Building Backgrounds

    It’s not quite a portrait of Wasabi, but it might be.  He’s large and grey, and he sits on windowsills and watches the world go by, kind of like this cat. This was lesson #8 from my year-long online art class, and the focus was on the technique for the background.  A couple of the projects so far have focused on the background, something I haven’t really given a whole lot of thought to in this context.  The lessons have been about the technique, with tiny mentions of things we might do on top of them.  It’s interesting …

May’s report

It’s official: individual detailed reports of what I’ve been doing are completely beyond my capacity at the moment. So, here’s the overview of what we did in May: We joined some friends at LUCO‘s Chamber Music Cabaret. There was a piccolo trio, and Caitlyn got pulled from the audience to read raffle ticket winning numbers. Caitlyn and I joined some of our homeschool friends for another field trip to a farm. This time we drove across the mountains to Little Wing Farm where we spent the day touring the orchards and generally traipsing around. Caitlyn has been having a digression …

Amuse your Child and Irritate your Cat in 4 Easy Steps

1. Bring your child and your cat together in the same location. This is easy to do if there’s food available, or even just the vague promise that there might be food for at least one of them. 2. Let the child pick up a shiny object. Today, Caitlyn chose a can opener. Let the child do random things with said shiny object. For example, open and close the can opener in a sideways position. Experiment with putting can opener handles on either side of a can or jar. 3. Let the cat choose a position on the other side …

Gratutious Cat Photos

Taking pictures of our cat is hard. Wasabi doesn’t pose. He sleeps in dark corners. He’s prone to rearing up on his hind legs and swiping at things out of place, including camera lenses. Every once in a while, though, he’ll get curious about a camera. Actually, I think he’s not so much curious about the camera as why this weird black thing is hovering in front of my face. Wasabi likes to visit people in the kitchen, since, obviously, we might be talked into feeding him. Also, he’s realized that the catnip lives in the spice cupboard. Any time …

My Weekend

Things I did this past weekend: spent 2 hours shoveling gravel into buckets as part of a work party in our local urban forest, Cheasty Greenspace at Mt. View. We graveled 75 feet of trail! attended a showing of Once Upon a Circus, a production of the SANCA Youth Company. They attempted to tell fairy tales but kept getting the details mixed up. Favorite segments: the acrobatic seven dwarfs and Red Riding Hood’s aerial routine. The introduction skit mangling The Lord of the Rings was pretty awesome as well. made a bag from In Color Order’s tutorial: started the holiday …