One week, she had light brown hair; the next, she'd dyed it that color I have a particular loathing for -- the burgundy red not found in nature, which is so inexplicably popular with women I know. It looks wretched, fake, plastic, and makes your skin look dead.... When I become Bitch Queen of the Universe, I'm making dying your hair this color a flogging offense.
Read More20 Design Reminders: #2 -- Communicate; don't decorate.
Or a poster where you could barely make out what the message was from underneath all the grungy ink marks?... If you haven't, let's watch it now: Now, with the first couple of modifications to the packaging, it looks like communication is happening: feature descriptions are added, bullet points added, OS requirements… all well and good, yes? But then, something happens, That video's an object lesson in what happens when you try too hard to communicate, and end up decorating.
Read Morethe gallery's updated
Last night when I got home, it was overcast, and still light; so I took advantage of this great lighting, and shot a stack of oil paintings I'd been meaning to photograph. Here's one: This one was about three hours, done all in one sitting.... Take a look at the updated gallery to see more, if you like.
Read Morethe one where I meet wil wheaton
Yesterday, J and I went down to the Stone brewery, home of Arrogant Bastard Ale, where we planned to drink a lot of great beer, and listen to Wil Wheaton read from his new book, The Happiest Days of our Lives.... For the last couple of days, I'd been trying to think of what cool thing I could bring Wil, and thought about maybe doing a painting of him and his wife -- but the only photo on his site of the two of them was in Halloween kit, as zombies.... He surprised me by recognizing me and thanking me; we chatted a bit about writing and art. I told him about having wanted to bring him a cool painting of him and Anne, but they both totally jumped on the zombie portrait idea.
Read Moretribal bellydancer painting
I'm very happy with how this one turned out, and Sabrina, the model, liked it too, which was a great compliment.... It's interesting to me how the paintings of models I know and get along with turn out whole orders of magnitude better than the ones where I don't know the model at all. There's something about making that connection that helps me immensely in getting a read on who they are and what they're about, and I think it shows in the resulting work.
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