English: Silent violin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This doesn’t take long to watch, but you will be filled with admiration!!! A feel good video. With all the bad stuff going on here and abroad we need some uplifting. We send them garbage. They send back music. A must-see video about the power of music. This upcoming documentary tells the story of music, hope, children, and the power of recycling. It’s the old saying isn’t it? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 
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More chalk drawings from Julian Beever. Incredible!!!!! Julian Beever is an English artist who’s famous for his art on the pavement of England , France , Germany , USA , Australia and Belgium Beever gives to his drawings an amazing 3D illusion.
Don’t miss seeing Julian Beever on the Top of the Bottle 
Do you notice everything is fake??? even the hose and water? 
Look Closely, you can see the Bricks through the Chalk on the Monitor Screen
People are actually avoiding walking in the “hole” 
Politicians Meeting Their End
Girl in Swimming Pool (Remember, both his feet in reality are flat on the pavement )
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Wood Chips
This man takes wood chips, soaks them in water for many days. He uses a tree from Russia (Red Cedar). Then he starts building his pieces which takes him about 6 months, 10 hours a day to finish it.
He was offered a lot of money for one piece but won’t sell one. Enjoy the pictures. 
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Photography of John Atkinson Grimshaw (1826-1893) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Taken from Wikipedia
John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836 – 13 October 1893) was a Victorian-era artist, a “remarkable and imaginative painter”[1] known for his city night-scenes and landscapes.[2][3]
His early paintings were signed “JAG,” “J. A. Grimshaw,” or “John Atkinson Grimshaw,” though he finally settled on “Atkinson Grimshaw.”
John Atkinson Grimshaw was born 6 September 1836 in Leeds. In 1856 he married his cousin Frances Hubbard (1835–1917). In 1861, at the age of 24, to the dismay of his parents, he left his job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to become a painter. He first exhibited in 1862, mostly paintings of birds, fruit and blossom, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.[4] He became successful in the 1870s and rented a second home in Scarborough, which became a favourite subject.
Several of his children, Arthur Grimshaw (1864–1913), Louis H Grimshaw (1870–1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871–1937) and Elaine Grimshaw (1877–1970) became painters.
It’s interesting to go through these paintings( see link below) and see the difference in his methods over the years, and his use of light and shade.
http://au.images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=mcafee&va=john+atkinson+grimshaw
Nightfall on the Thames, 1880 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Nightfall on the Thames, 1880
Grimshaw’s primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he created landscapes of accurate colour, lighting, vivid detail and realism. He painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type of weather; city and suburban street scenes and moonlit views of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Glasgow also figured largely in his art. His careful painting and skill in lighting effects meant that he captured both the appearance and the mood of a scene in minute detail. His “paintings of dampened gas-lit streets and misty waterfronts conveyed an eerie warmth as well as alienation in the urban scene.”
Dulce Domum (1855), on whose reverse Grimshaw wrote, “mostly painted under great difficulties,” captures the music portrayed in the piano-player, entices the eye to meander through the richly decorated room, and to consider the still and silent young lady who is listening. Grimshaw painted more interior scenes, especially in the 1870s, when he worked under the influence of James Tissot and the Aesthetic Movement.
On Hampstead Hill is considered one of Grimshaw’s finest works, exemplifying his skill with a variety of light sources, in capturing the mood of the passing of twilight into night. In his later career his urban scenes under twilight or yellow streetlighting were popular with his middle-class patrons.
His later work included imagined scenes from the Greek and Roman empires, and he painted literary subjects from Longfellow and Tennyson—pictures including Elaine and The Lady of Shalott. (Grimshaw named his children after characters in Tennyson’s poems.)
In the 1880s, Grimshaw maintained a London studio in Chelsea, not far from the studio of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. After visiting Grimshaw, Whistler remarked that “I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.”[9] Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes Grimshaw worked in a realistic vein: “sharply focused, almost photographic,” his pictures innovated in applying the tradition of rural moonlight images to the Victorian city, recording “the rain and mist, the puddles and smoky fog of late Victorian industrial England with great poetry.”
English: Shipping on the Clyde by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Oil on board, 30.5 x 51 cm. Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Shipping on the Clyde, 1881
Grimshaw’s paintings depicted the contemporary world but eschewed the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial towns. Shipping on the Clyde, a depiction of Glasgow’s Victorian docks, is a lyrically beautiful evocation of the industrial era. Grimshaw transcribed the fog and mist so accurately as to capture the chill in the damp air, and the moisture penetrating the heavy clothes of the few figures awake in the misty early morning.
Some artists of Grimshaw’s period, like Vincent Van Gogh and James Smetham, left letters and documents recording their work and lives. Grimshaw left behind no letters, journals, or papers; scholars and critics have little material on which to base their understanding of his life and career.
