The Cold Food Day

[This is a cross-post from my regular blog. Both need attention; but this entry is really about creating something new for me. Foods!]

This morning I woke up hungry, not having eaten supper the night before.

I thought of taters and eggs, which I had promised Alex I'd make before she and John had to go to the Bay Area. I thought of the soft and scrumptious loaf of Dutch crust French bread I bought at the store the other day. I thought of what to make for lunch with things on hand.

There was a container of egg whites, left over from making pumpkin custard the day before yesterday, so the taters and eggs made use of that. Delicious. Perfect. Hearty breakfast accompanied by tomato juice. Good start to a freezin' ass cold day.

Around 10 am, I opened the freezer to see what was available for lunch. I spotted a small container of onions and ground beef that I intended to make into some variant of minestrone -- but I knew Bernie wouldn't eat that as it would have too much tomato flavor to it. Aha! A bag of pre-cooked prawns (50 % off sale at the grocers one weekend) and a package of chopped broccoli. Got it, lunch is on the way!

The minestrone fixins I pulled out as well, just because I couldn't stop thinking about them.

Baby portobella mushrooms ... a package of them needed to be used up, so I cut each one into halves or quarters and tossed them into a frying pan with Saffola Margarine (good taste for sizzling) and cut up half a yellow onion into 3/4 inch chunks and began to cook them in extra virgin olive oil. The pot of white basmati rice began to cook.

Prawns thawed in a solution of sea salt and lemon juice and water; some of the mushrooms went into a pot with the minestrone stuff on a back burner, along with a hefty amount of "Italian Seasoning" by McCormick.

A can of chicken broth was mixed with 2 tablespoons of corn starch, some salt, and a heavy shaking of garlic powder, and added to the onion pieces when they were done, to slowly come to a boil. When the rice was nearly done, I put the frozen broccoli on to steam. A few minutes later, most of the mushrooms went into the thickening chicken broth, along with the cut up prawns. (Some of the mushrooms went into the minestrone pot.) When the broccoli was done, so was the rice, and with that, lunch was served. Delicious, nutritious, and satisfying.

The minestrone-to-be slowly thawed on its low setting, seemingly forgotten, but not.

I walked to the school to collect Lillian. We checked the mail, and then, ambling up the street came a man with his Great Dane bitch. She was beautiful, black with a white spot on her chest, and a hint of whitish toes. Maybe a third again bigger than our dog Sebastian, but looking like his auntie. Lil and I stopped to talk with the owner, who assured us that she didn't bite, and we petted the large, lovely lady, comparing her loopy ears to Sebastian's, and the breadth between her eyes, and the gentle eyes themselves. Yeah, I think Sebastian has some Great Dane in his ancestry.

Return to the minestrone variation. I dumped some leftover fried cabbage (don't knock it until you've tried it, cooked with onions in bacon fryings) into the pot, and a cup of tomato sauce. A little later, I tossed in about a quarter cup of nopalitos (cactus strips) and a handful of sliced black olives. I added more oregano, more garlic powder, and a cup of asparagus, cut into half-inch pieces. Dumping in maybe a cup to a cup and a half of Wolfgang Puck's beef broth (no MSG) and about the same amount of the water from the broccoli steaming, and a cup of pasta ...

When the pasta was done, I cut a couple pieces of the French bread, and slathered them with cream cheese. Serving the minestrone in a bowl, I sprinkled it with Parmesan cheese and ooohhh, perfect soup, perfect meal for a cold, cold winter evening.

Tough One

This one was hard on me, both in reading, formatting, and trying to find an image.

Jim Wisneski's sensitive and tragic story, "A Pile of Dinners" is about an Alzheimer's victim and a family member who has had to live with the horrible changes that the disease causes.

I don't think I did the story justice, but my all-too-recent experience with my mother's decline into Alzheimers made it hard to work with.

Almost a Cover Image

Me, not keeping a clear line of communication open, and he, not keeping track of Upcoming Issues, well, Jonathan Scott and I did not know that I was cobbling up a cover image to go with his story, nor did we know in tandem that he already had a graphic to go with it.

