Yes. 
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An excellent suggestion! I actually have one, tucked under the mattress so I can grab it when the inevitable happens in the middle of the night and the power is off. 
It was too dark to head back to the bedroom so I went out to where I keep the puck next to the fridge whose lights have failed
I need to keep that headlamp in my pocket, since lately we never know when the power is going to go out around here. Perfectly sunny day and “boom” lights out no explanation. :blink"
BTW, do you have a pic of one of your rat bikes? I’d love to see that.
Ok: This is what remains of the Aspen grove in our front yard. Sorry for the poor quality but my phone doesn’t have a polarizing lens to remove the inevitable glare from wet oils.
I learned only a few years ago that an Aspen grove is actually a single life form, either male or female, and that some stretch themselves over hundreds of miles.
I started this by toning the ground with an dioxazine purple and linseed oil and then rubbing most of that off. That is what appears now as the sky colour.
The rest was ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, yellow oxide (yellow ochre) and Cad yellow medium. I had a touch of viridian on the palette but only used it once to dull a yellow green a bit more. I sketched out the big dark shapes with a mix of ultramarine and burnt sienna. You can still see the bluish bits poking through.
I need to do a few touch ups and then I might make a 12x 12 inch panel from it.
in a couple more hours the sun (if it stays out) will be right to get a proper photo ref for it. Too bad there has been so much rain that it has washed some the brighter colours out.
You can probably tell I was racing the sun. lol
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Never been in an Aspen grove. I feel like my life is incomplete. 
Nice painting!
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The British Isles are littered with ancient monuments. Standing stones, circles, tombs, henges, mounds, and rock carvings, some of them dating back ten thousand years or more.
I first became interested in these monuments as a child. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, my Dad used to take me walking up on the high moorlands. He would show me the standing stones, and tell me “This is where we came from. These were our people”.
Even as a small child, I was fascinated by those ancient, silent, stones, looming out of the mist on the high tops. I was captivated by the mystery then, and I still am. When I had the chance to go to University, I studied archaeology. Having a degree didn’t answer my questions, though. It just raised a whole lot of new ones.
About 35 years ago. I started photographing British and Irish ancient monuments. For a long time I tried to get away every year for a little photographic tour, even if it was only for a few days. Consequently, I now have a huge collection of pictures. There must be thousands of them.
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Those are fascinating. Nice!
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Fantastic, @Polyphemus ! Have you considered making a Coffee Table Tome? ;`)
I gotta say I love those stones. 
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So… when are you going to share the rest? 
Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Anything you share of my ancestral homeland is groovy. Now, I have a new present to myself to fuss with. Pictures maybe next week. Hopefully with more to share…
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You know, I’m a bit ambivalent about that. I put an awful lot of time and effort into creating these things. Over the years, I’ve tried sharing some of them on line, and I found that people stole them. That didn’t bother me too much, and I pretty much expected it.
Then I found that people were stealing them and claiming credit for them. Then I found people were stealing them, claiming credit for them, and trying to charge other people money for them. That really annoyed me. So for many years now, they’ve just remained in my private archives.
But now I’m approaching 70, and my health is not great. One day, I’m going to die, or I’ll just become so sick I can’t work at the computer any more. And then they’ll just be lost. I really should do something with them.
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I can totally appreciate that. I feel the same & struggle to share more than a snippet.
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I just want to recreate them in NMS. I wish they would give us more stone to work with…
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That would be very cool. I haven’t tried to do that… Can you stack stone decor?
Even just finding mysterious stone circles & such would be fun.
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You can stack them now that we have free placement. Can be a bit fiddly and we need more shapes
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I gotta try this…which reminds me.
I haven’t done the Weekend Event yet.
Oops. Been busy.
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I’ve been gazing at your photos again and was wondering if you have ever thought of making replicas of some of the stones and circles you’ve studied?
I don’t know why, but I find I am especially drawn to the third one, Poulnabrone 01. I would love to go back “home” and paint the stones in the soft landscapes there.
I can’t remember if there are stones in Wales, but I do believe there are some in Scotland?
Just wanted to get your thoughts on the sculpture thing. Polymer clay is a wonderful medium for that.
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Ancient monuments tend to survive best in wild and lonely places. When they are close to population centres, there is always the danger that farmers will find they get in the way of ploughing, or that they are a convenient source of building stone. There are also recorded instances of Christian communities deliberately destroying them, because they believed them to be the work of the Devil. They don’t survive well near people.
There are lots of ancient monuments in the wilder areas of both Wales and Scotland. One particulaly good place is the Orkney Islands, which are off the far North Scottish coast.
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Stepping around the musty old rocks and voodoo dolls… wait, whut? I think I’m having another Steve moment. Which actually I love old rocks and things, which makes me think of another study to attempt…
Anyhow, I’m blathering. On to the important matters of consumerism and stuff! Which means I have a few more goodies to share. Which hopefully means some art to share… soon ™.
