Commercial Break

My friend Regina just released her latest fairy tale book: The Midnight Dancers -a modern day retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I read a draft copy of this book about 5 years ago (time should not fly so fast), and it was a pleasure to read the story again. My favorite parts were all still there!

Of course, I have some bias toward this book because it features some of my favorite things: Juggling, Martial Arts, 12 Beautiful Girls, Sneaking About in a Black Outfit with a Mask, Acrobatics, 12 Beautiful Girls...

There's even an explosion.



But don't take my word for it...

Bits and Bobs (Odds and Ends)

Flotsam and Jetsam? Sorry for yesterday's "esoteric" post. I had some trouble posting images to blogger and was unable to come back to it until today. Here are the bits and bobs:





And here is an entirely unrelated quote from Harold Speed:

It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from earlier periods.

Landscaping

This last weekend, thanks to an inspirational visit from some good friends, I began a fun reintroduction to landscape painting. Here are two small (5X7 inch) studies:




My kind friends left me some extra canvasses, so I'm going to try to start working on larger sized pictures in the evenings this week.