"Ever So Slightly Mangled" is a fine representation of a storyteller's art.

I included my illustration in the later part of the text.

Narrative [1]

M.J. Nicholls' cover story, "A Modern Narrative [1]" inspired this bizarre work.

Nicholls' story made me want to run in circles, shout "hahahahahaha" maniacally, whack my head with a stout book, and run into bookstores to risk arrest while madly toppling junk-ass-written best sellers to the floors.

At the same time, I sympathized with the fragility of a writer's ego -- all it takes is one person to hurt that ego so much that it never forgets.

Which is not to say that no one should ever say anything bad about others' writing, not by any means, but ... if you're not supremely confident about your writing (or any other art), mean words do hurt.

Hmm, supremely confident, or ... raking in the big bucks.

Haha!

This one was a lot of fun to do, and I chose a flexible-tip ink pen for the lines.

The illustration is for Dan Mulhollen's poem, "The Man With Red Tights."

Gazpacho, The Dish

So delicious, so nutritious -- Gazpacho.

I modified the recipe a little from the one I received from my friend Melissa 30-some years ago.

Surly Kid

Cover image for Matthew Dexter's story, "Summer School."

I have no idea why the sky ended up looking banded. I didn't try to do that, and Photoshop gave no indication it would happen.

Different Dragonfly!

Then there was this animal, who allowed me to take multiple photos.

Never saw any dragonfly like this in my life. A dragonfly with granny-panties!

This species isn't even supposed to be in this area, according to Bernie's research on the web. I haven't seen it since July 5, but I'll watch for his relatives from now on.

Blue Jay

Okay, get ready for a few posts.

This one was the cover for Mark Lyon's beautifully written, "He Sure Do Want To Fly."

What a story! When I first read it as a submission, I was so moved I couldn't be sure of my opinion. I sent it to Cheryl, our Poetry Editor and Voice of Reason. She, too, was impressed, and I sent Mark an acceptance letter. In the mean time, Bernie took my printed-out copy with him to work to read, and after he read it, one of his co-workers snitched it from him, becoming so engrossed she hid the manuscript in a bin of parts so that she could read it while she worked!

Yeah, it was a good one.

Writing, and stuff

Then there was the short story, "Pecking Order, " which took days to scratch out.

And many evenings and afternoons cleaning up the continuity gaffe in the serial novel "Transitions."

Plus a number of days when I was riding the horse to keep him from colicking, and working on formatting Press articles and fiddling with OPGraphics (Other People's Graphics) to make them Pressworthy ... Time just gets away, and there's never enough of it, and why the hell have I never in my life been able to say, "I'm bored, I have nothing to do"?

There is a preliminary sketch on a canvas in the studio. I can FEEL the blueness of the sky that is going to appear there. This week is supposed to be one of clement temperatures, so I hope to get out there and obsess over color and shape. I'll take photos, for sure.

Playing Catch Up As Usual

It's just wrong how time gets away from me ... some say it's because I'm of an age approaching the speed of light, and others say it's because I'm a spacey, lazy old cow who would rather sit in the shade and sip wine with her husband rather than work.

Maybe it's both.

Nevertheless (don't I always say that?) I have been trying to keep busy. This image is from Lydia Manx's story "Dawn's Early Light".

Gazpacho!

Michele Host's cover story for the Piker Press this week just about drove me nuts.

The story is called "Gazpacho" and although somewhat on the slap-your-hands-over-your-eyes ook, nevertheless made me long for gazpacho, a dish which I have loved for well over thirty years and never make because my beloved husband hates tomatoes in any form other than spaghetti sauce.

(Or fried green tomatoes, which I, in a strange cosmic reciprocation, loathe.)

The cover image, which said husband chose out of these three, is a digital photo, stretched a little and super saturated with color in Photoshop.

This one was a macro -- close focus feature -- which I also Photoshopped, this time with "paint daubs" as a filter.

I chopped a tomato and some celery and a white onion for these shots, all the while promising myself that I would use the ingredients to make some real gazpacho for myself later.

