first picture in the book, but I hope to do one every weekend so that I may improve with colors.
Drawing on the computer is harder than drawing physically, but I bet that's pretty common, no? It's a lot easier to control analog than digital tools, that's why it makes me annoyed when people assume that digital painting is easier for having filters and effects and whatnot--those are not even part of my toolkit....not that they're bad though, cuz they can be useful and great when used by people who know what they're doing....

Anyways, keep working hard everyone and you will be successful