I am taking a class at UNM called: Becoming a Professional Cartoonist.  I signed up for the class as a way to get my feet wet as an illustrator.  I have always wanted to do children's book illustrations, but I needed to figure out how an illustration is different from a painting.  I was hoping this class might help.  And I think it is.  The teacher is Stephen McCranie.  He has a rather interesting web page, which I will link to on my links page.  We are creating a 10-15 page finished comic for the class.  Mine, a romance,  is coming along nicely, but may end up longer than 15 pages.  Once it is scanned, I will post it somewhere on this web page so you can look at it. 

Other news:  I just linked my two new time-lapse painting videos from YouTube to my Art Shop page.  If you haven't seen them already, you should go look.  Each is only 3 or 4 minutes long, and I think they are cool. 

So, I recently found out that Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci were all left handed, like me. :-)  I am taking a portrait painting class with Fred Miller here in town and even though I paint pretty well in comparison to the other students in my class, I feel like a wretched beginner when I compare my abilities to those of the great masters (or even modern professional artists).  I copied the Girl with the Pearl Earring a couple weeks ago and even the copy, which pales next to the original, is amazing compared with my amateurish portraits.  So, next I think about how old I am now, compared to the age of these masters when they painted their amazing paintings.   How did they get so good so young?  Did they devote their time to art from a very young age?  Did they have great teachers?  I suspect both.  But I am also a renaissance "man" like DaVinci.  I teach science, I make primitive tools and fires, I am a botanist, I design and sew costumes, and more.  But I am not a master at any of those things, more like a Jill-of-all-Trades.  Today I wonder where life will take me next.   

I feel like a kid on Christmas.  I just published my first video to YouTube.  It is a time lapse video of me painting an small painting from start to finish in 8 minutes.  It is totally awesome and completely flawed.  That is nice, because it leaves room for improvement for my next one.  I am going to link to it on the tab "Art Shop".  My awesome brother, Ian, was here for the holidays and he set me up with lots of cool software, including Virtual Dub, which I used with Windows Movie Maker to produce the Video.  It was so fun to do, I hope to do another soon. 

Wow, my very first blog!  It will be short, because my family is visiting me for the holidays and I am spending all my time with them.  They all go home on the 4th and then I will have lots of time to work on this new website and blog.