The last picture I used the artistic filter "paint daubs" on, and then another filter "poster edges." This probably would have been my first choice for cover, but Bernie has a good eye.

P.S. The gazpacho I made this afternoon was HEAVENLY.

But that's another creative post.

Luggage

This was the cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "Castaways."

I wanted something vivid, but simple, and opted for a rough sketch in pastels, on black construction paper. As noted in previous posts, such sketches don't scan well, or even photograph well. What the eye sees doesn't correspond with the camera's lens.

I scanned the pic, then used Photoshop to super-saturate the colors. The I used "adjustments" to enhance the blacks. Luminous!

The red is for balance and deception. In Part Two of the story the following week, I left this image for Tyler as a treat:

Architecture

Mary Andes' excellent story, "The Music Tells It All" inspired me to look up pictures of Mission Buenaventura and try to reproduce it in Photoshop.

Currently a pastel sketch of this picture graces a canvas in the studio, soon to be the recipient of oil paint. I hope. That should be good for a few days' creation.

After Years

Chas Wallace's story, "Kinamoor and Darrelma" poked me to finish this oil painting.

Alex had stolen it from my art closet and given it a place in her office, but it was far from done. I stole it back and finished it, making a digital photograph for the cover art.

My memory is far more photographic than hers, so I can steal back this tiny oil (only 6" x 8") at will.

What? A Month?

It's really annoying to see that a month has gone by without a post. Truly it makes one feel like a filthy piker.

So we'll catch up, with as many days as I can remember and have on hand.

First up is the illustration for Jerry Seeger's Piker Press story "High Desert Blues."

The lines that inspired me were these:

"To the stars, the planets must seem like mad prophets and rock stars, untamed and reckless as they careen about the firmament, but the planets are also bound, their courses charted and known. When planets speak wistfully of freedom, do the stars even understand the word? "

Foodies

It was a collaborative effort.

Bernie told me yesterday he wanted pasta with prawns and peas in a white sauce. We spent a long time trying to pin down just which white sauce he was talking about. He claimed I'd made a really good one but couldn't remember what we had the sauce on. While in the grocery store, we narrowed the pasta down to fettucini; later while he was commuting to work and we were chatting on the phone, I bookmarked a white-wine-cream sauce that looked easy and was reputed to be tasty.

The sauce was easy, and I made it tasty by adding garlic to it.  I think it would have been better, but I used a cheap Italian pinot grigio that was almost flavorless -- sort of pinot grigio soda pop without carbonation.

There is not a bite left, though, so apparently it was a success.

The Waiting Room

I really think that this story is one of Mel Trent's best. "The Waiting Room" has a lot of subtlety and some powerful insights.

By no means does my illustration describe what I saw through her words. I suppose that means that eventually I'll go back and replace it.

Anniversary Issue

Seven years as an ezine.

I called up this pic from the archives, and photographed it. Mel Trent has done some phenomenal work for the Press, and for her own passions. This illustration of her work is one of my favorites.

Cover Semi-Doggett

This was the cover image for Richard Voza's story, "The Accident."

I wasn't really happy with it, but my time constraints don't allow me to nitpick a lot.

I used a non-copyrighted pic and modified it.

This guy looks too much like John Doggett (X-Files) in a too-tight suit.

The Obvious Slacker

I've been slacking, I know.

There are days when I work on stuff, and days when I don't. And the days all run together sometimes, and I can't remember which day I did what.

I know that this was the cover image for the March 30th issue of the Piker Press. It was kind of fun, building layer upon layer, but I really wished I had one of those illustrator's pads that has a stylus and allows one to use Photoshop a little more accurately.

Still, it wasn't bad.

Wading through

I haven't been keeping up my resolution, at least not day to day, but I do have some sketches I've been working on, and recipes to stun the very senses.

(Well, our senses, anyway.)

Lent and Easter are very busy times for us, and time on the computer is at a premium.

More soon.

Cover "Sweeper"

This was the cover image for Richard Vosa's short story, "The Sweeper".

