This weekend I turned a corner on the picture, and hit the point where everything is drawn and I can focus on pushing in color and building value.  The pattern on the pillow is still giving me trouble, but strangely the pattern in the sheets is coming together on its own.  I decided to hit the piece with a layer of fixative before continuing work early today, because it was getting pretty waxy and difficult to see how dark some areas were.  I'm always a little nervous about doing that too early, because the paper becomes slicker overall, but it seemed to work okay.  I also encountered the usual paradox where my darks didn't seem dark enough, but in actuality I needed to make all of my lights lighter.

Kiersten finished another piece on the loom this weekend, and Iggly decided to model it for us:

Slow going, but steady progress.  The pattern in the sheet is going to drive my bonkers, but I feel the angles and lines it makes really add to the movement of the composition.  I think I'm happiest with how the hand turned out - I was worried about the foreshortened hand being front and center, but that part went actually surprisingly easily.  The lower right hand portion of the picture still has the least amount of work done, just with blocking and a few glazes of jade green to color correct.  You can see the pattern of wrinkles in the sheets starting to form.

I've been working steadily on the piece that I prepared the swatches for in one of my previous posts.  The finished piece will be a panoramic 26" w x 12" H on Aubergine Colourfix paper.  If it turns out well, it will be one of my submissions for this year's CPSA show.  I love to draw twists, turns, and folds in fabric, and this piece has plenty of it!  Most of my work so far has been on the figure, and with different stages of blocking in for the fabric. On the flat portion of the sheet on the right there's just basic geometric shapes right now where the wrinkles and shadows are, but the crumpled comforter is fully blocked in and has some initial refinements, and I've started adding details closest to the figure.

After completing a few hand woven Christmas presents for family, Kiersten finished a dish towel for us.  I love that we have custom designed, hand woven towels!  It's also fun to be working side by side in the studio, with me scribbling away on a new piece and Kiersten on her loom.  I think she's contemplating a rug next.  Here's a few shots of the towel, and the loom:

I'm just getting underway on a new piece.  It has an interesting panoramic crop, which is somewhat different for me, with a final planned size of 26" W x 12" H.  I'll be working on my favorite paper, Colourfix, in a color that I haven't used much: Aubergine (usually I work on Storm Blue or Fresh Gray). The first step is always to pick my palette, and I like to do this by laying down swatches of color on scraps of the actual paper I'll be using.  I'll then keep this beside the picture throughout the process for reference.  Once I have the swatches, I'll whittle them down to a dozen or so colors and place those colored pencils into a working tray.  Sometimes I use an empty Prismacolor tin as my pencil caddy.

Here's a scan of my swatches for this piece.  They're organized by color groups, and within each color group by values.  It's also nice to see all of the colors together to get a feeling of the overall color harmony.  I'll post more work in progress pics as the piece moves along.

We actually put the tree up just after Thanksgiving, but I wasn't able to get any of the pictures of my camera due to my Macbook losing it's mind.  Now that my computer has had a brain transplant, the pics are up.  Just a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree that we put up every year, but filled with plenty of ornaments, many with their own stories and personal memories:

We've had this orange cat ornament for a while, and we noticed it looked like our feline friend, Iggly.  It'll be his first Christmas with us this year:

I snuck a peak at Kiersten's cooling cookies.  We had to try a few, strictly for quality control purposes:

Two weeks ago I curled up into my favorite corner of the couch, pulled the blanket over my legs, reached over to the coffee table to fetch my trusty Macbook, and pressed the power button.  The usual happy apple with a bite taken out of it was absent, and replaced by a blue screen of gibberish. I stared in disbelief for a while.  I pushed power buttons, clicked mice, and did obscure CTRL key combinations as if trying to invoke the computer gods.  Safe modes were invoked, OS X boot disks dusted off, and all of it led back to a blue screen of gibberish.  Finally, with my tail between my legs, I packed up my Mac and headed down to the apple service store.

"Your logic board is toast."

"Ah.  I see.  Have one of them handy?"

"Nope, but I can order it.  $1500."

"What?  This computer is 4 years old. How much is a new Macbook Pro?"

