I need to visualize Tudor England's architecture to be able to create a map of my characters travels and to draw a map I need to imagine the byways and lanes.
Brocks Barn for example has several places of interest, the barn itself, the wood carvers business, the boys cottage, the witch and wizards home, a saddlery, a stable, a forge, a watermill and at least a couple of farms.
So that requires a river, some footpaths, bridleways and lanes none of which are straight lines and then there's the contours of the land!
In between creating the images of my mental pictures and then writing the text descriptions I fill in the dead spots making watercolour washes of random backgrounds to pencil and ink in my various scenes banking on the random nature to help suggest ideas in case I can't.
A lot of dead time is taken up staring at these various backgrounds, like clouds in the sky, hoping they form or suggest some shapes to help my work.
Right now - past few days - I'm almost blind and so typing is all I can do and thats slow too as I keep hitting the keys adjacent to the ones I want thanks to having blurry monocular vision.
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