I did the pencil sketch, wasn't thrilled with it, started to putter with the same image in pastels, was even less thrilled, went back and scanned the pencils and erased most of it, just using shapes and colors in Photoshop.

Alternative Cover Picture

Pastels. I wanted to see how the idea for the cover image would pan out in pastels. I dunno ... I think I like it in pastels better.

Wreath

I've kept forgetting to include this one.

Our grape vine was trying to take over our neighbor's Japanese maple, so Bernie cut the two-inch trunk off at the ground, and we began yanking the yards and yards of vine out of the trees.

On a whim I wrapped and tangled the green vine around itself in a round shape, thinking I could use the dried framework for a Christmas wreath of greens.

However, later on I realized it was too big for a frame for a wreath for the door, and just left the poor strands parked up against the house through the rest of autumn.

Fortunate forgetfulness! The resulting lovely now graces a tall wall in my living room.

Color!

I spent several days working on this pastel.

At 12" x 18" inches, it's one of my larger pieces lately.  Originally, I was just going to do some stripes of color, but then Alex saw it and began to exclaim over it (I know she means well, but when it comes to artwork, that kind of drives me nuts with performance anxiety) and so I continued on to fill the whole sheet.

Humidity has been high, as you can see by the slight puckering of the paper.

Now, what is it supposed to be? Stripes of color, that's all.  Gobs of color.  I suppose you could gaze at it and at times imagine a lake and mountain scene,  at others a sunset ... just colors is good enough.
What I have thought about is that although I worked it as a horizontal piece, it might be more interesting to rotate it 90 degrees.

Is it a cityscape on Mercury? Canyons seen through infrared?

Cover Art Again

I guess this was the latest effort. The multiple gradients in the back were interesting play in Photoshop.

This one accompanied Dan Mulhollen's story, "Something I Forgot" in the Piker Press.

Editing

This past week has been taken up with editing "Transitions."

Well, until Friday, that is. On Friday I succumbed to my granddaughter's latest viral introduction, and have been out for the count ever since. The last one started the New Year off with a hack; my cough was done for ONE DAMN DAY before this pinched-nerve crap started.

How timely that the next virus hit THE VERY DAY that I completed physical therapy for the pinched nerve. I'm really pretty fed up with fate.

"Transitions" is coming along all right. It's not a great story, by any means, but it feels good to write it, and spend time with the characters.

Blue Tree #2

On Tuesday, I betook myself to the studio and worked on a better cover image for Lydia Manx's story, "If These Walls Could Talk."

I started with a pen and ink drawing of a tree. Initially, I saw the tree as being much more leafy, but I really wanted the blue-to-green gradient and the moons to be visible, so the tree was limited to a crew cut.

Then I went to Photoshop and worked with a lot of layers.

As with many projects, once it was done I could see things I probably would have done differently. I think I'd re-do the ink of the tree and drop that branch down a little more, like a dancer with a fan. The light colored-leaves would contrast with the dark grasses just fine.

Blue Tree #1

Gad, I was so tired and achy Monday that I took an old picture of my Japanese maple, leached some color out of it, added some other color, and did some fuzzy hazes over it.

It was a creative effort, but it wasn't what I wanted to see.

Almond Blossoms!

I had a kickass photo-shoot in a nearby orchard today, in spite of the early overcasting of clouds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/palmprintgallery/

After I brought the raw photos home, I plied some Photoshop to properly crop the pics, and was very pleased with the results.

In keeping with the recent torrent of creativity, I also cut some cardboard panels and put gesso on them to make them paint-worthy. They'll be useful for experimental stuff.

I think I want to put a second coat of gesso on them, though, so that if we want to sand them smooth, we'll have plenty of surface.

Gesso is a kind of thick paint-y goo that preps a surface -- almost any surface -- for painting upon.

Zoom! The Days Fly By

Monday was the cover image (see below).

Tuesday I wrote a little, editing Transitions.

