Creative Creativity Break

I spent most of yesterday trying to finish up the first draft of a short story that really needed to be done.  I'm discovering, though, that I need frequent breaks when I'm spending long days at the writing mill.  I've never really noticed this during my NaNoWriMo sprints, I suppose because I can generally crank out my daily words in one or two sessions.  But now that I've moved to much longer days of concentrated writing time, I've found a difference.

Yesterday I thought I'd take a  break from one kind of creativity by switching to another, but I needed to set some boundaries so that I wouldn't get swept away and forget to go back to the writing.  Therefore I made it a time challenge, too.  I decided I would open up Photoshop and give myself twenty minutes to create a desktop wallpaper.  One other rule:  I had to work with only the brush sets I happened to have open, plus one other I could choose.

It was fun and provided a good break.  The result isn't terribly fancy, but I like it and it's on my desktop now.  Here it is:


I titled it "Sister Moon."

For Christmas, hubby gave me a new packet of artist trading cards.  I think I might start a few of those to work on when I take a timed break, too.  The switch from one creative endeavour to another seems to have been better for me than using the time on something more mundane.