Seriously only barely making one blog post per week but that doesn't mean I can't bore you with shit I find endlessly fascinating. Another data point that may be of interest: The worst I feel, the more I fucking curse.
Barnenez:
Earliest carbon dating for this site is about 4800 BC, out-dating the oldest Egyptian pyramid by 2000 years. Just so you know, this is how we was living just shy of 5000 years ago.
Gobekli Tepe
The digging guys-- who I have a romance all about if only I can get the freaking 1980's romance OUT OF MY DAMNED HEAD AND ONTO THE PAGE-- have dated this dig to about 7550 BC or so. My hypothetical romance dig dates long before this Gobekli Tepe. Don't worry. I'm not trying to change pre-history. Just trying to get some boomchicka wow wow in with the fascinating history of prehistoric digs. Also, my make-believe dig is in Eastern United States. A long way away from where this real site is in Turkey.
The Tumulus of Bougon or, even better, The Necropolis of Bougon
The earliest of these buildings has been dated to about 4800 BC and was found stuffed full of skeletons. More excavations in the French town of Bougon revealed even more building filled with skeletons. And arrowheads, broken pottery and beads. Which leads me to believe that the prehistoric French built sturdier houses for bones and garbage than they did for the living.
Saint-Michel Tumulus
See? Another tumulus in France that survived from pre-history. Also filled with dead people. And don't be fooled like I was. This ancient burial mound is near Carnac, which is on the other side of France from Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. Mound Saint Michel, Mont Saint Michel-- easy to get them confused.
Can't write. It's killing me. Gotta do it but words coming not at all. Imagine scene in head many times then words on paper go. But this not happening. Instead only pictures for paint. Romance and blog fall to wayside. I paint picture of dinosaur.
"Rawr" say T-Rex, "Asteroid destroy whole world. Michele no can write few ten thousand word. Michele be destroyed my asteroid!"
Michele now go stare at blank screen. Write maybe one hundred word. No word come. Michele wait for asteroid.
It has been hot as balls stuck to thighs around here. Today is either the fourth or fifth day over 95 degrees. When it gets this hot, the tiny little electric fan on the computer table is very little use to me or my computer. What I end up doing is sitting down, sweating profusely after 5 minutes-- especially underboob, imagine I'm dying of heat stroke doing the strenuous exercise of moving my fingers across the keyboard and heading back upstairs to the only air conditioned room in the house. Trouble is, I can't write up there in the bedroom. The writing computer is the desktop downstairs. Upstairs is my Fire and my paints.
I hear that there are people who write novels on their Kindle Fire. To them I say, "How the fuck, dudes?" I can't even write a passable YouTube comment on my Fire. What I can do upstair, however, is paint. Right on my bed. Drives my husband batty. Here's a painting called Help!:
Yesterday I was feeling specially guilty for not adding to the 2,000 words I've typed so far. That's out of about 15,000 I need to finish this thing off. But I was thinking about 80s Romance. Problem was, I wasn't thinking about the hard crap I'm trying to get down now. It's really boring, early character and situation set-up that's bogging me down. Instead I was thinking of the ending missing chapters with the homina-homina bowchickie-wow wow. So I painted this:
There was more wanted to impart to you all today but the sweat has dripped from my eyelash directly into my eye and now my eyeball is on fire like the rest of my sweltering body. I hear there is a cooler front making its way to us here in the Baked Apple. We should be getting some relief by Thursday night. I will be seeking relief right now by going upstairs where I won't die.
Space painting is fun and easy. You should do it. Really. Here is a lovely young lady to show you a fast and easy way to paint nebulae.
I tried this technique painting the bug nebula. Some call it the butterfly nebula but scientists call it bug and so will I. Here is a picture of the bug nebula taken by NASA:
You can see why some call it the butterfly nebula. Anyway, here is my terrible rendition of the bug nebula:
The green was supposed to be underneath the pink and red but the pink and red did not have the covering power. Still, so much fun to paint.
I also painted the Milky Way. I did not use the lovely Empathy Film's technique. I did sort of a free-hand, off the top of my head type dealie and was very proud of myself when two separate people knew it was the Milky Way on sight.
Here's where I point out that photographs of space paintings are non-representational. At least mine are. Some paintings look lovely in real life but take horrible pictures. Some are pieces of crap IRL but photograph beautifully. I could not get a good picture of The Milky Way to save my life. But this picture of the very, very bad painting of aurora borealis does not at all convey how awful this painting really is.
This painting is worse than paint-over bad. It's burn the canvas bad.
I was waiting until I had the whole solar system down before I made a Space entry, but as I have mentioned, painting has fallen by the wayside while I struggle with getting down perhaps a grand total of 15,000 words in a very simple story. From Monday until right now at this very moment, I have gotten down 1872 words. I know because Word very helpfully mocks me with this fact every time I open it.
Now on to the solar system-- my second and third paintings ever were the sun and the moon. Don't remember which order. They came out nice. I must say, I've gotten much better at blending my shading since I did the moon. Still, I kinda like the stark rings around it.
Since then I've been having astrological problems with my space paintings. Take Mars for example.