"$1500."

"Gah!"

So, after a brief fit, we came up with a Plan B:  If I could find the part cheap on Ebay, he could install it for $300, which translated in my head as, "If I can find it on Ebay, I'll completely disassemble my laptop on my own and use my mad engineering skills to swap it out."

You must pause to understand at this juncture that the technical challenge of disassembling, repairing, and reassembling something incredibly complicated is, to an engineer,  like a dangling feather on a string to a cat; you simply can't pass by without taking a swat at it.

The internet is great.  You can look up how to do just about anything, including changing out a logic board.  To get the board out, it turns out, you must first remove everything else, and I mean everything. Everything is connected via screws, wires, and connectors which would give a neurosurgeon pause.  But, one jillion microscopic screws later, and here's what the emptied case looked like.  You can see the fans and memory sitting off to the left, and the optical drive is out of the picture.  Those three copper squares are the heatsinks for the GPU and processor, and needed to be cleaned with isopropyl alcohol before having a dot of thermal grease reapplied:

Here's the new board installed:

And, after putting everything back in and hooking it back up, there was a final moment of truth when I had to push the power button.  I considered diving behind the sofa for cover, but was transfixed by the outcome after two hours of work.

And there it was!  My old buddy, ready again for countless Farmville-ing and rambling blog posts.  The original estimate was $1800, and my final cost was about $300.  Plus I got 2 quality hours of engineering catnip to entertain myself with.

This weekend we carved our pumpkins.  Check em out!

Anyone's who's been to my Facebook page has seen the occasional pictures of Iggly, our feline friend adopted from a shelter earlier this year.  Here he is.  So cute and innocent looking.  Little would you guess behind those blue eyes gears are ceaselessly turning to conjure up fresh schemes of destruction:

Since then, our house has progressively been taken over by cat distractions:  there are blinking balls for a rousing game of cat soccer, feathers dangling from sticks for cat fishing, remote controlled micro-mice, cardboard box kitty forts, carpet covered scratching posts, kitty bed(s), kitty window perches, and even his own Garfield towel folded on (what is now) his recliner.  His favorite toys, though, are my toys: computer keyboards and laptop screens are irresistible to him.  In fact, he's a master at computer keystroke combinations, somehow always stepping on the CTR-ALT and some other key to magnify the screen 2000%, select everything in Kiersten's email folder and delete it, or upload photos of himself to I Can Haz Cheezburger.  But that's a whole other post.

This post is about the most delicious, delectable, satisfying thing in the world for our cat.....mmmmm, laptop cord.  Apple Macbooks have a thin white cord which dangles down from the side of the computer.  Kiersten's cable was the first to look like the cat had gone from one end to the other as if eating corn on a cob.  Even though the damage looked superficial, the little green power light on the cable permanently went off.  Shortly after the demise of her cable, my laptop was targeted and the little green power light on mine faded into darkness as well.  Since a new cable costs $90, it was just shy of $200 worth of damage.  Ouch.  We got two new cables, and decided how we would alter the Destructinator's behavior.

Round 1: Bitter Apple vs. The Cat

Bitter Apple is sold at pet stores, and is spritzed on.  It doesn't smell like anything, but tastes horrible.  I know this of course from experience, because every time I touched the power cord, some would transfer to my hands.  Inevitably I would eat something that required me to touch my food, and voila! Blech! Even just breathing while spritzing on the stuff caused the taste to appear on the back of my tongue.  Surely this would deter the ravenous destructo-cat.

Outcome: Iggly merrily munching on, and destroying the brand new $90 cable, oblivious to the spray.  Me Bitter Appling myself at least a dozen times, no matter how many times I made mental notes not to touch the cable.  Cat:1, Humans: -1

Fortunately the destroyed section was localized to about 4" of cable, and I was able to surgically remove and splice it this time.  Apple power cables are particularly vulnerable to pet damage, since they are coaxial and a simple puncture can short them by bring the outer axial wires in contact with the inner ones.  Aside of course from the equipment issue, there's also the danger that Iggly will use all nine of his lives at once as he discovers electricity.

