Was both one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It took me just shy of a year and a half. I read the entire seven book Harry Potter series to my eldest daughter once she showed me she could pay attention long enough to make the exercise worthwhile. We started book one by reading half a chapter at a time, doing voices and dramatic pauses, sounding less like Alan Rickman as Snape and more like Will I am Shat tner. We read the first book three times in a row before she was comfortable enough to move on to book two, which we read twice. My throat took a real hit reading out loud every single day. Once the shit downs hit, and school went on line, we would read chapters throughout the day as well. We did that right up until this summer when we finally completed the whole series, and moved on to Percy Jackson, which was ok, but nowhere near as entertaining. We have yet to finish the fifth and final book of the series. Not sure if the payoff will be worth it. The whole point was to spend time together doing something fun, and imparting a life long love of reading and storytelling. I know that I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I hope to some day read The Lord of the Rings to both kids. Then we can watch and enjoy the films together as well. Or I’ll enjoy it and they’ll tolerate it and move on which is fine to. I show them the thing of interest, and they can choose to enjoy it or find something else that interests them instead. I want them to like this stuff, but I don’t expect them to love it or become obsessed with it. I just want to be the one to offer it up to them, I don’t care if they don’t want to wrap themselves around it like I did as a preteen/child. I just want to introduce them to stuff I like so we can share it for a bit, as a fun experience and then let it go. If they adopt it – great, if not, at least we shared it for that brief moment in time.
Tag: Pop culture
Spending some down time sculpting
Like I said in a previous post, I have pulled back from my writing so that I can continue to dabble in clay. I just like the visceral feel of tacky clay under my finger nails. Watching something grow from a wire armature into a fully realized piece with some detailing on top for good measure. I put nearly 44,000 words to paper in the first six weeks of 2020, and only one full sculpt. So now I’ll do that for a bit instead. Below you can see the bulk of my hard work over the last several years. Enjoy.
Fun with Celebrity Mash-ups
Several months ago I had a quiet day at the office, must have been during one of the quarterly meetings or near a holiday, as I don’t really recall at the moment. But I was tired of working on cut and dried advertisements so I scoured the internets (read Google images) and pilfered a couple of clean head shots of various actors and actresses. I did more than the snippet I’ll post here today, but some didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped, and some people are just too similar to notice any kind of a mash up; for instance Johnny Knoxville and Joshua Duhamel just look so alike that you couldn’t tell I had super imposed one over top of the other. Others were just badly executed, a Tara Reid & Kate Upton mash up was simply horrendous, and plain frightening to behold.
Anyway, here are the three most successful mash ups. Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston, Putin and James Masrden, and Daniel Craig and Zack Efron. Share, comment and enjoy.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
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