Accepting Donations for the Kevin and Julie Fund!

Hi Everyone, and welcome to my blog. As some of you know, I'm a survivor of Hodgkin's disease. While it is a highly curable form of lymphoma, others with the disease, unfortunately, are not as fortunate as I am and have one or more reoccurences. If you or anyone you know has ever gone through cancer treatment, you know it is no picnic, and sometimes the "cure" is even worse than the initial disease itself, as far as the side effects and energy drain that result. I belong to a Yahoo! group for those with Hodgkin's Disease and those who otherwise have an interest in the disease, and two of our regular and most supportive contributors, Kevin and Julie, are now facing a reoccurence. I'm a strong believer in encouraging others and "paying it forward", and so am undertaking a little project with Seegal, another Hodgkin's group member, to come up with a way to "do something nice" for Kevin and Julie, to lift their spirits during this difficult time. What we are hoping to do is to collect enough money to buy gift certificates for Kevin and Julie to www.HomeBistro.com to have meals delivered to them. If you would be so kind and find it in your heart and pocketbook to donate anything that you can for this cause, it would be most appreciated. For your convenience, I've put a button below to PayPay that you can just click on to donate to this fund. If you are unable to donate at this time, please remember Kevin and Julie regularly in your prayers as their treatment options are limited since they are dealing with disease reoccurence. Thanks so much!

Banksy Wanna-be?

Continuing to experiment with digital stencils for Crusade 19, I tried to come up with something mimicking Banksy stenciling. Here's what I came up with, the idea being that it looks like grafitti spray-painted on a wall.

To get the sprayed-on-a-wall look, I blurred the stencil image quite a bit, then went over it with a background-colored textured brush at extremely low flow. I think it's cool!

For more Banksy inspiration, check out the Banksy Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/banksy/pool/

CUT IT OUT!

(part II)

http://michelleward.typepad.com/how_cool_is_that/2008/04/crusade-no-19-c.html


This month's topic is stencils ! We're encouraged to make our own. Y'all know me, I like to do almost everything digitally these days, so I thought I would share with you a way to make and use stencils in Photoshop with the following mini-tutorial. If you aren't a Photoshop user, this won't make much sense to you, but will give you an idea of the cool things you can do digitally that are similar in appearance to what you can do non-digitally (not sure what the term for that should be--"hands on"?!) And for those of you who do use Photoshop regularly, you will of course recognize that there is more than one way to make stencils in Photoshop; for instance, you could also accomplish the same thing with a clipping mask. The beauty of working digitally is that you can experiment with colors, brush strokes, blending modes, etc., to your heart's content until you get a look that is just right.


Have fun! Here we go...


Launch Photohop and open a new file. The first thing you should do is create a new layer, then delete the background layer (it's funky to work with). Then...

Now Deselect (CTRL+D) (the "marching ants" will disappear).

TIP: If you make the inner color close to the color outside of the stencil, the result will be more "stencil-like".

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Now, go create! :^)

Where in the World....?

Crusade #15

This month, Crusaders are revealing their "whereabouts" and learning about others' as we continue building our art community.

Now it's my turn! Welcome to my corner of the world!

The first 29 years of my life, I lived in North San Diego County, California. While I lived the most years there in Carlsbad, I also lived in Oceanside, Vista, Leucadia, and Cardiff-by-the-Sea. My dad still lives in Escondido, and my step-dad is in San Marcos. (Map courtesy of http://www.beachcalifornia.com/nsdmaps.html)

In 1989, I moved to Albany, Oregon. It was a little bit of an adjustment to the rainy climate. I must say, though, that the scenery is gorgeous here and I would miss it dearly even if I ever moved to somewhere where it is sunnier, which I know I will someday (to make my husband happy!). We do have glorious summers, however, although they always seem too short! Anyway, here's a neat little (short) video about Albany.

http://www.elocallink.tv/clients3/or/albany/city-vp6l.php?movie=alorwel&spon=welcome

Thanks for visiting!

Meet My Muse!

A new crusade!

http://michelleward.typepad.com/how_cool_is_that/

Crusade No. 14 is all about revealing our muse, our source of artistic inspiration. My muse, Sara N. Dippity, is pictured below. I love art, and I'm always exploring new ways to make art. There are many fantastic artists (Michelle Ward, Linda Warlyn, Teesha Moore, Stacie Rife, etc., etc., etc.) whose work I adore and inspires me, but when I begin to put the ink, paint, or pixels down, it's Sara N. Dippity that puts the excitement into the experience. As someone who is not very experienced at much of what I do artistically, sometimes I am not sure what results I will see when trying something new. Many times I have been pleasantly surprised at the outcome of some of my "experiments", and have found that Sara N. Dippity emboldens me and encourages me to try new creative pursuits. Sara N. Dippity really is a fun companion while I play! But Sara N. Dippity is unpredictable, so I have had to learn to leave my expectations at the door when creating--but I know something exciting will happen when my muse is in the studio! I think I've learned more from Sara N. Dippity than by any other means.

Now for a plug: "Nine Modern Day Muses" by Jill Badonsky is a really fun book about creative muses ~ check it out!

VACATION!!!

I'm just a little excited. :^)

Steve and I are treating ourselves to a South Caribbean cruise! We will be doing lots of snorkeling and just being tourists in general. Here's our ship and our destinations. I probably won't update the blog while we're gone as Internet access is pretty spendy on board.

Here's where we'll be going:













And here's our ship:








(Carnival's "Destiny")

"See you" when we get back...

My Forever Crush

crush: an intense and usually passing infatuation, also: the object of infatuation

Here is another crush that I want to write about for Crusade No. 12 -- My forever crush.

Let me introduce you to Steve:

Steve lived in the same neighborhood as I did in Southern California. I was ga-ga over him from the moment I met him. Something about him just made my heart go pitter-pat! (Well, it was his surfer-boy good looks and confident manner, among other things!)

The older he got, the cuter he got, and my crush got bigger!!!

We dated some, but we never did have a "serious" relationship...I had a crush on him, but he had a crush on surfing. ;^)

Then around 1978, my heart was broken.

Steve joined the Army. And he got married -- to someone else!!!!

After Steve got out of the Army, his marriage ended in divorce. We got together once more, but it wasn't in the cards for us to be together. We lost contact with one another, and many years went by. I always wondered what happened to Steve. He was never far from my thoughts. He just really left a lasting impression on me.

Fast forward to 2004. By this time I had been living in Oregon for over a decade. I was really into using the Internet, and had tried "finding" Steve through various search engines. No luck. But one day I got an e-mail spam ad from Classmates.com, so decided to check it out. I hoped to find Steve's name there, since we had attended the same high school. But he wasn't in their database. Well, Classmates.com is mighty persistent with their spam ads and I usually ignored them. But one day, I decided to check my high school classmates names' again--and there was Steve!

I wrote him, and was astounded when he replied the very next day! And we discovered an amazing coincidence, he was also living in Oregon, only a couple of hours away! Among the other amazing discoveries was to learn that we both had a crush on one other all those years ago (sometimes teenagers feel too awkward to let on these things!).

Well one thing led to another and we decided to meet. After all the years that had gone by, the chemistry was still there. And my crush was back!

Skip ahead to June 14th, 2005: Nassau, Bahamas ~ we eloped!

And my crush and I are living happily ever after. Yes, I'm still ga-ga over him! :^)