Wednesday I painted -- oils -- on a painting I'd begun years ago. I was able to do some groovy blue on darker blue texturing, which I believe will set the tone for the rest of the painting.

Thursday, Lillian began asking questions about my art work; she was trying out new terminology and mis-used the word "stencil". I whipped out the Exacto knife and cut a simple shape from card stock, then used soft pastels to demonstrate what a stencil does.

While Lil experimented with a heart stencil I cut for her, I continued to mess with my shape. I added a little other color to the shapes, too.

When the air began to chill, I cleaned up the work table, and then smiled, realizing that what Lillian had done for me was -- get me to playing with my toys. Now that's priceless.

Cool Work, Me!

This was the cover for today's Piker Press.

The story is "Transitions", which I've been working on for ages ... well, today was the first chapter of it, not the whole mess of 88k words, of course.

Yesterday's creative effort was to pick up the massive pile of print out and go through it, editing as I went. After several months of ignoring the thing, it was actually fun, and I found the continuity gaffe that had been hanging me up and fixed it.

This morning (as well as at various times during the night when I woke up and worried about what the morning would bring) I thought about what cover image should accompany the story. I didn't want to do anything representational; I know what the characters all look like, but maybe someone else will have a different vision of them, and that's cool.

I went outside with my camera and took three pictures; the above is a composite of two of them, layered with about 65% opacity. The part with the ripples I adjusted separately, bumping up the contrasts A LOT. I had an idea of what I was going to do when I went outside, knew what I had to do with the photos when I fired up Photoshop, and whammalooey, it was done, and was just what I'd wanted to do. That's RARE!!!!

Ahhhhh.

Done With This Slop

As I was plying pastels to this picture this afternoon, I was also chatting to Bernie on the telephone.

"Yes," I grated into the headset, quoting a line from the original Battlestar Galactica, "I think we're done here."

I loved the colors of the painting I was trying to imitate, but I never could figure out what the order of their use was, or what exactly the painter was trying to convey. Now it is a fact that the original artist used oils, and I was using pastels, but still. I could discern no particular light source, or rationale for his use of purple.

I did try, but when vibrant color becomes boring through annoyance, it's time to hang it up, and maybe try one little piece of replication some time in the future instead of a big landscape. I sprayed the beast with fixative; in a couple days it will be dry enough to press between sheets of tracing paper and hide forever.

Simple Graphic

I have to admit this isn't a very complicated effort for the day.

It's the cover image for Dan Mulhollen's story, "In A Different World."

This gimpy shoulder and arm just don't make for comfortable computer work at all. I put up about half the Press yesterday, and after Physical Therapy, I did the rest. By the time I got to Photoshop, I felt very weary.

A little later I tried working in the studio on that damned weird-colored pastel effort (see above) but the Flex-all treatment of my shoulder and neck made it feel too cold out there.

While I was irritably scraping pastels across the paper, it occurred to me that what I should have done was take one small section of Svob's work and tried to imitate that. Taking on an entire page of his jittery style is just too much.

And tonight my arm and shoulder ache enough that if he came to the door, I'd smack him a good one, out of frustration.

Wet Paint

What seems like a couple decades ago (but is probably only about three years) I started this painting.

I was still using a film camera -- okay, maybe five or six years ago -- and I remember doing a pastel sketch as a preliminary. Then I took an old canvas that had a rough undercoat in blue and gold of a image of a fish, and used black oil paint to block in the palm trees.

And then I forgot it.

Lately I've been itching for oil paints, so today I bit the bullet and dragged out all the stuff -- the brushes, the canvases, the tubes of pigment.

I'm not really sure of where I'm going with it, but at least it's not palm tree silhouettes against a fish outline any more.

Not particularly interested in realism with this one; it's just an exercise.

Lessons learned: You must use it or you will lose it, and have to start back at Square One.

And student-grade cadmium orange doesn't cover underpaint worth a shit.

And Payne's gray + cadmium orange ends up looking like a dirty moldy green.

But it did cover the erstwhile fish.

Experimenting with Color

I've always been fond of loads of color, but also afraid of using them.

