March 20, 2009

  • Something I detest

    I cannot express in words how much I detest what Xanga has done to change how we update the “look and feel” of our Xanga sites. I’m neither stupid or computer-illiterate, but the entire ‘themes’ interface is a huge pain in the butt. I don’t find it in the least intuitive or self-explanatory, nor do I find any real help or instructions about it anywhere.

    And to top it off, it’s virtually impossible to find a ‘contact us’ sort of place where we can either complain or protest or make suggestions for improvement. I know I’ve found such a link in the past, but it’s a long tedious process to find it, if or when I find it at all, which I couldn’t today.

    It is partly because of these detestable changes that I stopped using Xanga recently. But it was also partly because I’d just run out of things to blog about and the motivation to write at all. But I think I’ve regained a little bit of that now, so we’ll see if I can keep up the momentum to blog weekly.

    If I’m not here, you can find me at my personal website, which I’ll now be updating again since spring has sprung and there are lots of pictures to be taken.

October 7, 2008

October 3, 2008

September 25, 2008

August 1, 2008

  • Blue Jay Painting

    This is my reference photo

    This was the ‘first draft’ of the painting.  I liked the dark background, but not the color below the fence.  It didn’t ‘pop’ enough for me, plus it didn’t match how bright the sunshine was on the fence or the grass below.

    I added more red to the background and more yellow to the sunlit areas.

July 29, 2008

  • What’s your style?

    Thank you to everyone who complimented my butterfly painting and my latest video. 

    When I paint now, I’m not concerned with trying to capture the details of the photograph.  If someone wants a photograph of, say, a butterfly, I can just show them the photo.  Now when I paint, instead of driving myself nuts with trying to be technically perfect or photorealistic, I’m painting how I feel about the subject.  Trying to capture what it is about the subject that has meaning for me.

    Of course, I have to keep in mind some technical issues – how this pigment mixes with that pigment, color issues, perspective, shading, shape, etc.

    But with that butterfly, for example…what struck me about the real life butterfly was how the black shifted to light blue on the lower half of the wings, the line of spots and their color shift, and the touches of white along the edges of the wings.  In the photo, those touches are barely there, but in my mind, they stood out vividly, so when painting it, I painted what I ‘felt’ – that the touches were larger than they actually were.

    I just wanted to talk about all that because I actually haven’t painted for a while and I’d been thinking about what changed.  Why did the butterfly turn out so well when in the past painting had been so much of a struggle that I stopped for a while… and that was the answer that bubbled up from my nether-brain.  Because I wasn’t painting to my teacher’s style or techniques, that I painted in a way that made sense to me and focusing on the aspects of the picture that had meaning for me.

    Finding my own style, in other words, I think that would be called.

July 22, 2008

July 19, 2008

  • Butterfly Painting

    This is the reference photo.  It’s a Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly.

    This is the ‘first draft’ – the underpainting on which I tested shades of blues and greens and shapes and proportions.

    This is the painting as it sits now.  It’s not finished yet, obviously, but I’m happier with the colors.