Bar Sketches

The studio here is now put together, as is the apartment’s “electronic foundation” (wireless, etc)…..sometime today I plan to actually hook the scanner into all that, which means posts (among other things) can become a lot more frequent again (not to mention allow me to finish building the blog&writer sister sites to this one).

The CAB meeting over the whole Marc Steiner fiasco is tonight, if you’re interested.

Here’s a link to their page…..doors open at 6:30.

This doesn’t have anything to do with sketching or Photoshopping, but I thought I’d mention it for the benefit of anyone living in Baltimore or Maryland.

In the last few weeks, the local public radio station (supported by donations, not tax money) fired it’s only local talk show host, Marc Steiner, with no advance warning for what appears to be personal differences between it’s President, Tony Brandon, and Marc Steiner.

Basically, the show kept reporting on unfavorable actions by various corporate interests in the area, interests that had begun to underwrite the station in order to influence the show’s content. When Steiner refused to modify his content, he was sacked, Brandon citing a drop off in ratings, a drop off that according to several articles in the Sun, doesn’t even exist.

Even if it did, the station is supposed to be supported by donations and donations have been doing very well and are supposedly at their highest ever. Radio programs that focus on the environment, corporate shenanigans, polite debate between differing political viewpoints, art, culture, and what-have-you are generally NOT going to be as popular as talk-shows that talk about titties and farting for three hours straight. That’s why the station subsisted on donations…..it allowed a venue for a non-hysterical debate of these issues to exist.

In any case, here’s a link to Steiner’s blog which is, at the moment, ground zero for the ruckus. There are links to multiple articles in the Sun, the Citypaper, the Examiner, and others.

Steiner didn’t just talk about whatever the issue of the hour was, he and his staff made sure to have the smartest, well-spoken representatives of both sides of the debate present, be they conservative or liberal, pro or anti- global warming/abortion/gay marriage etc.

It was nice to hear a reasoned debate for two hours every day that didn’t involve yelling, slurs, and talking points.

In any case, if you’re local, you might want to go take a look and see what’s going on.

Some obvious anatomy problems around the waist.  My anatomy just isn’t good enough yet without a model or a muscle chart nearby.

I’ve been fooling around with Photoshop some more, getting more and more comfortable with it.  This one took three days (several hours each day)….I basically took about eight different photographs and combined them….one was a photo of a bridge in Florence, one was of a lake, and four or five were various photos of stone castles and rocky mountainsides.  The last was from the FXFILMS Website who just happened to have a photo a model starship that is apparently 18ft long (it’s called the Rodger Young and looks amazing).

In any case, this was my first attempt, but I learned a lot of things the hard way which will hopefully help on the next piece I import into Photoshop.