Round 2: Out of Sight, Out of Mind vs. the Cat

We went to Lowes searching for cable protectors, and found some plastic flexible tubing which looks a bit like vacuum cleaner hose. Kiersten installed the hose over her line, but I instead opted to unplug my cable when unattended and place it behind the glass of the tv stand.  I found the cat would sit on the other side of the glass door and stare at it, like a kid looking into a bakery window.  I envisioned him smacking his lips hungrily.

Outcome: This worked until, inevitably, I went to bed one night and forgot to stow the cord.  The next day I found the little green power light had shone it's last light.  Fortunately we'd taken to the habit of always turning off the power strip when unattended, so at least the cord was munched on sans power. The vacuum hose was a suit of armor for Kiersten's cable, but was a bit awkward to have dangling from your lap.   Cat:2, Humans:0.5

Round 3: Stinky, Smelly Cable vs. Everyone

After surgically extracting the new damaged section of cable and splicing it, we proceeded with Plan C, the Stinky Cable.  It's not actually called stinky cable - it has some "pet guard" title - but it's a heavy, clear, flexible slit tube which has been coated in a citrus fragrance that pets find unappealing.  By citrus, they mean citronella-ish, and strong.  We had to let the cable air outside overnight. Now it's installed on both laptop cables, both little green lights are on, and the humans have been effectively repelled into other rooms.  We're not sure if our weird cat will be repelled yet, since we dropped some of the tubing on the ground and watched him merrily play with it for a while.  I have the strange feeling that he's very, very amused by all of this.

Outcome:  No humans in the living room.  Cat, tbd.

This Saturday I will be giving a workshop for CPSA DC115 titled "Evoking Mood with Neocolors and Colored Pencil", and I've got an area in my studio filled up with all my prep materials.  Like laying out pieces prior to a show, it's always fun to see everything all at once, together.  Here's a few snapshots:

Last week we attended the CPSA 18th Annual International Exhibition at the Art Museum of Los Gatos, California.  This was my fourth acceptance into the annual show, but my first time attending the convention earlier in the week so that I could see the entrant's slide show and participate in the silent auction.  I was really impressed by the quality of all the entries, and it was also very interesting to see the second piece submitted for artists who were accepted (you can submit two, but if accepted, only 1 is chosen).  Having not been to the gallery yet at the time of the slide show, it was also fun to try and guess which of the two pieces were accepted, for artists that I knew were in the show.  The slide show is presented in the much the same way that the awards are during the banquet; a reader projects the work on a screen, reads the title, artist's name, and artist's location.  I think it's great that everyone who submits gets to have their work viewed and recognized. There are breaks throughout the slide viewing to give away door prizes.  Just about everyone wins a prize (I won a pad of watercolor paper).  Separately, there are raffle tickets you can buy for the bigger prizes, and those were awesome - complete colored pencil sets from Caran D'Ache, Prismacolor, Neocolor; Icarus boards, year's subscriptions to the Artist's Magazine.  Also, the hospitality suite provided a great bag of freebies, including current issues of the Artist's Magazine, Derwent pencil tins, Canson sketchbooks, Stonehenge pads, and the samples of the new Lyra colorstripe pencils. The silent auction also was a blast, with an E-bay like countdown and flurry of final bidding.  My piece went to Shelly Minnis, who also bought my other silent auction piece two years ago.  The big bucks went for Elizabeth Patterson's piece, which I believe set a new record at about $700.

The awards banquet had a great slide show and talk by Vera about the 20th year anniversary of the CPSA.  For the awards, the top prize went to Shinji Harada's photoreal "Grapes in a Basket".

The artist's reception on Saturday was fun.  We had a bus shuttle us the 15 miles or so to the gallery, and it was a perfect, warm, sunny day for it.  The gallery space was somewhat small, and divided into three rooms, two at the entrance, and one on the bottom floor.  I actually prefer the smaller spaces, and the energy that comes from having everyone packed into them.  It's fun to hear all of the conversations about the different works swirling around you.  My piece was on the top floor in the left-hand room, and had a nice position in the center of the wall directly across where you first enter the room.

