Ask, Listen and Never Give Up

Now the weather has turned colder, and I'm less inclined to go tramping around the countryside, I've turned my thoughts to some of the 'indoors' goals on The List.
Recently, I started on a new one:

062. Watch 100 TED/TEDx Talks

In the past, I've watched various TED and TEDx talks, courtesy of YouTube, and find them interesting, informative and inspiring.
As 100 is a lot of videos, I'll blog about them every five or so videos that I watch, and embed the videos where I can.  So here goes!

Amanda Palmer: The art of asking
In this video, performer Amanda Palmer talks about her days as a street performer, the success of her crowd-funding attempt (which had around 25,000 backers!) and the belief that rather than making people pay for music, they should be asked.
Amanda Palmer is a very animated speaker and her talk left me with the impression that if, like Amanda, you have the balls (and trust in people) to ask for what you want, you'll eventually get it.

November Reads

November is nearly over, and I'm continuing with my goal of reading 3 books per month for a year (#050 on The List).

As this month was National Novel Writing Month, I thought it might be difficult to read three full-length novels as well as trying to write a 50k novel, so I picked some shorter books to read for November. As before, I've rated the books I read out of 5.

Little Forest Folk

It's been a month since I posted any more paintings, yet what I'm posting today are paintings I finished in July!
I posted them on deviantART, but never got around to sharing them here.

As before, this is towards a goal:

055. Create 52 paintings in 1 year

(The year runs from March-Feb, because March is when I started!)

Today's theme is fanart, Little Forest Folk-style

Gee Up, July 2014

Gee Up: Another fanart of Full/Tomo Furukawa, vocalist of Guniw Tools, and Shilfee and Tulipcorobockles (to name but a couple of bands). I've painted him before (he's one of my favourite people to paint in this style!) This time, here he is smoking his bubble-pipe and riding his trusty rhinoceros beetle. In painting this, I discovered that painting beetles is rather relaxing!
Am really pleased with how this one turned out.
Medium: Watercolour on watercolour paper
Size:22x14.5cm

Sea Salt, Chilli and Troika

It's been a couple of months since I last blogged about any chocolate, but I'm still working towards my goal of trying 50 new chocolates (goal #64 on The List).

Here's the latest three, which involve sea salt, chilli and marzipan!