Resurrecting My Inner Artist

The first snow and winter storm of Winter 2019 finally arrive the second Saturday of January. In my experience, that’s a delay of nearly ten days from when we usually have snow or a winter storm or if nothing else bitter cold below zero temperatures and wind chills. The snow we received was wet and heavy, perfect for making a snowman but not so great for my back when I went out to shovel the driveway.

20190112_104105

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WorldCon Withdrawals

Despite what my husband thinks, I have not over-dosed on science fiction since last Wednesday when the 74th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly referred to as WorldCon) arrived for the second time in Kansas City, Missouri.  MidAmeriCon II ended yesterday and of course the highlight of those five days was the Hugo Awards Ceremony held Saturday evening.

20160817_073751In fact, I sincerely hoped when I woke up this morning it wouldn’t be to the harsh reality of a Monday morning workday.  Ah, but life is cruel and the alternate dimension I’d enjoyed for five days evaporated into the dreary doldrums of gainful employment.  Well, not completely dreary.  Perhaps dreaded would be more like it, since I knew I’d be walking into some ‘hot potatoes’ once I strapped myself to my desk.

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Portable Puzzling

I remember spending time with my grandmother putting together large landscape jigsaw puzzles as a child.  I have always had exceptional pattern recognition abilities, probably a direct result of my photographic memory.  Whether it’s puzzle pieces or star hopping using binoculars and a telescope, I can look at the missing space once and sort through hundreds (or thousands) of pieces and match it in my memory before confirming it by snapping it into place.

But with the advent of my own children, and then followed by large dogs who think puzzle pieces are dog treats, I just haven’t thought it was worth it to do jigsaw puzzles at home for quite a long time.

Spurred on by the “Exercise Your Mind” Bingo card challenge, I went searching for a 21st century alternative to thwart my Rottweilers.  I found an app for my tablet that allows me to complete a puzzle and never worry about dropping a piece to be snatched up by the mobile black hole on four feet padding around my kitchen.

Here’s the Flickr album I created today to track my progress while completing my first virtual jigsaw puzzle of “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh:

Jigsaw Puzzles

This satisfies my love for great works of art, astronomy and puzzles. My mind is doing mental cartwheels right now.

A Beauty, Sleeping or Otherwise

An excellent analysis of one of my favorite Disney classics, Sleeping Beauty, posted at Tor.com and authored by Mari Ness.

Some interesting tidbits:

  • First Disney feature filmed on 70mm (the 1950s version of IMAX)
  • Incredibly detailed backgrounds by Eyvind Earle – the equivalent to at least 60 multiple, massive fine art paintings.
  • Maleficent morphs into a dragon – one of their most magnificent creations, animated with rich, black and purple bitterness.

Picturing The Hobbit | Tor.com

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/12/picturing-the-hobbit

Happy birthday to Bilbo and Frodo!

I’ll link in a few of my favorite art pieces from the above article later this evening.

Justin Gerard (http://www.justingerard.com/), who said about painting The Hobbit, “I like drawing monsters that are just a little bit human, and who have personalities that you might recognize in people you’ve encountered in your own adventures, and The Hobbit has the very best of these.”

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Hugo Awards Voting Adventure: Remainder of Retro Hugos

Tomorrow the winners will be announced for the 1939 Retro Hugo Awards.

The 1939 Retro Hugo Awards can be watched online via ustream. The stream will be located at http://www.ustream.tv/hugo-awards. The Retro Hugo Awards Ceremony starts at 8PM BST (or 2PM Central) on Thursday 14 August.

Retro Hugo Awards Ceremony, LonCon3

I’ve covered the main ‘big’ categories in previous posts.  Today, I’ll summarize the remaining ones that are less, ‘sexy’, for lack of a better term. Continue reading “Hugo Awards Voting Adventure: Remainder of Retro Hugos”