Most people don't know how much my life revolves around music.

Music is awesome. It inspires me and keeps me going no matter how rough things get. Even when I am alone, my music has always been there for me...like an old friend who's been through everything and never left. It doesn't judge me. It doesn't criticize my mistakes. It doesn't reject me or ignore me. It is my comfort, my sanctuary. It will always be waiting for me when I get home after a lousy day. It's always there to shelter me from isolation, fear and anxiety. It relieves pain and suffering. It calms me down if I'm upset and it fills my soul with peace.

It helps me relive my past, mainly the good things, but some of the bad too by reminding me of the challenges I've overcome. It can jog my memory about a specific year or an important event in my life, and it lets me revisit my childhood anytime I want. It can take me back to places I haven't been in years, with memories so vivid it's like I'm there again. It lets me remember the faces and voices of people who I will never see or speak to again.

Yoda said the Force can help you see the future, the past and old friends long gone.

Well, music is like the Force, and a powerful ally it is. It will always be there to back you up, to motivate you to reach higher and go farther, to push you beyond your limits and achieve things you thought impossible. And it picks you up when you fall down.

If a friend gives me something to listen to, I keep it forever. Because even when they're gone, as part of their memory it still remains with me. That small part of who they were will always be in my life.

I have a playlist for every season, every holiday and important anniversary, for rainy days and for sunny days, for happy days and sad days and really shitty days, for love, sadness, anger and frustration, for confusion, chaos and exultation. For moments of victory and defeat, for specific situations and moods. It helps me to understand difficult situations, because they’ll make me connect to words in a song that didn’t stir me before. Or I can meet someone and suddenly know what the artist was thinking when they wrote that. It helps me understand and empathize with other people, even if their viewpoints are different from mine.

Music is more than just music. It is memory. It and my best friend and lover who won't ever leave me behind. Music is the soundtrack to my epic adventure.

I made up a new word!

Precrastination: noun. The precursor to procrastination. Procrastinating about procrastinating. example: "I'll think about doing it tomorrow...tomorrow"

Original Pattern Ink on Paper

I'm not updating this blog much because I have a full time office job now. But my job is technical and non-creative, so I need to keep doing my art on the side as a creative outlet to keep my brain healthy.

This hypnotizing pattern started out as a doodle on the back of a notepad from work (I think I was unwittingly making it as I was on a phone call) and I liked how it looked, so I brought it home and started inking it on grid paper. And I will say this...making patterns is hard. Especially alternating patterns. I messed up in the bottom left. But, as Salvador Dali said, "Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it"

Now that I have this scanned, maybe I can print out copies and start coloring them in.

Finished a drawing

Begun 7/18/2015

Finished 10/17/2015

Sometimes it feels good to go back and finish an unfinished piece... Of course no one can tell me when I'm finished. Sometimes even I don't know. I guess it's when I run out of space on the paper. 

Fall is here!

I haven't blogged on this page in so long it feels like a crime. 

I got a new full time job in April, and I have been working a steady 40 hours a week ever since.  It's hard to believe the whole summer came and went and the cold rainy fall weather is here already. It happened too fast...a 40 degree drop in a week isn't cool. I'm afraid of getting sick from this rapid weather change.

Anyway, I work as a contractor for Xerox now and my new job is photocopier and printer maintenance. Not repairs, but replacing toner cartridges and 'consumables' when they run out. In a two-building office complex with about 47 copiers and printers, that is a job in itself.  I'm so happy to get a better paying job in my field with the health benefits I needed, but it isn't creative work at all. And 8 hour workdays really wears me out, leaving me too tired to do the art at home that keeps my brain and soul alive. This Photoshop painting I'm about to post is literally the first time I drew anything in months.

Photoshop is actually a really powerful paint program if you know how to use the brush tools properly.  The variables you can change for brush tools are almost infinite. It has options called "Jitter" that let you vary the color, size, shape, angle, texture and scattering within a single brush stroke of your mouse or tablet stylus.  I won't go into details here, but if you have Photoshop it's worth taking a few online tutorials to unlock the power of brushes.  All the fun of painting, without the mess to clean up afterward.

Here's a seasonal doodle for you, using the brush effects I just described. All the leaves and tufts of grass were 'scattered' with swipes of the brush, not cut and pasted. This took me less than an hour.



Tired or not, I just have to force myself to sit down for an hour a day and do this. Make something.

What a life...

There's deranged, there's slightly crazy, there's genuinely crazy, then there's making art for a living. ...Then there's genius. In that order.

Memorial Day

This weekend, show your flag and remember the fallen soldiers who gave their lives so you could keep yours.

When in doubt, use Caslon.

This is a reboot of an old school assignment where I had to pick a typeface, research its origin and make a tribute piece of artwork to be printed into a booklet. Naturally, I chose Caslon. I think this is the most elegant piece I ever designed. All the graphics in the pages were made from the Caslon font's unique symbols and characters. Any suggestions for a font to do next?