Grimshaw died 13 October 1893, and is buried in Woodhouse Hill Cemetery, Hunslet, Leeds. His reputation rested on, and his legacy is based on, his townscapes. There was a revival of interest in Grimshaw’s work in the second half of the 20th century, with several important exhibitions devoted to it. A retrospective exhibition “Atkinson Grimshaw – Painter of Moonlight” ran from 16 April 2011 to 4 September 2011 at Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate and subsequently in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
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Giant bus proposal from China (Photo credit: Daniel Bowen)
Pity we didn’t have this straddling bus in Australia. Though I wondered how I would feel if one of these went over the top of me. A bit claustrophobic maybe? Still it’s a great system and would get a lot of cars off the roads wouldn’t it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=t1gTzc7-IbQ&feature=player_embedded
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Hieronymus Bosch – The Seven Deadly Sins (detail) – WGA2503 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Taken from Writer’s Digest 12th March 2013
We’re most likely to sin when we’re at our most vulnerable—and for creative writers, there may be no more vulnerable time than the delicate (and often excruciating) process of editing our own work. Sidestep these too-common traps, and keep your story’s soul pure.
by Janice Gable Bashman & Kathryn Craft
Many authors damn their efforts from the start with a premature focus on snagging a lucrative book deal. They submit to agents or self-publish before their work is truly ready. But building a career requires that you lay a strong foundation of only your best work—and nobody’s first draft is the best it can be. Careful editing is the mortar that holds the story bricks together.
Penance: Resist the temptation to convince yourself your first draft is “good enough.” If you find yourself rushing your editing process just to leap ahead to pursuing publication, look for deeper motivation to sustain you. Remember that the revision process doesn’t have to be any less enjoyable than the writing itself: You’ll be setting out to find the magic in each word, sentence, paragraph. You’ll be tapping your creative soul for ways to add tension to every page, to find clever solutions to tough story problems. Greed looks toward the uncertain rewards of tomorrow. The joys of writing are available to you today.
Just as dangerous as the temptation to call your first draft “finished” can be the tendency to jump into a revision right away. Words and ideas flood your mind; emotions pump through your heart. But that mad creative rush can become excessive, harming your ability to clearly assess your writing.
Penance: Step away from your current project as long as you can bear it—then wait an additional week. You’ll need that emotional distance before you revisit your work.
A great novel is like a gourmet meal. It must be prepared carefully, and to specification, with complementary flavors and courses.
Getting carried away and stuffing in all the good ideas and beautiful word pairings you’ve got in your pantry can lead to overindulgence.
Penance: Put your manuscript on a diet. Pare down or eliminate scenes that don’t further the story. Examine plot points, characters, description, dialogue and exposition, until you have precisely what you need to tell your story, and not a character or subplot more. Then apply this same philosophy to your work at the sentence level, killing your darlings and eliminating excessive adjectives and adverbs, along with verbose descriptions. Bring out the flavor of both your story and your style, but stop short of overseasoning.
Even in the current age of publishing, where aspiring authors can and must act as their own publicists and webmasters and take on myriad other roles, editing is one thing you can’t complete alone. As a form of communication, writing needs an audience. Thinking you don’t need feedback from others isn’t just pride—it’s pride that can squelch your potential.
Penance: Seek the help of beta readers, critique groups and editors. In return for the valuable feedback you receive, share your growing skills by critiquing the works of other participants in return. Then take your humble approach a step further and volunteer at writing conferences, libraries or literacy programs. Start a neighborhood book club, a regional networking group or a listserv for writers. Read widely and blog about it. The more you support the literary community, the more likely it will support you.
The lazy scribe is one who’s failed to develop and utilize all her natural talents. To draft a story—and then stop there—is to ignore the very nature of literature, which constructs meaning through the deft layering of craft elements. If you find yourself bucking that notion, you may be guilty of sloth.
Penance: Just like with physical exercise, whipping your talent into shape takes time and dedication. You don’t jog once a year and end up with a perfect body. So it goes with your manuscript. To build the endurance skills you’ll need for marathon writing and revision, you must continuously train: Do writing prompts. Do writing exercises. Keep your writing muscles toned through daily practice, and when you review your previous work, your mistakes and weak sections will become more apparent, you’ll be more capable of dealing with them, and you’ll be far less likely to walk away.
Creative people are notoriously insecure. You may covet one published author’s self-confident voice, or another’s way with words. Maybe it’s his humor, or her emotional honesty. If you fear your work pales in comparison, remember that those authors didn’t strike it big by mimicking others or wallowing in jealousy.
Penance: With a friend or writing group, analyze your draft for what is uniquely you. Is it your voice? Your descriptions? Your quirky observations about the world around you? Edit your manuscript again, with an eye for drawing that element out on every page. Editors and agents don’t want another x, y or z. They want what you have that nobody else does. So don’t hold yourself to an impossible standard by trying to be one of your peers.
The editing process can inspire uncontrolled feelings of rage in a writer. It’s difficult to discover or to hear from a trusted reader that you might not yet have fully developed your work—but it’s also an important step in growing your organic talent.
Penance: Wrath will only get in the way. Ignore feedback at your own peril: What angers us most holds a nugget of truth. Find it. Listen for the gifts within the criticism offered, and use them to help inspire new ideas. Your manuscript can only improve as a result.