I painted stars in the shadowed part of the planet, as if you can see stars through Mars. It took me quite a while to figure out why, although my Mars came out pretty well, there was something very off about this painting.
My lack of an astrophysiology degree again rears it's stupid-ass head with Jupiter and Io.
It was supposed to be Jupiter and a very distant Neptune (why Neptune and not Saturn? Because I don't know how to paint rings), only that isn't distant at all. In fact, it's too close to Jupiter to be Io. Actually it is to close to Jupiter to live and far, far too large. What do I know about proportion and perspective? Apparently, about as much as I know about astrophysics.
As is evidenced by my Neptune's Moon.
What gave me the silly idea that it would be cloudy on Neptune's moon? This time I'm giving myself an out. Triton does have a thin nitrogen and methane atmosphere. So that explains the haze.
That's it. I don't know when I'll finish the solar system. After another 13,000 words AND I learn how to paint planetary rings.
When I was a child I wrote. A lot. Didn't write for other people to see because that would be embarrassing, but I had notebooks and loose papers and snippets of stories all over the place. This continued well into my young adulthood. I got over being embarrassed and thought, hey! wouldn't it be nice if someone paid me for this? And that's when I realized nobody cared.
In my regular adulthood I discovered mosaic. This is where I found I had a love for boxes. If there was a plain box within eye sight, that shit was going to get covered in tesserae. I didn't write much, though. But I did make a beautiful mosaic box where we keep my deceased brother-in-law.
About ten years ago, my son gave me a how-to book, a set of tools and a box of beads and I started making jewelry. I love making jewelry and still make some on occasion. Right now, in my head, I have a pair of earrings inspired by my painting Honeybear.
Yeup, that's right. I no longer make heaps of jewelry because I started painting. A lot. I don't seem to do anything in moderation. In my computer I have folders just for tree and space paintings which I was going to share here once I painted all the planets and painted the perfect tree.
Well, now I'm writing again. From scratch and not re-doing old stuff. Which means the painting has fallen by the wayside and I may never get my perfect tree. So I'm sharing me tree folder with you now.
We'll do them in the order they were painted and see if I've made any progress.
My first painted trees. I watched a tutorial by Angela Anderson and painted them. Not bad, I thought.
Night of the Triffids (yes, that's supposed to be a walking tree) is actually me trying to figure out changing the value of a color using white and black paint. The base color is Ultramarine Blue.
The secret to Paper Birch is masking tape.
I really enjoy painting backgrounds. So much so that I don't want to ruin my background by painting over it. But this worked out well. I call it Tangletree. You Xanth readers will know what I'm talking about.
Now for a tree with leaves. Had a nice, stormy background. The grass is terrible and I was going for a wind-tossed look. Getting a little bit closer to the perfect tree.
Oh well, now we are a few steps back from the perfect tree. The canopy is far, far too small and didn't know how to correct it, so I named it Stunted Cherry.
Tomorrow I'll do my space folder, which is chock full of really terrible paintings. And some cool ones too. If you'll excuse me, I'll now go back to banging my head against a Word blank page.
When I was a small child, the United States was going through a crazy phase. My abuela, who raised me, was pretty Old World. She wasn't about to answer these questions. So they stuck with me all these years. Perhaps an anonymous internet reader who is familiar with those olden, crazy times can answer a few of them.
1. Was Lyle Waggoner ever funny or was his total purpose standing next to Vicki Lawrence looking classically handsome?
2. Did Little Willie ever go home?
3. Did Peter Lupus ever speak in Mission Impossible?
4. Did you have to buy a pet rock or could you adopt a stray from the street?
5. If you were really hungry, could you eat Baby Alive food?
6. Did Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched all travel Over The Rainbow like Dorothy did?
7. Did grown-up, white, adult males wear plaid Sansabelt pants unironically?
8. Was there a difference between Matchbox and Hot Wheels and did boys do anything with them besides stuff them in their mouths?
9. Was I the only kid freaked out when Samantha re-modeled Darren's face?
10. Loop or Ball?
Do you think you've seen enough of Lyle Waggoner? Have not seen any of Barbara Eden? Here's two bonus pictures for making it to the end of this blog entry.
80's Romance Couple have been left in the lurch. That's because I find writing difficult when people are around. Painting-- not so much. I don't mean blog writing or Facebook writing or messageboard writing, I can do that around people. Except for the blog writing, those things take no thought at all. Oh, I'm sure the people reading what I write wish I put some thought into it, but no. Pure fingertip diarrhea.
Now hubby has gone back to work and so should I. Painting-- FUN! Writing crappy romance novel-- work. But before I go back to work, lemme show you what I've been doing for fun.
This is Eye Without A Face because, duh! I rather like it. The paint color surrounding the eye is called Flesh. It is not the color of my flesh at all-- and that is after considerable darkening. Those paint makers know some pretty pasty people.
You do not know how many terrible paintings I can inflict on you. I even have series. One called Space and one called Trees. This is because I paint a lot of space and trees. Many, many of these paintings are very terrible. But that's for another day.