New Compilation CD Burned + Album Graphics Designed

I do this thing every now and then where I make "compilation albums", usually a playlist with a certain theme that I make my own CD of. So whenever I do this, I sometimes create my own album art to give me some Photoshop practice. (See this earlier post)  

This is one that I came up with this week...music from all the James Bond movies. (With a few relevant bonus tracks) The album title was taken from the opening titles in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which is a Pierce Brosnan one and my absolute favorite of all the 007 films. Oh alright...it's a toss up between that one and Goldeneye.

Pierce Brosnan IS the BEST James Bond.  Wanna know why? Because the '90s were awesome, that's why. He's a genuine British man who is not faking the accent. He's polite, charming, super cool and level-headed, always has a dry joke at the best times (which were all improv lines in his movies by the way) And, no matter what he does, his suit never wrinkles. Plus, I actually met him at Times Square once on a field trip to New York in 8th grade.  He was very polite and pleasant, unassuming, just as cool in person as he was in the movies.

I have my own reasons for not liking the other James Bond actors.

Sean Connery: Way too Scottish, not enough British. Also he is the only Bond that ever wore a fedora. And fedoras are way out of style.

Roger Moore: A bit too old to sleep with 25 year old girls....? Seriously Rog was pushing 70 when he starred in License to Kill. And he slept with a very young woman. That's f****ing disgusting.

Timothy Dalton: not even British, also terrible actor.

Daniel Craig: Wooden actor, very cold/emotionless, not appealing enough to ladies, weird scar on his face, doesn't look charming, not witty enough for Bond. (Seriously, where's the sarcastic one-liners and dry humor we came to love? He's way too deadpan.)  ...Even though Ian Fleming's original idea for Agent 007 was in fact a blond man with blue eyes, as described in the 1957 novel Casino Royale in which he first appears. I think he's great as a stone cold bad ass in other action movies, but he really sucks as 007. I'm sorry. I just don't like him.

But I digress. I put together lots of these compilation albums, it's a throwback to my radio DJ days. So anyway, enjoy the slick graphics. I can't sell this CD as I don't own the rights, but go ahead and download these tracks if you want and I can gladly print you this jewel case insert and CD label for them.

Front jewel case sleeve insert

Back insert + spines

CD label

 Constructive comments on the package design are welcome.

New York: Day 5

This is my favorite part of the forest. It reminds me of so many places. The first glimpse of Narnia in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardwrobe, the silent deadly forest in the Ardennes where the battle for Bastogne occurred in Band of Brothers, and the "Forest cathedral" described in the Red Badge of Courage.  It's a storybook kind of place. The snow makes it absolutely enchanting to walk around in.

This is my church.

There was no sign of anything living out here. It's as if the whole place is sleeping. It's silent, wonderful and dreamy. Absolute peace and tranquility. Due to the total absence of moving creatures, I guess I should be working on macro shots instead.

Some berry things on a branch.

These are some odd flowering plant that never loses its flowers. They just turn brown and dry up in the cold and then turn pink again in the spring. They grow in clumps like this.  Everywhere in this forest, one gets a sublime sense of not dead, but a sort of dormant beauty. Just patiently waiting for spring.

I like to brush these pine branches with my hand and watch the soft powder fall to the ground in a tiny blizzard.

This is an exposed hillside where the wind constantly blows from one direction. Look at how the snow is on the side of all the trees. It's magical.

These pines make an indescribable sound when they flex in the wind. Sometimes it sounds like a groaning or a screech. Other times you hear sharp cracks like rifle shots. It can be startling if you're unfamiliar with the sound.

Something passed by here. I didn't leave these tracks.  It might be a "coyote-dog". Grandma's woods is home to a pack of coyotes that mate with stray dogs. Sometimes I can hear them howling as it gets dark.

Still no luck with the infrared scout camera. We think the extreme cold is making it shut itself down. (It dropped to 5 last night).  I moved it indoors and put it near the bathroom window, but that also failed. The infrared flash bounces off the window and back at the lens, making the whole scene a whiteout.  I guess I'll have to use it when I come back up in the summer.  What a bummer.But at least we know it works, as I captured my own face a few times when I was trying to reset it.

We were going to come home tomorrow, but there is yet another lake-effect snowstorm on its way... so we will just have to come home sunday.   I have been doing some sketches and keeping my blogs updated though.  Tonight I am already in my PJs, sipping some hot tea and watching Cold Mountain.

One more day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

New York: Day 4

New York: Day 4

A visit to the farm

Today we paid a long overdue visit to my uncle's house and one of my cousin Emory's farms. They live about 2 hours away from my Grandma's house (up here they measure distance in hours).  It is a very long, boring and monotonous drive through flat country and quaint little podunk towns, with peeling paint and collapsed barns. I couldn't make this drive by myself. It's too long and not exciting enough to keep me alert.

