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Recently, I have be a slakard in adding to my blog. My bad! I have been involved with certain creative endeavours. This Ulead Video Studio just fascinates me. There are so many things you can do. One of my favorites is creating slide shows. We have hundreds of photos from our travels. With the software you can zoom and pan the stills to give the illusion of motion and even add such things as rain, snow or lightning.

About the left. It is a CD for the hearing impaired. How can this be you ask. By reading the CD of course!

Video

I'm getting too much into video. It is all consuming. I dream of mash-ups. I look at my lunch on my plate and begin imagining how it would look animated. Every photo becomes part of a slideshow. Every drawing needs to be animated and every scrap of video needs a new soundtrack. It's not that I'm obsessed but when I refer to seeing some one wide angle the film is running off the sprockets in my mind.

I simply must find a way to share my knowledge via how-to videos. It is late and I'm about to fade out....

dig-it

Today while walking along East Bay Street in Charleston, SC, I discovered an archaeological dig. It was like out of a George Lucas movie. if I had been wearing my Indy fedora i could have joined right in. We talked with a historian on the site and he identified out the other workers. Archaeologists as well as laborers were on the job digging dirt and sifting it through a screen to recover fragments pottery and such. The dig was under the the auspices of the Walled City Task Force, a consortium of non-profit organizations and sectors of the city government. Charleston is the only walled city built by the British in North America. The Spanish build won in St. Augustine, FL and the French in Montreal, Canada. You can keep apprised of the goings on in the dig by visiting the website at www.walledcitytaskforce.org .

moving static images

I have continued to try new thing involving my artwork embelished with video effects. In doing so I can add motion to an otherwise static image. The smaller image is of a scan of a inject monoprint. Several pases through the printer with several resists applied produced this result. The face drawinf was a pastel. i combined them all into the moving image. I used Ulead software to do it.

From Sea to Shining Sea

Our vacation this year was over 10,000 miles by automobile. It was also a testament for our compatibility as a couple. Contrary to what the pictures show, I did almost all of the cooking. Late in the day we could check into a campsite, set up camp, i.e. tent and all, and have dinner ready within 30 minutes. The navigation system in the Acura was a great. Last year we got lost on the Colorado River near Moab, Utah following Yahoo Maps. I actually took over 800 photographs on the trip and probably did about 100 sketches and finished 12 plein air paintings. This will be our last coast to coast trip for a few years.

Who would believe that once again our highway would be filled with cattle driven by cowboys. Last year I think that it happened to us in Utah and there were only a few cows. But this year there were probably about 100 in the coming toward us in a highway in Wyoming.

As usual I carried my sketchbook with me on the trip. It includes drawings, rubbings, stickers and stamps collected along the trip. Many of the drawings will be used as reference for future paintings. I'm not really sure what a used cable car ticket can be used for.