January 2009

I’d love to do it but I’m too chicken shit. Or is it “too busy?” Or “too lazy?” Or is my early potty training bringing on early-stage psychosis? Mommy.

http://jeffhayesfinearts.blogspot.com/

http://www.dailyartpainters.com/

http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/

http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/

http://makingamark.blogspot.com/2006/09/stickability-factor.html

http://reviews.ebay.com/Painting-A-Day_W0QQugidZ10000000001813827

http://www.squidoo.com/paintingaday

I got a new sight-size book. It’s about sight-size drawing from casts, which I can’t afford, which I saw on Amazon from some people that didn’t understand the specifics of the sight-size method so they recommended this book.[asa]0980045401[/asa]

It’s a good book, not much on the reading, though. It’s also not QUITE what I thought it would be – I had some people that are doing the Bargue Plates,

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Wellllll…

Okay, the book is good. I recommend it. I need to get off my butt and get to my garage and get it cleaned out and the studio set back up so I can draw again. And I need to find some good places to get casts to do drawings from. I’ll re-review, I suppose, when I get that.

I whole-heartedly recommend Tony Ryder’s book,  The Artists Guide to Figure Drawing, because that book is so amazing. HE is so amazing. I only wish I had taken that path earlier in my life instead of being the practical lout that I am.

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Anyway, finding a good plaster cast is difficult, unless you’re rich. Darren Rousar used a Discobolos cast that seems to retail for nearly $400. Cough!

No, not a new site, more like a relaunch. You see, about 8 months ago, my hosting company borked up my “hustedportraits.com” domain and it was going to some third party, so I reconfigured everything to my other domain, stevehusted.com. However, that’s just a site I wanted to use to ramble about non-art things, and I wanted clarity and continuity of purpose in my art blog…

So I was in a quandary: do I reconfigure hustedportraits.com or do I try to figure out something else? A few weeks after the snafu, which was inconvenient because it happened to coincide with my daughter’s birth and nobody could see all the nice pictures I took, which supremely annoyed me, they got hustedportraits.com back. Whoopsie, our bad! Well, too little, too late. I’m going to let that domain expire, I’m sure some domain squatter will sit on it for a while in hopes that they snatched up real estate they can hawk back at inflated margins. No such luck, sorry, guys.

I decided to put my mind to it this week and I came up with a solution: subdomains. Turns out my host, HostGator (they’re really good other than that snafu), updated their CPanel installation and it’s all snazzy now. So I was browsing around my available options and I had a flash of brilliance: why not just make subdomains?

So I made my gallery point to gallery.stevehusted.com, I made my non-art/Linux/music blog into regular ‘ol stevehusted.com, and I created artist.stevehusted.com, which is what you see now.

I think I like this solution – it simplifies things for me and doesn’t require me to reestablish on a new domain. It DOES give me a fresh WordPress installation, which I think I’d like to customize more, but not as much as the Tarski theme on the main site (which lost its customizations after upgrading this last time, but it was worth it – it’s a solid theme).

Now I’ll need to redouble my efforts at getting this thing going. I was going to do it in 2005, but my son was born and I spent time with him, and also got 27 credits in a graphic design program at AIU. Then, in 2006, I was going to do more but I got busy with my new job… then in 2007 I went on sabbatical from work, then in 2008 my daughter was born AND I did a very, very busy rotation into factory planning at Intel.

Phew!

Now, however, I think I’m finally settled down with no big work things happening, no school for at least a year (gearing up for the MBA because art is more business than painting/drawing – more on that later), no more kids on the way, so I’m kicking myself in the butt to get this going. I have a couple hundred article topics I’ve readied plus all the goodies that I think of all the time.

My next step is to get my art articles moved over here from the main WordPress blog, which shouldn’t be too hard because the style and the content are separate so it should be as simply as copy/paste/delete the old.

Ya’ll ready for this?