On the way there we saw an interesting sky phenomenon.  Sometimes cited by quacks on the internet as signs of UFOs, this is called a Fallstreak hole.  Water droplets in a cloud crystallize into ice faster in one area than the clouds around it, thus the weird 'hole' punched in the sky.

"Look! An alien mothership just disappeared!" - said no scientist ever.

This is not the first time I have seen bizarre cloud patterns in upstate New York.  Check out this super cool optical effect I saw once, on a day when it was 10 degrees below zero. A prismatic halo around the sun.

Picture taken January 1, 2013

(The above effect only happens on days when it is below zero at high altitudes.
Moisture in the clouds turns to tiny ice crystals, which refract the sunlight
into a rainbow spectrum when the sun shines through it.
I've seen this before in other places, but not anywhere near this dramatic)

We arrive at the dairy farm. This farm is only being rented through the winter. It has over 200 cows which are the chief milk supplier for Byrne Dairy which stocks grocery stores all over the region (the place where Grandma always bought her milk) Needless to say, it's an impressive operation.

We drove up the long dirt road to get to the farm right as my Uncle drove a tractor in front of us. He's pulling a grain spreader to these two barns across the field where the maternity ward and the calves are.

Inside this corn crib is about six tons of corn grain. My Uncle says these cow eat about 2 tons a day.

And here's the moneymakers.

This is what the farm uses instead of silos. Long trenches of poured concrete,
with grain pushed into it by bulldozers. Then the pile is covered
by a plastic sheet and weighed down by hundreds of spare rubber tires.
I asked him where the tires come from. He tells me the gas stations
and car repair places throw away tons of defective or punctured tires,
they just give these to him for free by the truckload.

Finally, the Byrne Dairy tanker truck comes in to load up hundreds of gallons of milk.

New York: Day 3

DAY 3

Today I spent a lot of time outside in the woods.  I traced all the trails we blazed so far and then walked the old trails as well, meanwhile I tracked my progress on a GPS tracking app on my smartphone. According to the app I walked a distance of 3.31 miles, in 3 hours ten minutes.  This is a screenshot of the satellite view (with no identifying landmarks, no I'm not dumb enough to show anyone where this place is) The paths I took are marked in red.

The original trail cleared by my grandfather and uncle is the top line. it goes more or less straight back to a clearing, where it turns and goes down a steep hill into the deep woods, a marshy swamp where the trail abruptly ends; they were not able to push it any further. There's a massive boulder back there about the size of a minivan, which marks the end of the old trail. I was told that this boulder might have been moved there by a glacier many thousands of years ago. Rocks that size don't just roll downhill.

What my father and I have done is extend this trail and connect it to another one, which only exists in our GPS devices. We marked off trees along the route with orange caution tape. Now this bottom route is over very uneven ground, and we have no idea if it will be passable in the summer when the foliage is grown up.

My trail is the more or less straight one that goes through the middle. The area inside this 'circle' has never been explored or charted. It is actually a nice walk over fairly even ground. The beginning of this trail follows some deep ruts left by wagon wheels over a hundred years ago when this place was a farm. Then it feeds into a natural path frequented by many deer and other animals.

Personally, I'm excited about this. If only my grandparents had lived to see the wonders of technology. I always wanted to make a map of the forest since I was a kid, and now thanks to smartphones, mobile GPS and satellites, we now have a perfect map far better than any we could draw ourselves.  It always seemed kind of boring how we'd walk back as far as we could go then have to turn around and come all the way back. And so now we have a closed loop that brings us back to the starting point.  This is a groundbreaking achievement if you ask me.

So anyway, here's some of my pictures from today.

This is how we marked our new trails. Now to see if they hold up until the spring.

The existing trail. Those are my footprints. I retraced my path 3 times to walk every
foot of the known paths plus our new ones.

This is a lean-to shelter I built from a Boy Scout handbook several years ago. It's held up
long then my other shelters I have built before.

This forest is about 60 years old....but there is always new life.

Mom tells me that these huge holes in the tree were dug out by a Pileated woodpecker.

Aren't these pines magnificent?? These form a huge gate almost...a gate to the deep, deep forest.

More magnificent pines. I never get tired of seeing them.

...And finally, some critters!

A chickadee on a branch. These things are so tame, they aren't afraid of humans at all.
The only way I could have captured this was by standing less than 5 feet away, and using my medium range lens.
This could very well be my favorite bird picture ever taken by me.

And finally, some deer!  These walked right into the backyard and were visible out the back window.

New York: Day 2

New York, Day 2:

I really like how the house faces East. The morning sun is just amazing, how it makes everything glow. This is looking out the kitchen window at the flag on the garage.