Here are a few pictures from the show:

Today I received notification of acceptance of "Opaline Dreams" into the North Light Book "Strokes of Genius 3: The Best of Drawing", scheduled to be released in October 2011.  I'm really happy to be accepted - I love this series of books, and routinely flip through them for inspiration.

The Silent Auction pieces are now posted on the CPSA website, and available for perusal.  What a great collection of small works - I want them all!  This year I'll actually make the show early enough to participate in the silent auction, so I'll get a chance to place some bids.  Now, the problem is narrowing it down!  You can view the pieces here.

I've thought about writing a post about this before, and had some reservations, but it's something going on in my life right now, and something I had some good news on today, so I thought I would write about it.  It takes a little bit of storytelling. In 1985, I got together with a couple of friends after school for a game of football.  It was a half-day of school, we had an actual field to play on, and it had just rained, giving us some nice, muddy ground - all in all, perfect.  In the course of the game, I got whacked in the eye.  The injury caused the lens and iris of my eye to fill up with blood, and I lost vision in my left eye.  After a week in the hospital, my vision slowly returned.  It took another month before my pupil undilated. After assorted follow-ups, the eye doctor said that everything was fine, but that 20 years from now, I may have some problems.

As it turns out, he was correct.  There is a tubing meshwork that moves fluid through your eye, and some of my meshwork was permanently damaged by the injury.  When I was younger, my eye was able to better compensate for the damage, but in my late 30's that changed.  As a result, I developed glaucoma in my left eye.  Three years ago I was upset when I learned I had a condition which had no cure, that caused blindness, and would require daily medication for the rest of my life.  Other than the knowledge of it, however, there were no other symptoms - no pain, no noticeable loss of vision - just a routine of visual field tests, retinal imaging, and pressure measurements every 6 months, plus eye drops to try and keep my eye pressure down.  There are different types of glaucoma - for those interested, mine is secondary open angle.

About 2 years ago I noticed my eyeglass prescription seemed to be changing.  Even though I am nearsighted, I was losing the ability to focus on near objects in my left eye.  At first, my eye doctor thought I needed bifocals.  After ordering glasses and discovering the prescription was still wrong, I started to become frustrated when no eyeglass prescription would allow me to see clearly.  Not only was my near vision affected, but so was my distance.  Everything in my left eye was blurry, even with glasses.  An examination with dilated pupils revealed that I had a nuclear cataract.  Although cataracts are common for people later in life, injuries, as in my case,  can cause them to occur earlier.  As mine progressed, it was like looking at the world through a dirty windshield; sunlight, or headlights at night would wash out the entire scene. Colors became progressively shifted towards yellow and brown.  The distortion caused double and triple images of text and lines.

Although cataract surgery is routine, for someone with glaucoma there is additional risk, I was hesitant.  In the spring of this year, however, my routine check up showed that my eye pressure had elevated further, and my doctor was considering laser surgery to reduce the pressure.  He also suggested the option of having the cataract surgery, which may also reduce eye pressure.  We talked through the risks, and I chose the cataract surgery, since it was inevitable.  I had the surgery this past Tuesday, and Kiersten was there with me (and has been taking great post surgery care of me)

In cataract surgery, your existing natural eye lens is completely removed, and replaced with a synthetic one.  In the process, they also give your new lens the correct prescription so you're no longer nearsighted (I chose to also have my astigmatism corrected).   The downside is that it's fixed focus; like most middle aged people, you will need reading glasses for text closer than arm's length.  Considering I couldn't read anything with my left eye, this sounded pretty good to me.

Today was my post op appointment, and I was a bit nervous.  I showed up with the plastic clear eye patch and giant sunglasses that LASIK patients are probably familiar with. My eye surgeon told me that everything went perfectly, and he was pleased with the outcome.  We checked my vision on the eye chart, and we were both surprised that I had 20/20 vision in my left eye, one day after surgery.   A measurement of my eye pressure yielded the lowest pressure to date for me, even lower than my right, healthy eye.  The surgery wasn't a cure for my glaucoma,  but I'm happy that it helped. It was a cure for the cataract, though. The colors I see in my left eye are crisp, and clear, and untinged. I really can't voice what it's like to get your vision back, or to go from not being able to see clearly with any glasses to seeing 20/20 with no glasses.  My next follow up appointment is Monday.

