A couple of hours Friday and Sunday working on color balancing, especially the skin tones, and further refining the face and hair.  Haven't done much yet with the lace - but that will be last so I don't have to rework it several times for color and value balancing.  Starting to come together.  More updates to come later in the week.

This weekend we had a fun getaway at Skytop Lodge, a remarkable historic resort in the Poconos.  Both Kiersten and I have taken ballroom dancing lessons at Vince Brust Studios (in particular, for our first wedding dance), and a few times during the year Vince organizes a dinner/dance at Skytop.   The lodge has its own big band - the Skytop Orchestra - and it's  a rare treat to swing dance to Glen Miller music played live.  The resort is amazing - the grounds, gardens, and architecture are breathtaking - and I look forward to returning there for the next dance during warmer weather.  Here's a few of my favorite pics form the weekend:

Still figuring out what I'm doing with Neocolors.  I decided to do a second wash for a few parts, and discovered (unfortunately) that the first wash will come off when rewet.  I completely erased the left arm, as well as some of the darks in the dress!  After some struggling I've fixed the oops, and have been working on getting the values and colors in the skin tones correct.  I find it very difficult to force colors into light Colourfix paper  - I tend to work with dark tones because of this.  Since this piece is on a lighter tone, it's been a wrestling match.  The dress has been the biggest struggle.  Overall it's still on track though - still plenty of color correcting and value building to do.  I haven't done much yet with the lace of the dress, but I'll work on the details once I get the values and color balance worked out.

On Tuesday night I worked on blocking in the first Prismacolor layers.  Always a challenge to get anything done on Tuesdays when Lost is on!  It's starting to take shape.  Should get a few more hours in on Wednesday.

I've been invited to participate in this year's CPSA Silent Auction. Two years ago I also participated, and created a work using one of the alternate poses from the larger piece that was accepted that year. In that case the larger piece was Cascade, and the auction piece was Respite.  I like the idea of doing a sister piece for the silent auction - hopefully this year Opaline Dreams will be accepted, and my auction piece will be the sister piece. Yesterday I started the new piece, which is about 12" x 6" on Fresh Gray Colourfix paper.  After laying down the Neocolor II's, I used a medium sized brush dipped in water to dissolve the pigment.  It's interesting when you lay down the Neocolors in that they're not entirely intuitive; before you hit them with water, they tend to all look similar in hue and it's hard to tell what you'll end up with, especially on Colourfix paper.  Once the water starts flowing though, I love how you can move the pigment around freely, and get some wonderful watercolor-like washes.

Here's the dried work in progress.  I really like the fuzziness of it! In a few parts I left the bare paper show through, because I think it's already the right color. Next step is to start laying down the Prismacolors.  I'll post more pics as I make further progress.

Last weekend Kiersten assembled a plant light stand, and it's new home is in the laundry room of our basement (at the end of last year we finished our basement and turned it into an art studio. In the process, the laundry area was upgraded from 'damp medieval dungeon' to a nice, finished laundry room). Here's a photo of the new stand, with a few happy plants basking in the full spectrum lights:

That top shelf has a few seedlings merrily growing.  Notice anything familiar about that splash of green on the right?  Let's have a closer look...

Recognize it?  That's the little green glass vase that posed for my drawing, Verdant.   Now it's living up to its name and truly going green.

One of the things that I'm a bit envious about with Google Blogger is the sense of community.  Part of this is because everyone can comment on everyone else's blog using their current credentials, and don't need to create a new login and account for each new site.  This is a bit harder to do in Wordpress, but the Gigya Sociable plug-in helps by allowing you to login using your existing Blogger/Facebook/Twitter, etc account and comment.  You'll notice the new links to the side.

I've also created a Facebook page.  For a while I wondered how a Facebook page would contribute, when I already have both a blog and a static webpage - but I think Facebook is naturally social, and updates populate across friends' walls automatically.  I've changed my mindset to realize that the blog, webpage, and Facebook page each have a different purpose and voice, and it's all about connecting more with people.

As an aside, I was thinking about the development of my own art career, and how much it was affected by the internet and social websites.  Participating in art forums like Scribbletalk really opened up my eyes to a much wider range of approaches, supports, techniques, and styles, and commentary from the artists gave insights I could never get from browsing a static site.  The distinct speckled look of my current style is due much in part to drawing on Colourfix paper, and I didn't know Colourfix paper existed before seeing Nicole Caulfield's and Ranjini Venkatachari's work on Scribbletalk.  My latest piece, Opaline Dreams, which used, in part, Neocolor II's, was also due to seeing work completed with Neocolors, and a desire to experiment.   And of course, if you're reading this, it's because I spied several artists using Wordpress, and decided to give it a whirl.