The forecast is sunny all day, but bitterly cold. Right now it's 16 out. Everyday after this it looks like we will be getting a lake-effect snow storm. So I guess I'd better go out and retrieve my camera before it gets buried. I did mount it in the clearing last night, peering across it into the entrance to the deep woods. I'll post any results later today. I'm walking back to show Dad the new trail I blazed just before sundown. I'm excited.

But right now we are going to an art museum in Utica, so I'll see how that goes.

Utica is the closest thing to a major city up in this neck of the woods. It was a major industrial center at the turn of the century, at one time everything Onieda county residents ate, wore, bought and used was manufactured here. Factories galore. Now most of these are abandoned. But there is much to see in this city if you like history. Visit the Saranac Brewery, Onieda County Historical Society, any number of small curio museums and one fairly large art museum, the Munson-William-Proctor Art Institute, home to minor paintings by world famous artists. (The four paintings by Thomas Cole entitled The Voyage of Life were my Mom's favorite as a kid and they were housed there, but they've since been moved to the National Art Gallery in DC) 

Currently there is an exhibit on Tiffany glass there. Photography isn't allowed in the museum but I can link to the exhibit's website (ask me later). The center pieces of this exhibit are seven stained glass windows depicting archangels, representing the seven great Byzantine churches in what is now Turkey. Interestingly , one church is named Philadelphia and another is called Smyrna. They were found in a deplorable state inside dirty barns scattered through the region and took decades to clean and preserve. Altogether they are made of over 1,400 pieces of handmade glass. They are being shown in public for the first time. Did I mention how much I love old churches? 

Okay so I quietly snuck a pic with the iPod camera...

So next we went to the Onieda County Historical Society, to check out the exhibits there. Dad said there was a lot of Civil War artifacts on display the last time he went. But it seems they had to put them back in storage to make room for the enormous electric train set.

By now it's noon, so we head back to the house and I get to show Dad the new trail I blazed yesterday. We took the GPS with us and a printed satellite view...it turns out I found a way through a part of the forest we had never seen. Nice! It even reconnects with the end of the existing trail.

Oh, one last thing. I FINALLY started concept art for the books! It only took me 2 years of procrastinating... I will scan the two sketches I made so far tomorrow. 

New York: Day 1

DAY 1

No sticky snow here so far. All we had was a light sprinkle of sugary snow that melted when it hit the ground. Oh well. At least it isn't raining. Temperatures hovered around 25 degrees and it actually got colder instead of warming up in the afternoon.  The remote camera appears to work, but so far it hasn't caught anything. I will try moving it further back in the woods, maybe in the clearing at the halfway point of our trail. I have seen little piles of deer pellets so I know they are back there.

We know we are close to the house when all we can see on either side of the road are pine trees.

This trailer across the street is for sale if anyone wants to be neighbors. $34,000 for 38 acres of undeveloped land...get it before it's gone!

Yep, the house is still standing.

I ventured out with Dad to check out a new trail he blazed
with some orange flags four months ago. It turned out to be much wetter
than expected. He took it right through the middle of a swamp. We bought a few hundred yards of
orange caution tape at a local hardware store and this is what we tie around the trees. I don't think this
is a practical trail to follow year round, but we did find some neato things at ground level.

These little things are everywhere once you get past the first stone wall. Resembling fuzzy green bottle brushes or pipe cleaners, this stuff forms a thick green carpet in some areas of the forest floor. I thought these were baby pine trees,
but it turns out they are a form of oversized moss called Lycopodeum.
They don't get any bigger than this, about 2 inches in height.

I noticed an interesting thing about the thin ice that forms from puddles of water.
You can see these odd ripples or contour lines. I remarked it looks like a tiny topographical map.

A new tree growing from the fallen log of a dead one. That's kinda cool.

I have NO IDEA how this ice forms. These are ice crystals that appear to have somehow
'grown' from a patch of very wet mud. I wonder if it's frozen water vapor?

When i stumbled on this I thought was some kind of fungus.

...But on close inspection, it's very thin fibers of ice.
Have you ever seen ice form this way? They shatter like glass.

 I saw no furry things really, except a white tail deer about 50 yards away that bounded into a thicket when he heard me. They move so fast, the only thing I even notice is the white tail. One of these days I will snag a pic of one. They are such majestic creatures, they move like they only weigh a few ounces.

What gets me about this place is how utterly black it gets at night.
Back home we have have so much light pollution from Wilmington and Philadelphia
that it never really gets dark,  the sky glows orangey pink at night. Here it is so
pitch black without the moon, you cannot see your hand in front of your face.
You can't tell from this picture, but the stars are very bright.

This shot was taken from the back deck on a tripod, with about a 25 second exposure. Very nice lens flare.

The best part of being out in the cold...
coming back in to get toasty in front of Grandma's wood stove in the kitchen.