Saturday, January 16, 2010

Back On Line

It is hard to believe that one month has gone by since my last post, but time has just been flying by and finally I have some time to catch up. One of our biggest goals was to finish some paintings to submit to the judge for the Pastel Winter Show which will be held in February and both of us put pastel to the easel and worked hard to produce several paintings each. After getting feedback from friends and neighbors we each picked the best 3 for submission. Then the fun began (read hassles) with none of our 4 photo editors able to to do both the decrease in pixel resolution and resizing to inches. OK, fine....we headed off to Best Buy to get the expensive Adobe Photoshop Editor and brought it home only to find out that we did not have enough RAM on the (old) laptop to load the program. Quick emails to my brother for HELP and he came to the rescue by ordering the RAM from some internet site and then coming over to install it for us. While he was here he also installed the new program as well to make sure we were up and running, OUR HERO for the day, for sure. But then we had some downtime learning how to take a digital photo of a painting which should be a piece of cake, right? What is the problem, other than the painting was a little crooked, the camera wasn't centered, the wind blew the easel over, it was like wading through mud. Then we had to load the photos onto the computer and learn how to manipulate our new program and the clock was tick, tick, ticking down towards the date it all had to be mailed, during the Christmas season no less. But finally it was submitted and we just received our letters of acceptance two days ago. Allan had a seascape accepted and I had a pomegranate and a sheep shed accepted. Now we are getting the accepted paintings framed for the show which opens Feb 5th and we are right back at the easel to try and get more paintings done for the Spring show deadline of March 7th. We have also started up our weekly art lesson/consultation/critique with Nancy Clauss, the artist we worked with in Scottsdale last year. In addition to all of this we have been visiting with friends and neighbors, playing BINGO every Wed night (don't laugh...I have won two jackpots) and helping my brother with his landscaping/having lunch once a week. In the middle of all of this, both Allan and I had skin biopsies done, Allan had new glasses made, and I had the flu for over a week. Oh yeah, and it was Christmas somewhere in there. But my new year resolution is to be a more frequent blog writer....I guess anything would be an improvement over the lack of blogs in the last month. But we have been keeping up with all of our blogging friends and it sounds like everyone is as busy as we are and having a great time too. My son-in-law is envious of all the fish that Mark and Renita are catching down in Rockport (although their photos are all pretty suspicious with everyone dressed in down jackets....the fish are probably freezing and moving too slow to get away. We heard from Jim and Nancy too....they are giving up their jobs at the Rose Parade and leaving sunny California for even sunnier Arizona where we will see them in February. Rose and Mike will be staying a while in San Francisco and we will be glad to see them again when they return. Take care all......and let us know what you think about the paintings.

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