Another toothpick painting is finally finished.
This one is a cute little Oak bonsai.

And what do you know, I have a dot count!

But you have to wait until the end.

This one took a long time. Mostly because I was spending more time on Steemit than painting (don't we all know that feeling), but also because the leaves seemed like they would never end.

And this one even had a traumatic beginning.

Before I start painting, I have to sketch things out. I'm not the type to freestyle, and even if I tried, the end result definitely wouldn't look like anything that belongs on this planet, let alone anything resembling a tree. And I also work best at night for some reason.

So there I was, doodling away on a quiet night. I had just lifted my pencil from the paper when suddenly the dogs EXPLODED in a fit of barking.

Sigh...

Took a while for my heart rate to come down from that one.
Why were those idiots barking, you ask?

A cat.  My cat.   That they live with.   And sleep next to every night.

Ok, moving on.

This is what 100 dots looks like.

By popular demand, I decided to count the dots. And I'm not ever going to attempt that again. What a pain in the ass!

1000 dots.

I couldn't have any movies playing because it would make me lose track of my numbers, nor could I listen to an audiobook or podcast. So much of this painting was spent either in silence or listening to music I've heard a thousand times before (so I wouldn't try to listen to the lyrics and lose track of the goddamn numbers).

Did I mention I'm not good with numbers?

So to keep as accurate a count as possible, I ended up scratching lines - one line for every 100 dots - on the original sketch which also doubled as a handrest/cover for the rest of the unpainted area. Can't have smudge marks!

I love seeing scrap papers at the end of a project - they have so much life.

I also tried a new style of leaf, which I'm not sure I like a whole lot. (You can see the test leaves above.) They do look more "oaky" than the leaves on my other trees, so I guess they work.

But holy lord, did they take a long ass time to paint!

When I finally got all the leaves in place, I was tempted to call it finished right there. But it didn't look right. It was... sparse.

So with a great sigh, I began to fill in the gaps.

And a few thousand dots later, it was finally complete.

This one took well over 30 hours, but unfortunately I forgot to check the times as I was painting. I can only deal with one set of numbers at a time!

Ready for the final count?

^{(approximated to within 200 dots)}

Drumroll.....

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.

.

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28,079

I had actually thought the number would be higher, but then my mother mentioned that if I had $28,079 in single bills, I would realize how big of a number it actually is. Makes sense.

So now that I've done three trees, I'm sick of them and ready to move onto something else. Flowers, maybe? Or more sugar skulls. Those are always fun.

If you want to see the rest of the toothpick collection and learn about the process, here are some of the others:

Tree Thing
Tiny Elephant
Sugar Skull
The Monster Cherry Blossom Bonsai
Fir Bonsai

Thanks for checking out my dots!

^{Get your mind out of the gutter, weirdo.}