Good Afternoon, I hope you are enjoying your Thanksgiving day with your friends and family. I am sure I will be stuffed with turkey, and hopefully asleep by the time you read this...  

God bless the retail system in America! It provides us with jobs, friends, and countless fire code violations on Black Friday, errr Thursday. To those of you who go and shop before it officially strikes Friday... SHAME ON YOU! Also... HELLO! Because I will be seeing you from the other side of the cash register, luckily, not until 1 a.m. though, if you can call that luck? END RANT. Now on to the fun stuff.  

I made this for you and only you!  Kinda. It was good practice for me, too. I did some hand-lettering and some hand-painting. Hopefully that's not too punny for you.  Seriously, thank you for your support, well-wishes, comments, and emails; it really does mean a lot to me and I'm thankful that YOU ALL are in my life :)

It's come to my attention that this breed of turkey is usually made by tracing a hand. Well, that is not the case here. My turkey is special, it's hand-drawn with no tracing help at all! (I should hope that after  $30k in tuition, I would know how to draw a hand. Thank you Illustration Dept. at Hartford Art School)  I held my left hand out in front of me and sketched with my right hand. Here's how I did the rest:

I started by drawing normal block letters along 4 guide lines. I added the extra triangles afterwards, not knowing how they would fit on each letter until I tried.

So I painted in the lettering with a maroon color. I tested some blue to the first "T" and liked how it looked so I continued with that below.

 I also added some to the lettering. The splotches, by the way, are caused by my palm touching the screen before the stylus (pen) is close enough to be registered by the computer. Otherwise, I can rest my palm there if need be.

Here is a failed attempt at making a nice watercolor-like background. I have a lot to learn when it comes to digital painting. I ended up setting the Layer to Difference which somehow made my colors opposite of what I actually chose. So if I chose blue it ended up being yellow (almost complementary, but not always) and vice-versa. Needless to say, it was a little annoying but it gave the right watercolor look to the painting.d

I spent a lot of time painting around the letters on the Difference layer and then ended up accidentally moving the layer. I liked how it looked so I decided to keep it. (I also had already saved and did not feel like going back to a previous save to do it again.) Anyways, thats why you can see an empty outline of the lettering and turkey. I liked it, what do you think?

Before I forget, the program I am using is ArtRage 4. I am using a watercolor brush on watercolor paper. Thanks again for being here and have a wonderful turkey day!

When it happens, you'll understand exactly what it means. Until then, read this. I first heard about it when I visited the Yale Art Gallery with my friend Ursa and she described this moment she had with a Jackson Pollock. I thought she was a bit crazy at that time. I mean, who really has a moment with an inanimate object?

Of course this was a time in my life before I really believed in art. I was just realizing that what I was doing in my life was not working and something had to change. I was exploring again. I had decided to take some drawing classes at community college mainly to relieve the monotony of my life.

At any rate, I didn't believe Ursa until it happened to me. It was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and it was a John Singer Sargent that did it for me. There is a couch in the gallery in front of this massive square-shaped canvas.  To its left and right are Chinese vases that stand five feet tall. They are the actual vases from the painting. The gallery space immediately demands your attention because of these massive artworks.

I sat down and began to ponder why this painting was there. Before I knew it, forty minutes had passed. I don't really remember what happened during those forty minutes; people were simply a blur on the edge of my periphery, like I was dreaming and I couldn't actually distinguish faces. From that experience I knew I had to see the painting again.  I became a member to a museum that was a two hour drive from me! 

DISASTER!  The next time I went back to the MFA the painting was gone and it left a small hole in my heart. It was on loan to another museum. It''s been a long time coming for me to see that painting but I was able to again last month when I visited the MFA with a few friends. They can confirm that I made a beeline to the painting 45 minutes before the museum closed. I don't think they realized, nor did I, that I would be sitting on the couch staring 
at that painting until they ushered me out, but that's how it happened. The painting's got a hold on me! I'd like to try to put into words why.

There are four daughters in the painting. Two in shadow, two in light. During this second epiphany, while letting the painting envelope my brain, I did my best to take mental notes to analyze later. I was incapacitated to the point where I was incapable of taking written notes and/or sketching. 

When I moved closer to the painting (just a foot or two away) the young one sitting on the carpet was staring at me. When I sat back down, the one leaning against the wall to the left began to stare at me while the others looked away.  It was creepy and captivating at the same time.

The one leaning against the vase so casually, not even bothering to look at the camera. The father's nightmare... imagine the attitude on her! Then you have her sister next to her, standing in the shadows, almost as if she is a ghostly figure from a horror flick. I'm not really sure if I'm suppose to see her. She only stared at me when I was standing up and about ten feet away.