So, this is/was my current art center. Complete with a makeshift paint shelf which I keep knocking over and scaring my alarm system - GRAH!! Oh, and there go my two show-off pets Stage and Fright, wanting some intranet appreciation.
I grew tired of picking up my paints and apologizing to my alarm system, and I kind of lost all reason. Meaning one day, a big box showed up at my door. Oh wait, no, I drove off to Hobby Lobby which was having one of it’s frequent half off sales. And I showed up with a big box, which warned ominously was too heavy for one person. But, dash all that, I’m a vet! I’ll just - ZOMG… (pictures of lugging not to follow) 60 pounds, and even better, bulky… but no one around to help, so… carping heck… 
Upstairs, I discovered some heavy stuff inside it. Which means this is an unboxing thing. And there’s my show-off hairy hand wanting to be on the intranets…
Dragging the awesome guts out. Some of them, with Fright supervising…
And construction commenced. Aaand… one piece refused to fit…
Oh well, that shelf was in the way anyhow, I like swinging my legs sometimes when I sit- ow! For now, it’ll add some rigidity to… I think it’s a sofa. A little more piece adding aaand… I’m pretty sure it’s not a sofa. Maybe it’s the answer to my prayers! Stage and Fright seem to like it. I just hope that doesn’t mean a family expansion…
I think it looks a bit all right. There is a little swivel basket to hold a sip of tea, soda or paint thinner - bleagh! And a foam brush holder - with a slot for a cellphone for when your agent calls for a new exibition, how modern. And with a little scooting and floor racket, we have… the new studio space which means all kinds of creative production! At least I hope so. If nothing else, no more spilled paint tubes all over the fracking floor and a whiny alarm complaining about crashing boards! GRAH!!
Oh, and while this was going on, a pair of boxes showed up at the door, for reals this time. And oh goody, varnishes and… beeswax?? Oh that’s right, I ordered that too. And more boards because… incentive.
And to top it off, I celebrated by getting a Vy’keen… letter opener or something…
So… no art, yet, still staring at my circle occasionally. But now I have… incentive!
As an aside, the reason I call my twoo lovable little fuzzballs of luuv Stage and Fright is because… just because! But seriously, the yellower legged one was originally Naraku, after the naughty guy from Inuyasha who was all kinds of rude to everyone. But then another one followed me home a few years ago, and I just had to keep her. I was debating what to name her, like Kagura, but I blurted out, “Stage and Fright,” and it stuck. And rather than being random words, “naraku” which the Japanese pronounce “narak,” is a little chamber under the stage originally for props in Japanese plays. Somewhere along the way it acrued some creepy connotations. Maybe because villains began to appear from it, perhaps as jump scares to the protagonists. And this is why Rumiko Takahashi named her villain Naraku, and why my two adorable little vampire bugs are called Stage n Fright. Cool and disposable, huh! 
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Congratulations on your latest art acquisitions! They look awesome and I am sure they will feel awesome when you start painting again.
I have two oil paintings on the go at the moment. The 4x4-inch plein air study I made last week when the sun decided to make a brief visit, and a 10x8-inch study from a photo I took last fall.
I am going to have to finish that plein air study inside. The weather has been crazy this year. It has rained so much this year that I feel like I’m living in the tropics. So I haven’t been able to get outside a the right time of day to finish that one. I did finally get a reasonable photo to work with. All I got done on that one before the light failed was the main blocking in of the darks before the light failed completely.The photo reference of the second piece really caught my attention a few weeks ago. I started a photo album for the painting but before I could start working on it we had a huge mid-summer storm that hit the power with a kind of stuttering outage over about fifteen minutes. It really buggered the studio computer.
I should back up here and say that my eyesight is now so bad that I need to be extremely close to my reference in order to see any detail, like the edges where shapes meet. So as an experiment Mal set up a Unix box for me (a tiny thing --6x8x4-inches!) that all I had to do was plug in a USB stick with the photo ref on it and it would magically appear on the attached 20" screen. I found that working from the screen from photos that I had prepared in advance in Photoshop is much superior to working from printed photos. Painting from light is much closer to painting from life.
I have UPS blocks for my main computer that I use for gaming and photo- and video-editing, but the tiny Studio computer was as yet unprotected and died. So there I was mid painting and no reference.
After some discussion with Mal we decided to try out using the Uncommon Room widescreen TV to see if that would work for me. So I started this second 10x8 landscape working from that. And it was lovely! Not positioned well, and a LOT of glare from the East and South windows right in my eyes (nice North light on my easel though).
Working in the UC room felt a little vulnerable, so once I knew it would work, I put everything back in the studio. We ordered a wall mount for the TV and Mal loaned me his wall-mount swivel so I could turn the TV to portrait mode. (That TV/Monitor belongs to Mal’s work, so it will need to be replaced. He makes gorgeous procedural digital particle-effect motion art for his collaborative partnership with a glass artist. They have made (iirc) six installations so far, and sold three of them. They are currently working on a large commission piece.) Once the TV/monitor (I almost wrote “monster”) is in place in the Studio I will be able to work more comfortably again.