  After a last ditch snowfall a few weeks ago, winter finally gave way and suddenly it was sunny days in the 70's.  Perusing our yard, the daffodils are in bloom, the bushes are sporting some green, the birds are munching away at the feeder, and splashes of color are emerging everywhere.  Six years ago the house was a new construction and had no landscaping.  Everything which has come since then was planted by me and Kiersten (and Kiersten's really the green thumb - before we met I was lucky if I didn't kill a house cactus).  I was thinking about all of the funny things that we learned along the way, and decided to compile a list:

1. When deciding between the cheap and expensive version of a tool, you'll end up with the expensive tool either way.  The only question is whether you'll buy the cheap tool first.
2. When the tree nursery asks if, for a fee, you would like them to dig the hole and install the tree, the answer should be yes, not "Pfff...I have a perfectly good shovel..."  As it turns out, there's a reason their trucks have hydraulic lifts.
3. The extra step of staining a sample area of "Honey Wheat" deck stain will avoid the experience of having a "Pee Yellow" deck two days after you stain the entire thing.
4. Squirrels have their own core of engineers.  I suspect they have a morning meeting complete with hardhats, blueprints, and whiteboards to lay out the day's activities.  Not only are they much smarter than you, they actual enjoy the opportunity to defuse your Rube Goldberg squirrel deflector machine in the quickest manner possible.  If you happen to be an engineer, this is especially deflating.
5. Regardless of your "mad climbing skills", a ladder is a good thing to own.
6. Poison ivy looks a lot like regular ivy.
7. The longer you live in a house, the more tools you have that you don't know what they do, and can't remember why you bought them.
8. A hammock is bigger than it looks in the catalog.
9. When Archimedes said, "Give me a big enough lever and I could move the world", he most likely was trying to dig a hole in our back yard, which appears to have been built on a rock quarry.
10. Sore muscles, broken tools, replantings: many.  Enjoying the first spring blooms, and thinking of all the colors to come in our garden: priceless.

After visiting Janet Pantry's site, I noticed the artist blogroll was live - it had the most recent post of each blog along with a thumbnail.  This appears to be a standard widget in Blogger, but unfortunately in Wordpress it's somewhat hard to do.  After a bit of tinkering with plugins and code, I've updated the list on my site to follow suit (like all computer tasks, this was strangely harder than I expected).   I like that, instead of a static link list, it's a dynamic list of current content.  Hopefully it will generate some more clicks to the sites of the artists I've linked, and give them a bit more traffic.  Of course it's also nice for me to log on and see the latest from all of my favorite blogs at a glance. For those with Wordpress blogs interested in setting this up, I used the Advanced RSS plugin and created a custom template.  Once you install the plugin, just go to the settings page, click "Create New Template", then replace all of the code on the template page with mine.

I was tempted to run some fancy find and replace function to delete all the rouge Â's that have peppered my blog since the Wordpress upgrade, but through some unforseen technical glitch I probably would have deleted all the real A's too, turning my website into "The rtwork of Shwn Flchetti".  Since I don't want to be an 'rtist', I decided just to safely (and maddeningly) delete them one by one.  Ah, now back to some rtwork.

I've developed a Pavlonian twitch every time I see the alert on my blog "A new version of Wordpress is available, click here to upgrade", since every previous upgrade has resulted in a subsequent "Woes of the Web" post, usually after a week of banging my head against the keyboard in frustration as I tried to figure out where exactly all of my posts had gone, what a "fatal error in line 62" was, and how on earth to undo it all.

This upgrade required updating my web hosting account with Godaddy from PHP4 to PHP5, as well as the mySQL version of the Wordpress database.  The later part required backing up the current database, creating a new version, and restoring the data to the new version.  Surprisingly all of that went better than I expected.

Except you may have noticed that every sentence of all my posts now ends with a capital A with an accent mark.  Gah!  So if you're reading my posts wondering why I have a strange fondness for capital A's, it could be worse.  Ah, well.

I've submitted Opaline Dreams as my entry for this year's CPSA national show, the 18th Annual International Exhibition.  I'll know whether or not it's been accepted at the end of April.

Opaline Dreams was interesting in that it was my first attempt at mixing Prismacolors with Neocolor IIs, which are water soluable.  Neocolors look much like a Crayola crayon when you hold them (although they are still considered a colored pencil - imagine the 'lead' of a colored pencil wrapped in paper, instead of wood).  It takes a bit of experimenting on a test scrap of paper to determine the right combination of crayons to achieve your color, especially since, once you wet them, the color will be very intense.  For this piece, I intended to use the Neocolors only for the darks; this was because I really felt the gray green color of the Colourfix paper was a key part of the skin tones and fabric, and wanted it to show through in the lights.  Since Colourfix can be difficult to get a full range of values on, having solid darks on a lighter paper also helped address this. After the Neocolors were laid down on the paper, I brushed water over them and blended them over the paper.  For the darkest area on the right, I used a very small brush and meticulously evened out the tone.  For the hair, and darks on the right, I used a larger brush and more freely 'painted' with the water.  The result was fuzzy, and uneven, which is what I wanted.  It gave the periphery of the piece a softness that was in line with the mood.

The remainder of the piece was straight Prismacolors.  I spent the most time on the folds and lace of the gown, although it was the skin tones that I found to be the most difficult area, since there was a constant push and pull between going too far in one color and not enough in another.  I tend to end up with an unusual mix of colors in my skin tones, and this one was no exception with greens, purples, and creams.

The artist's reception for my show is Friday, January 15th, 6 pm - 8 pm at the Paper Kite Gallery, 443 Main Street, Kingston, PA 18704.   The show includes about 20 pieces and will run through mid February.

Tonight I finished final framing of the pieces to drop off this Sunday for next week's show at Paper Kite Gallery.  I always like laying out all the pieces when they're done and seeing how they look together, especially for the ones that were worked as a series.

7" x 5" colored pencil on Pastelbord.  2010.

9" x 12" Prismacolor colored pencil on storm blue Colourfix paper.

7" x 5" Prismacolor colored pencils on gray Pastelbord.  Completed 2009.

I received my copy of the December issue of the Artist's Magazine, which lists the 26th Annual Competition winners.  Although I wasn't a winner, I was a finalist in the Portrait/Figure category, and was listed in the magazine on page 57.