This book by Mike Svob, Paint Red-Hot Landscapes That Sell, has a number of interestingly improbable color schemes that intrigue me. I decided the next art project would be to fiddle with color per his example.

You can see I've tried to match up my pastel sticks to the colors of the photo of his oil painting.

When you do oils (my mother taught me) you begin with the darkest colors and then work into the lighter shades. With pastels, for me it seems to be the exact opposite, so I started with the yellows.

By the time I was ready to switch to oranges, my arm was really throbbing, so I sprayed the thing with fixative and called it a day.

The amazing part of it was that I was so engrossed in shapes and hues that I missed my 3 o' clock painkillers completely, and wouldn't have remembered them until Bernie reminded me at 4 that I was overdue.

That's good news!

Pastel Irritation

Irritating. Yes, that's how I would describe this "lesson" in using pastels.

I think I started messing with this a couple days after Christmas, and could only get back to it from time to time, due to low temps (and no heat in the garage studio), and then a cold; add in that after each stage the "instructor" wants the surface pigment stabilized with fixative.

Finally I got fed up with the change in color from instruction photo to instruction photo, and just finished putting the sparkles on the water and textured the sky.

I think I learned a good bit about making water appear watery, but bleah. Next time I do a study session like this, I'm going to look at the finished product first and work from that, and not from the lies with which the instructor misleads his irritable student.

Cover for "Betrayal in an Envelope"

The illustration accompanied Kathryn Long's story "Betrayal in an Envelope."

It had to be simple, yet vivid. Vivid to match the story, and simple, because my shoulder and arm were still screaming non-stop pain.

Bernie wanted me to skip putting up the Piker Press for a week, so that I didn't have to sit at the computer too long. But instead I worked on it a bit at a time over the weekend, so that all I had to do Monday morning was the illustration.

I took two envelopes and crumpled them. Then I took them to my studio and flattened them, then used a smudgy foam triangle to drag red pigment over one, and blue over the other.

I set them on a piece of paper on the floor and took a photo.

In Photoshop, I cut away all the "paper" background, and inserted a background of sort-of-sepia. The layer with the envelopes I "adjusted", messing with the hue and saturation. And then I called it done, wishing that the painkillers would kick in.

Had I been in my right mind, I would have intensified the colors I hazed over the sepia background, and cropped the picture a little more.

Cover for "Patient Zero"

This was the cover for Mel Trent's story, "Patient Zero."

Begun with a background gradient of yellow ochre to olive green, I added a cut and paste of a man from a public domain picture. I elongated him using "Edit -->Transform", then colored him with red and orange. Then the "smudge" tool.

Then I added some translucent red to the layer with the gradient.

This was done a week ago Monday ... I had no idea that the next day was going to bring crippling pain to my neck, shoulder, and arm.

Such is life.

Playing Catch-Up

Three forward, one toe back,

Trailing scribbled lines across the snow,

Footsteps dance around the scattered birdseed.

In spite of neglecting this blog shamefully, I have been sticking to the resolve. Each day I HAVE been working on some creative act. (Well, with the possible exception of the last Steelers' game day. I do believe I was a waste, eating chicken wings and jumping up and down and screaming so as to wear myself out.) Not only a poem called "Winter Chickens", but also an Aser story "Sidelong", and two other short stories, one called "Fire" and the other "Wasting Time."

I think the poem and "Sidelong" are done. The other stories I'm still snarling over.

Then there is the pastel project I've been working on in the studio. Some days lately have been too cold and wet for working out there, and I have come to really hate the project, which is a practice lesson. Bernie observed my frustration, read the book I was working from, and pronounced that it was like Kliban's cartoon on how to draw a cat. He had drawn three circles in the first figure, added ears and whiskers and a tail in the second, and in the third, shown a lovely, realistic pen and ink of a sitting cat.

At this point, I agree with Bernie. The step-by-step photos look like the instructor started over on his sketch several times. Maybe he did. Maybe that's what we're supposed to do. Still, he could have said so. Shithead.