I’m thinking that once that is installed, I will take pieces of my videos and loop a few seconds of them, and paint from those. I have found that the colours/lighting/shadows seem truer in the videos than those just snapped with the camera app. Also that way I also get the sounds, wind, birds, frogs, etc. Looking forward to more of that.
Here is a photo of the TV acting as a monitor for the photo ref for the WIP that’s on my EdgePro easel:
What do you think about the monitor vs photo print-out idea for viewing painting refs?
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I agree with what you stated about the monitor being lit and having more of an outside feel. I have drawn from photo but not monitor but I know drawing from photo, for me, is not quite like drawing from still-life. I would think the monitor would give an extra sense of depth. Should also be easier to see. Nice set up!
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You do such lovely work. I’d love to see what you could do with a reference on the computer screen.
I have also noticed that my device (1Phone) gives a much closer colour representation in videos than it does in photo mode. Also in video mode you can make audio notes about colours and other pertinent info about the scene/still-life while you are videoing it.
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Goodness, what a day, and I had to help it some to drag it out. I was going to respond at the 2hr mark, and it may well be 17hrs since you posted when I reply. Meh, Jack needed help this morning with the frooked up deck. But I digress.
Mal’s procedural art sounds interesting. How big are the monitors he uses?
So back to the subject of the post, I’m sorry to hear about your vision. Mine is on hold until I can get back with the VA to let them know I’ll have a ride to shuttle me home. I just need to remember to call them… if I want to. I’m not fond of surgery in general, especially digging into my eyeballs! AAAGH!!
I’ve been using monitors off and on myself for a few years, though I didn’t equate the light-bearing properties of monitors with better artistic grasp of the subject. But that makes perfect sense, seeing as we see illuminated objects in real life. As I’ve been fond of saying about Humans in general, and artists in particular, perception is reality. I’ve actually been considering dragging up my utility PC and a 40" Bravia TV to the “studio” and using it, so now I have even more incentive to try it.
I’m also very glad to hear that the only real daunting issues with your art is getting a proper monitor situation and a functional PC. Being able to see the beauty of art and the world outside is as important to me as being able to hear music.
This week has been an ordeal for me. Frequent periodic interruptions. I’m lucky I had energy in the evenings to noodle on my one “simple” piece. But I finally made the progress to be able to get it to this stage, where I’m happy with the marker study to transfer to canvas. It’s still too large to put on a 16x20" canvas board, and I’m tired of fussing with it, so it’s going on the bigger 18x24". Someday I want to attempt a large B-52 painting, and that’s going to require a proper canvas a few feet across. But the 18x24"s will give me some decent size to play with until I get braver with bigger works.
I’ve considered taking some time off from my No Man’s Sky project to tackle some of those forest scenes, which I took dozens more pics last week, and of the Church, though I’m thinking of something more majestic for it. But right now, my fic and related art is consuming my soul.
When I have had the time and energy to be creative, I’ve been noodling on my story. Right now, it’s more than a dozen pages of dude-babe soap opera, but I think it might be entertaining to the guys too, without being overtly smarmy. Then the festivities can resume.
It’s funny how the thing is about 75% writing itself. Scenes suggest themselves, and I run with them, and so far haven’t had to scrap any of it. In fact, most of the events in the last two chapters sprang from the idea that Nijol was going to peek into Lawless Space. I had no real roadmap, other than an encounter at some point with a derelict. All the characters came to life on whims that came to me, and they took on lives of their own and the rest is history. Which makes it even more fun for me because the story is almost as much a surprise for me as the reader. And I have many more surprises for both of us to come. But I really should get on with it so I can pursue other creative endeavors. Other stories, music, more art, maybe some cartooning, voice over work…
I wanted to bring to your attention an artist which had quite an effect on me in a few ways, an Indonesian guy who goes by TomTC on Deviant Art. And he’s been such a big influence… even after I forgot all about him for months. 
I was attracted to his scenery, and discovered after a few panels that they were digital paintings, but looked incredibly paint-like. To my surprise, they also involved a pair of animaloid people, a Rabbit doctor and what looks like a little Bear girl - polar bear? Something else with a tuft tail? In any case, he seems to be heavily influenced by Studio Ghibli, the Japanese equivalent to Disney, and especially now, I consider far better than Disney. Each illustration involves a scene in an overarching story, which both characters play a part. The story and images run the entire gamut of emotions and plot types, from pleasant to spooky and downright macabre at points. In many of them, even pleasant scenery can have spooky elements in them, from eyes peering at you from a gloomy shadow, to shapes in the fog that suggest something otherworldly. He only reveals little tidbits of his tale in each scene, and they’re tied fairly closely to each scene, so you have to read a number of them to get a gist of the overall tale he’s weaving.
I had to laugh at his brief bio, as it starts off, “Hello! I like to draw and stuff…”
Here is his home page, and some of my highlights:
I hope you enjoy his work and are inspired by it as much as I am.
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