Wordless Wednesday: It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween, all across the land...

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Original art available to see in person at Images Salon...

If you're in the Los Angeles area, I have some paintings up at Images Salon. They give wonderful manicures and pedicures. Gentlemen, don't be shy. Just because Michelangelo went for a month at a time without taking his boots off, doesn't mean you have to neglect your feet!

They're located at 85 South Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, CA 91105 and their number is 626-683-8682.

To see the paintings individually, please visit my website here and visit the Floral Gallery. The ones up at Images include two anthurium paintings, one sunflower painting, and one orchid painting.

Quatre et Finis! The final image of my sunflower painting...

Here is the final image of my original 24"x18" sunflower painting.

Both the original and prints are available on my website here.

Wordless Wednesday: Temptation... Did I succumb? Of course I did...

Un, deux, trois... Here is image #3 of my in progress sunflower painting...

Petals and more petals...

In Progress Sunflower Painting 2 and the book Bloggers Boot Camp

Here is the second image of my sunflower painting Sunlight Sunbright.

This week I read Bloggers Boot Camp by Charlie White and John Biggs: learning how to build, write, and run a successful blog. If you are looking into going into blogging as a professional, journalistic endeavor, this could be a very helpful and useful book. If you are looking to improve your blog in general, while it has some helpful nuggets, this book might be best checked out from a library.

My biggest take away from the book is their suggestion for consistent blogging Monday through Friday. I don't expect I'll manage that weekly, sometimes I'm too engrossed in my paintings to come up for air much, but I will make the attempt to blog more consistently. Some of the time that is... Other times I may fall off the face of the earth in a haze of art creation, only to return when the fires burn less hot.

In Progress Portrait of a Sunflower Painting, Image 1...

Here is the start of my sunflower painting titled Sunlight Sunbright. It is a 24" x 18" acrylic painting on canvas that I took photographs of as I painted it at various steps. There are four images and it took around two weeks to complete.

I knew I wanted to paint a sunflower but my initial debate was if my painting were to be based on a store bought sunflower or one from a garden. Both are beautiful, but they are different. This time I decided to use a reference photograph of a sunflower that had grown in the garden of my mother's students.

Above is the first image. As you can see there is some white paint showing, this is where there's a disparity from my lines and where I wanted them to be...

Wordless Wednesday: Red Hibiscus Flower by a Cocktail Sign

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Space Invaders in Culver City!!!

This Sunday a friend and I went down to Culver City to pick up some brunch and what did we discover... Space Invaders!! Right off the bat, one of them squished my friend. While I was unable to save him, I was able to capture the moment on camera. Fortunately, he had more lives available, so we were able to get our brunch and safely manuever away from the Space Invader plagued Town Plaza.

The Culver City Cultural Arts commission hired artist Jason Torchinsky to install these giant Space Invaders temporarily around and about Culver City. I did google, but I was unable to find out how long the Space Invaders will be around. I have some additional Space Invader photos that might make it up at some point; but since I'm not sure how long the Space Invaders will be around, I decided to try and post this one relatively quickly. Thanks Culver City, for making our mission to acquire sustenance more perilous and entertaining than it usually is...

Do you think Alex was squished for:

1. Missing his brother's art show opening...

2. He had it coming, he knows what he did...

3. To save Lisa from getting squished or dirty...

4. All of the above.

I'm voting for all of the above...

A blue angel painting, the movie Dolphin Tale, and a decided lack of sketches...

I painted this painting quite a while back, in 2003 in fact... By rights it should already have been up on my website; however, when I was doing the photography of the works I had, I managed to forget this one. It was hiding in plain sight on the shelf in my room...

So, to see it up on the website, please visit here.

I saw the movie Dolphin Tale this week. It was very moving and sweet. I don't always post about movies that I've seen on my blog because I worry about revealing too much information; but there was a nice story within a story that I liked about dolphins and children. It is a Native American Tale. So, here goes... At some point the goddess decided that she wanted her people to live on the mainland, so she put up a rainbow bridge for them to travel. As they crossed the children were playing as they crossed the bridge and some fell off the bridge towards the ocean. The people were worried that the goddess would be angry and their children would die when they hit the ocean. The goddess, however, was so moved by how beautifully the children played that just as they were about to hit the ocean, she transformed them into dolphins, so that they could play forever...

I've been promising sketches for quite some time and I have not followed through. While I am sketching, it is by no means a consistent endeavor. I think that I'm not currently in the right space to make constant sketching a priority. That could change, but for now, that is how it is. If that changes, I will try to scan and post, but it is not an endeavor I currently feel like pursuing...