Today the list of accepted artists for the CPSA 18th Annual International Exhibition was published on the CPSA website, and my submission, Opaline Dreams, made the list.  Woo hoo!  The exhibit runs July 22nd to August 20th at The Art Museum of Los Gatos, California, with the artist's reception on Saturday, July 31st. Also - some more good news from the weekend - Opaline Dreams was juried into the local 2010 Wilkes-Barre Fine Arts Fiesta, and won first place in its category (Graphics), and took Best of Show (the show included categories for Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Graphics, Crafts, and Watercolor).  The Fiesta runs May 20 - 23.

April may bring showers, paving the way for May flowers, but it also is crunch time to meet a series of annual art deadlines.  These past two weeks have been a flurry of activity.  I just finished my CPSA Silent Auction piece, Citrine Dreams, and I'm working on matting it now.  Two weeks ago I had giclee proofs printed of Bend and Crescendo, burned a CD, wrote an artist's statement, and sent it off in the mail to Vera Curnow; this is the 20th anniversary of the Colored Pencil Society of America, and to commemorate, CPSA is creating a book.  All signature members were invited to submit two pieces for the book.  If all goes well, it will be available during convention week in Santa Clara.  Today was the drop off for the Wilkes-Barre Fine Arts Fiesta, an annual local juried art show, and I submitted Opaline Dreams.  Coming up on May are two submission deadlines which I took care of this weekend also:  The Artist's Magazine 27th Annual Art Competition (May 3) and the book Strokes of Genius 3: The Best of Drawing, Fresh Perspectives (May 1).  Last year I was a finalist in the Artist's Magazine competition, with Crescendo, and my name appeared in the December issue.  This year I submitted Opaline Dreams.  For Strokes of Genius, I went all out (did I mention that I really want to get into this book?), and submitted Bend, Crescendo, Cascade, Opaline Dreams, and Wrapped.  Wrapped was an unusual choice with that grouping, but it looks a little more like something drawn than painted, so I included it in case my other work is too painting-like for the book's requirements. Phew!  Just one more project to do now, and it's a very cool one.  Last year I did two shows at Paper Kite Gallery.  One was the Free Art Show, and those who donated pieces were invited to participate in a July 2010 show.  The July show will be a type of tribute show;  one of the gallery owners had inherited many drawings when his mother passed away a few years ago.  Artists participating in the July show were allowed to take one of the drawings and use it as an inspiration or foundation for their piece.  Many of the drawings were charcoal life drawings, and the figurative works appealed to me.  I'm really looking forward to it - it's like a design challenge you would get in art school; here are the parameters, now, to be true to the original concept of the artist while creating a work that is also uniquely my own.

Well, enough writing for now, time to get back to work!

Finished!  Time to complete was 9 days, probably around 30 hours.  After coating the piece with fixative, and letting it dry, I did some color correction throughout, and then final detail work.  I always try to avoid using black until the very end; it's my trump card for values, and once I play it, I can't go any darker.  You can see how the hair has more definition from where the blacks were introduced.  I'm happy with how it turned out - I really wanted something softer, which worked with the waxiness of the Neocolors, to have a more painterly feel to it.  Now I just need to mat it with a backing and place it into a plastic sleeve.  If you like it, you can bid on it at the CPSA Silent Auction, which is July 29th at the 18th Annual International Exhibition in Santa Clara, California.

Here's the progression side by side:

Just about done!  Tomorrow I'll hit it with a coat of fixative, then do a few tweaks and further color correction.

Picking up some steam, now.  There's a point in every drawing where the hardest parts are done, and you get to play with colors and details.  Feels like I've reached it with this update.  Started to refine the lace, although there's still a lot of color correcting to do there, and some detail work.  Looking forward to dabbling on Tuesday (although it will be competing with my Lost addiction, so I probably won't be as productive!)