Weekly Photo Challenge: Water
©Rena Katinas
I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do for this week’s Photo Challenge. Our city rests on an inland sea, a beautiful one, but a picture of Lake Michigan as a whole is just a bit too literal for me. I considered doing some sort of something or other with glasses of water, but my family seems to be hoarding all the water glasses in their bedroom. I thought I was going to have to opt out of this week’s challenge. Wouldn’t you know it, today turned out to be one of those wonderful rainy spring days, the kind that turn the sky so dark, you have to turn the lights on at noon. Really dark stormy days are so rare, and I love them. Pictured above is a close-up of water droplets on my window screen, or Lake Michigan in very tiny bits.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny
©Rena Katinas
This week I have not one but two photos, taken at 18th and Wentworth, down by the railroad tracks. These thistles or weeds are on their own, there isn’t much nature to be found in the immediate area. The second image is just me having a little fun in Photoshop!
©Rena Katinas
It’s the End of the World and My Carpets Aren’t Clean!
I had fully planned on posting a list of things to do before the end of the world (who knew?!) which I only found out about on Thursday. I figured I could blog and do a little spring cleaning on the traffic areas of the carpeting at the same time and set up my SpotBot for carpet ass kickin’. I pressed the set in stain button and the SpotBastard doesn’t work, all the lights light up and it beeps incessantly. Perhaps it knows it’s the end of the world and just doesn’t care any more. So instead of preparing an Apocalypse list to post, I spent all yesterday evening googling and testing, making a giant flood-mess in the bathroom, then an hour on the phone with the Bissell customer “support” zombies, then more fiddling and generally getting nowhere fast.
Now I’m facing the end of the world with dirty traffic areas, plus I didn’t get to eat a lobster with lots of butter, or party in the streets like it’s the end of the world. Well I guess there’s always the day after the end of the world, and up until the final end of the world on October 21. I’m not exactly sure, because I couldn’t be bothered to read the entire end of the world summary. I think that’s the period of time when we are supposed to sit out on lawn chairs while holding umbrellas and just watch stuff fall apart until October.
It’s not clear what time the apocalypse is scheduled for today, so far the neighborhood isn’t a flaming pile of rubble. I’ve checked out my windows, hoping to see the likes of Cheney, Bush, Newt, Rush (Limbaugh, not the band) and those two genital warts, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin engulfed in flames, floating up to the outer atmosphere until they disappear. So far nothing, but it is a foggy day today, here in Chicago.
Well I guess there’s always the next end of the world, or the one after that. Until then I’ve prepared myself with a big beatin’ stick, a large capacity stock pot, my “Judgement Day 2011 OR 2012″ T-shirt, and pina colada fixings. I’ll be gathering apocalyptic recipes for the many things that might rain down upon us: the sky, locusts, frogs, Tea Baggers, (er, Tea Party members) even the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan.
Here’s hoping you all have a warm and festive apocalypse today and many more to follow!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Wildlife
©Rena Katinas
Wildlife in Chicago isn’t abundant, mostly rats and stray cats in my neighborhood. I found this guy or gal chilling at the boat yards along the Chicago River, on the south side. It’s some kind of insect, I know that much. Maybe it’s a cicada, or a grasshopper, not sure how to tag this… “mystery bug”? If there are any bug-people out there, (bug enthusiasts or people who believe they have been genetically altered with bug DNA – I’m not picky) if you know what this is, let me know!
Gettin’ My Scribble On
scribble©2011 Rena Katinas
My little painting area is in total disarray right now. I became so frustrated with my attempt to rearrange for not only my right handedness but for my easel to face, god forbid, light, that I just left everything in a state of mid-rearrange. It’s now becoming my white whale and I’ve chosen the time-honored tactic of avoidance to deal with it over the last few nights.
What’s the best way to avoid doing things you should be doing? Corel Painter! (Also GarageBand, but I don’t want to confuse things further.) Why spend your late nights figuring out how build a large tabouret that won’t fall over without the aid of wood or tools, when my computer already has a studio filled with art supplies that are organized and easy to find.
I tend to do a lot of doodling and scribbling, after I first open Painter, it’s a good way to warm up and free my mind. So I scribbled away, lost in the zone listening to Panjabi MC, only half paying attention to the marks I was laying out. When I stopped, I realized my jamming to Indian hip hop scribble had turned into some sort of figurative scribble by accident and I was pleased!
Mango Molested Because Camera Won’t Play Nice
©2011 Rena Katinas
I found a mango in the fridge and thought it would be a nice subject to bring into Corel Painter. So I plopped it on various pieces of watercolor paper I had painted to use for drawing grounds and proceeded to shoot some photos. Then I realized my lens’ auto focus motor is definitely dead, s#@%t! After manually bracketing some shots, because my camera doesn’t do that automatically either, I thought why not make some fairly serviceable RAW files look kind of insane. Once I began post-processing them in Photoshop, I began to realize I had done that mango wrong. Digitally molesting mangos by tone mapping them in Photomatix won’t make you feel better about your broken lens motor, but it’s pretty fun, if you can get past that dirty feeling.