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ducklings (Photo credit: runmonty)
What a great guy to do this, he deserves the applause. So glad to see all the ducklings safe.
JUST WATCH THIS.
THE THREE ABC NEWS PEOPLE TALKING ONLY TAKES A SECOND OR SO AND THEN THE VIDEO STARTS, IT IS REALLY SOMETHING TO SEE, The Duck-man ..Enjoy!
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Acrylic paint red pyrrole dab (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Taken from Artist’s Network Online Magazine 5th April 2013
By Courtney Jordan, Online Editor of Artist’s Daily
Painting for beginners and painting for more advanced artists do not involve totally different processes. Only the familiarity with basic painting
instruction and the ease of executing those technical steps is what separates a beginner painter from an advanced one.
To learn how to paint–right here and right now–start with three easy steps that will allow you to grow in confidence and skill as an artist.
1. Learn What Your Materials Are All About
All oil painting lessons start with the fundamentals of materials because knowing how your paints respond allows you to fully understand how to exploit them to their fullest potential, and how to avoid any big mistakes.
Traditional oil paints consist of ground pigments combined with a drying oil, such as linseed, walnut, or poppyseed oil. A “drying oil” is one that absorbs oxygen from the air, which causes it to dry and harden over time, forming a flexible and resistant surface. Each pigment requires a different amount of oil to reach the consistency needed for painting. The amount of oil absorbed by a pigment directly affects its
drying time, which can be useful for an artist to know as he or she works in the studio to learn painting.
2. The Basics of Color
You can learn how to paint nearly every color with just three pigments. Exact hues vary from one manufacturer to the next, but you could go far with any company’s Indian yellow, naphthol red, and ultramarine blue.
Secondary colors, such as orange, green and purple, are made by mixing primary colors. Tertiary colors are those made by mixing a secondary color with a primary color. Other colors are made by adding a bit of white pigment (a process called tinting) or
adding a bit of black (a process called shading). 
3. Learn to Paint
with Dimension: Layering with Acrylics
Acrylic painting lessons will usually include the basic techniques of manipulating washes to develop detailed paintings of landscapes, figures, still lifes and the like. This process sounds
more complicated than it truly is, as there are just three essential steps to learning how to use acrylic paint to give objects depth and dimension.
First, Apply a Thin Wash: Use either a wash or glaze of red oxide combined with a small amount of titanium white and diarylide yellow. Apply one thin wash to your surface to create a few shapes.
Second, Apply a Second Coat: Using the same color as in step one, mix a wash or glaze using slightly less water or gel. This value will be darker because there is more pigment. When the first coat is dry, apply a second coat to the areas to give the initial shapes more dimension. For example, the second coat could be applied to the front and side of a cube.
Third, Apply Shadows: After the second coat is dry, apply a third one of the same color to the areas where shadows from other objects could be. You may need another coat after this one dries to further delineate shadowed areas. All of this was done with the same color and shows how successive layers of a single color can easily add dimension to a basic painting sketch. –Hugh Greer
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This is one of the cleverest email’s I’ve seen. PLEASE WAIT UNTIL THE GROUP CHANGES POSITIONS. IS IT TWELVE OR THIRTEEN?? 
This will drive you crazy!
WHERE DOES THE EXTRA MAN COME FROM? Don’t ask me; I haven’t figured it out yet !!
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Writer Wordart (Photo credit: MarkGregory007)
Today’s guest newsletter is from James Scott Bell, who is our Instructor of the Month.
Structure is translation software for your imagination.
You, the writer, have a story you want to tell. You feel it, see it, populate it with characters. But turning all that raw material into a novel isn’t simply a matter of putting it into words on a page or screen. You have to “translate” it into a form that readers can relate to.
That’s what structure does. And if you ignore it or mess with it, you risk frustrating-or worse, losing-readers.
I was amused many years ago when a writing teacher of some repute shouted in front of an auditorium that there was no such thing as structure. He went on and on about this. Later, when I looked at his materials and the terms he had used to designate various story beats, guess how they unfolded? Yep, in a perfect, traditional three-act structure.
When it comes to the writing process, fiction writers tend to fall into two camps: those who prefer to outline before they write, and those who find outlines too constricting. The pillars of structure are equally useful tools for both of these types of writers. If you’re a writer who likes to outline, you can learn to set up a strong story by mapping out a few key structural scenes from the start. And if you like flying by the seat of your pants, you can continue to be as free as you like with your first draft. Write hot. Just understand that later, you will have to think about structuring what you’ve written-because manuscripts that ignore structure are almost always filed under unsold.
But what, you may ask, about authors who purposely play with structure-some to the point their books are called ”experimental”? Suffice to say that these authors usually know exactly why they are doing so-and they accept as a consequence that their books might not be as popular with the reading public as novels that have structure working in their favor. At the very least, every author should understand structure fully before playing around with it. (This advice also applies to hand grenades.)
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