General

Start With Confidence

Some of you may remember that I participate in Art Challenges posted on the Fine Art America and Pixels sites. These challenges last for various time periods and each one highlights a different subject. Some challenges allow different mediums to be used throughout the time period but the last one I participated in required the use of the same medium throughout the entire challenge.

I have completed three day, seven day and month long challenges as well as three that lasted for an entire year with one of those requiring a new image daily and the other two requiring one new image per week. It takes a little confidence to start one of these year long undertakings with the ultimate goal of finishing the entire challenge.

I recently finished the second weekly challenge whose theme was The World Inside. The image for Week 51 was titled Crossword Confidence.

Just as it took a level of confidence to start a year long art challenge it also takes confidence to start and complete an entire crossword puzzle in ink!

As you can see in the featured image, the words for a crossword puzzle were being filled in with a ballpoint pen. Filling in the puzzle with ink portrays a confidence that the word being used is the right one and will not need to be erased and changed when an intersecting word is filled in.

A little information on these puzzles: Crossword puzzles are word puzzles with numbered squares arranged in a grid. White squares are for the letters and black squares separate the words. The entire puzzle is itself created as a square.

Clues are given for words whose letters fit in those squares. The words intersect with each other where one or more of their letters match.

Crossword puzzle grids can vary according to the country or region where they are created.

Many crossword puzzles are based on a theme and some called a metapuzzle actually have a second puzzle within the completed puzzle. The words to the second puzzle are ones that are highlighted by gray or possibly yellow squares.

The earliest crossword puzzles in the United States became popular in 1910.

Just as I start these art challenges with confidence, I now work crossword puzzles in ink.

However, to be perfectly honest with you, I am mainly doing that because the letters written in ink are much easier to see than the ones written in pencil!

Check out my most recent challenge images in the “Recently Added” Gallery found on my art site by clicking here .