painting is meditation for me. So rarely can I let my mind relax and let my subconsious flow out a bit, but painting does it (well depending on what I\'m painting). I often have no idea where hours disappear to, but i\'ll look up and it\'s 2am and I should have been in bed hours ago. So for me it\'s not really about patience, since that doesn\'t seem to factor into it at all.
As for my mood, I think it does help, although not so much for short term things, but the mediation sort of lets me work through all the long term/life things and get my in generally to a happy place.
I can also definately get into a bad mood from painting too. Working on my latest, there was a day where I thought I had done somethign and completely killed my composition on the mini and it pissed me off the whole next day, until I had a chance to sit down and fix it.