RTT-shameless self promotion

I totally plan to shamelessly self-promote today.

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 Paintings:
This is the one that I've been working on for a week or so now. It is coming along. I need to let the painting dry a while longer. I'm mostly working on the hair right now and blending the flesh colors. The blending stage takes the longest time. Sketching takes a little while mostly because getting the perspective right is difficult for me. Slapping the first layer of paint on doesn't take any time at all, a couple of hours at most. The blending and layering stages takes forever since you can only work on a little bit at a time. From now on I'll be adding highlights, low-lights and detail.

This is the second one that I am working on. As you can see it is another grayscale piece. I really like the abstract quality of it, JR not so much but than JR doesn't really like any abstract paintings. It is not a true abstract, of course, more of a study. This painting is of a baby's eyelashes. Which I think is kind of cool. My friend Lacey took the picture of her son while he was sleeping. I cropped it a little closer and chose to paint it on a 12 x 12 canvas. I think it gives it an interesting sense of motion and emotion. Once again, during the coming weeks I'll add the details. What do you think?

I have two more paintings in the drawn out phase. One is the banner from the "We can Afford That" site without the text. The other is an old photograph of JR's grandmother and her friend/sister (I'm not sure which) boarding a train home from boarding school for Easter break. Obviously, the photograph is in black and white since it was taken around 1910, but I'm going to painting it in color. I'm going for a very impressionism style with this one. It will be interesting to see how it comes out. I've found that paintings tend to take on a life of their own. I'm sure these two won't be any different.

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If you haven't watched it or if you have but found it so compelling that you just HAVE to watch again or if you have time on your hands or you just can't get enough of University of Houston during WWII history or you are so bored that you will watch anything even mildly interesting in an effort to relieve your boredom. Here is the documentary film I made with some others.



The University of Houston: War and Growth, 1939-1950 from UH Memories on Vimeo.


I figured out how to actually embed the file! Yay me! I'm feeling oh so clever now.

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As a Goldendoodle Nessa doesn't shed. Which is a good thing. What is a bad thing is the amount of money that it costs me to take her to the groomers every 3 months. Since, I have become very cheap this year I've decided to groom Nessa myself. I'm proud to say that she doesn't look too much like a lawnmower cut her hair and I've only nicked her once. The groomers can't say that. Now, if I could only be more proactive about bathing her every couple of weeks and brushing her at least once a week she'd have to have less mats cut out of her fur.


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As many of you know, my one New Year's resolution was to do one random act of kindness every day. This has now become sort of mantra for me and it has spilled over to JR. We were doing our (what has now become) bi-weekly grocery shopping trip and another driver was being a jerk. I said to JR, just let him cut in and don't get all huffy about it. Then call it your random act of kindness for today. Which he did. JR has been getting more on-board with this philosophy. Pretty soon we will either be the nicest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse (name that paraphrased movie quote) or biggest suckers to ever live. I'm okay with either.


That seems to be the limit of my random today. head over the Stacy's place by clicking on the button at the top of the page to read more random posts from other exciting bloggers.

Love,
M