I am not an actual artist/writer by trade, but I was not going to sit around waiting for the Artist's Block to go away by itself.  Thus I went to work doing some software and website upgrade for a small company.  Eventually I finish my work and found what was missing in my last digital painting. It was just a evening sky full of stars that was missing.  To add that, I made an extra black layer in Photoshop, and then use a Gaussian blur to make the stars.  I made two more layers like that using different Gaussian blur settings to get different size stars.  I then merge the star layers together, clone certain stars to get them to cluster together.  I also colorize the stars somewhat by using Hues.

For the finishing touches, I change the settings on the star layer to Screen.  My background was a purplish night sky, but by changing the layer setting, the stars can shine out against the purplish background. The finished painting can be viewed at http://www.lindachow.com/gallery/artwork/slide2.html I mentioned before that being an artist/writer is not my day job.  Yet I do enjoy painting, drawing, writing....whatever is good for the creative streak in me.  I hope to become a children's book writer/illustrator someday, especially when I grow old and retired.

There's also the invisible changes to my site.  I've also went through a lot of the graphics on the website and reduce their size, all for the sake of quicker uploading.  There's still more fixer-uppers needed to do around my online home, but those are things that I'll just do over time.

 That link should lead to an interesting article ("Unlocking the Mysteries of the Artistic Mind") from the July 2009 issue of Psychology Today.  It explored how humans view art and how artists, particularly the Old Masters, had a sense of how their audience perceives art.  It also showed why certain art is appealing.  Guess the old business saying of "Know your customers" applies to the art world as well.

A Fibonacci series poem typically has six lines, although I have seen some on the Internet that ran longer.  Each sequential lines contains the same amount of syllables per line as the corresponding number in a 6-digit Fibonacci sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8.  It adds up to a total of 20 syllables (there'll be more syllables, of course, if the poem runs more than 6 lines).

Here's an example of a Fibonacci poem from yours truly:

Way
too
simple,
so easy
to make a poem
even one fearing words writes it.

Besides my lack of blogging, I had not posted any art or writing on my website.  There were valid reasons for this.  One was that I was stumped with a severe case of writer's block.  Maybe it was the economy, or maybe my day job had drained away much of my physical and mental energy, but whatever the cause of the writer's (and artist's) block, it had created a blank on my canvas and my computer.  Another reason of why I hadn't posted anything was that I was so caught up with all else that was going on in my life that I completely ignored my art.  My creative life, after all, was my avocation, not my vocation.  It was thus just too easy to set my creativity aside. 

Anyhow, I decided that today would be the first day of the rest of my creative life.  Once I find the cable to hook my scanner to my computer, I will definitely start posting my creative works online.