Excerpt from "Wasting Time:"

"Every day was the same, and that was good. Every day was the same, and that made me wish for anything different." She sat up on the ledge of the bath and looked at her reflection in the water. Pulling at her dripping hair, she turned her face from side to side, considering what she saw. "I hate my hair like this," she announced.

"Be patient," Margot muttered. "It'll grow out."

"I don't mean that! I mean it's already down to my shoulders in back and my nose in front and it takes an hour to dry! I look like a haystack with eyeballs."

And from "Fire:"

Kish opted to take two flat rocks and a stick, and roll three glowing embers onto one rock, covering it with the other. No one sleeping along the walls moved or noticed; he was free to stand, drape his blanket fur over his shoulders (making sure the edges did not drag on the ground and make a noise), and pad noiselessly on bare feet away from the fire.

To her, the dark-eyed one, who pleaded for fire. "Donai," she called it. He named her in the moonlight, "Ka-be-Donai" -- "Who Pleads For Donai."

He backtracked his own steps under the shine of the moon, glad that snow had stayed in the sky for so long

and not dropped to the ground to make his trail visible.

And from "Sidelong:"

Melody had to learn that however great her changes in her life had been, they didn't give her the right to quarrel with her company. And the Life That Guides the World knows that there are times in one's life when no amount of explanation is ever going to be enough. You could be the greatest orator on the crust of the world, but if you've somehow managed to fall afoul of your colleagues, you might as well just write the whole thing off and take your show on the road; either that or grow an alligator's hide and settle in to outlive them, hoping they don't have a penchant for reptile handbags.

Exercise!

Seeing this picture on the cover of Via, I was, as always, entranced by the combination of purple and orange.

I decided that today's project would be to play with the image in Photoshop.

With the magazine in front of me, I drew the lines of the elements of the picture with my mouse. (When economic times get better, I've GOT to get one of those pen styluses instead of trying to use the talent of my right hand with a mouse, which my right hand almost never uses any more. It's like trying to draw an eyelash with a brick.)

I scanned the cover photo so that I could try to see what the colors actually are. Photoshop did not agree with me about what colors were present, but I pressed on.

After an hour and a half or so, I saved the file and made lunch. After lunch I pressed on, getting some good reddish colors and textures on the near hill. A half hour later, the power went out, and erased everything I'd done since lasagna casserole. I didn't even swear; I should have known better; I do know better than to not save every couple minutes. Dammit.

I liked the sky in the finished product, but as usual, was far from satisfied with it.

After the power outage, I must confess, I was deeply annoyed and quit probably before I should have.

And since I was lazy enough to work in only two layers, it came out better than it might have.

Idle Hands

On Wednesdays, I take my granddaughter to her religion class, and while she does whatever religious studies first grade kids do, I have an hour to keep myself occupied.

This time I grabbed my sketch book, and once her class had begun, I decided to set a task -- to sketch 10 hands, just for practice, because I don't practice any where nearly as much as I should.

I tried to imagine basic shapes upon which to build and model a hand. And because I'm so damn timid about this sort of thing, I left the pencil alone and used a pen.

By the time I had scribbled the ninth hand, it was time to pick Lil up at her classroom.

However, I do include a stick figure carrying a shopping bag, and the foot, which started bare, grew a sock, and ended up with its toes on backwards.

And one too few of them, I might add.

Catching Up and Catching Disease

This is the illustration I did for Tyler Willson's story "Mercenary."

That would have been on December 29th, and that was the last time I was able to keep to my Resolution.

New Year's seemed to take so much out of me in preparations ... I wondered about that, but didn't realize at the time that I was coming down with a bad cold. I was a little hoarse on the 4th, but then with a loud cartoon Kapowee! I was out for the count.

So I'm way behind on Resolution projects. Most of what I've done since then is sit still and wait for enough of the illness to pass so that I could sleep.

Last night, amid grotesque nightmares and anxieties, coughing fits and wheezes, I was able to doze for an hour at a time. One lovely nap lasted an hour and 15 minutes!

I'll be back to posting here again soon, I hope.