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Showing posts from January, 2010

Photos for Painting

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I took pictures of my daughter today as demonstration material for my upcoming photo workshop. The pic above is one my favorite. Here's the workshop info: Red Dot Photography Workshop Getting Good Images for Painting and Drawing Reference Saturday, February 6, 2010, from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Having a good photo from which to work makes painting and drawing easier and the finished piece better. This hands-on workshop is for artists who want to learn to take better reference photographs for painting or drawing. I’ll cover some principles of two-dimensional design, such as balance, depth, focal point, etc. and we’ll work on how to get optimal lighting sources without a flash. Composing images will be covered in depth. This is not a high-tech lesson; I start with very basic instruction. Bring in whatever kind of camera you have. Although the workshop will help you take better pictures, it is not a photography class. The focus will be on better source material for painti

Yoga Report: Rolf Solvik Visit

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"Florigami" 45" x 48" (oil on wood and copper with handmade tiles) I recently attended a fantastic yoga workshop at my local and very favorite yoga place in Birmingham, Heartwood Yoga . Visiting from the Himalayan Institute (located in Pennsylvania), was Rolf Solvik, a yogi, psychologist, and director of the HI. He comes to B’ham yearly, and oh, do I look forward to his visits. At these yoga workshops we do yoga postures and relaxation sessions, but the great majority of the time Rolf gives a talk about a particular subject. This time we learned about the Bhagavad-Gita , the famous Sanskrit text. The Gita is a small part of a much larger text, the Mahabharata , which is kind of like the Bible in that it includes blindness, a bloody battle, bigamy, backstabbing, brutality, and bargaining with God. It also has some really good people who try to stay good in the face of all this blasphemy. The little section called the Bhagavad-Gita is the part where one