Artist: Chris Turnham

I wanted to start highlighting some artists whom I am in complete awe over. I only know personally a couple of the artists on my artist list, but when I find an artist work that I love I add them to my list. Today I want to feature Chris Turnham. I accidentally happened upon his work one day when I was googling something or other. I love his interpretations of line, space, and color. I like looking at his sites and seeing how imaginative his concepts are. Imagination is something I really need to work on. Chris also worked on the artwork for the animated movie Coraline, a movie with amazingly beautiful and imaginative artwork (and also a movie that I would definately not recomend taking your children too....). I highly recomend that you take a look at one of his two sites that I have discovered. http://www.christurnham.com/ or http://www.christurnham.blogspot.com/

This week has been a very hard week for me, just several big things going on that have caused me discouragement and sadness. I hope next week is better.

Ethan Singing

Here are two audio only videos I took this evening of Ethan singing. I was putting him to bed, and I started to sing him a song like I do every night, but this time he started singing with me. It melted my heart, he was so sweet about it. He has attempted a couple of notes before but he has never tried to sing a whole song. I think music might be a good way of teaching him to talk, he loves music and playing on the piano, and I was so excited to hear his cute little voice as he tried to sing "you are my sunshine" and "twinkle twinkle little star". I didn't tape it, but we also sang "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam" which he loved and kept wanting to sing again and again. I think he's so cute. :)

Today I went to a friends home and took a bunch of pictures of her cute children to use as reference pictures for future illustrations/artwork. She was so kind and patient to let me take the pictures, and I am really excited to see how the images turned out. I used my nice camera, which isn't digital, so I'm going to have Costco put them on a cd so that I can then go through them one at a time and determine which ones are keepers and worth printing for reference photos. I'm excited because I have some good ideas for some illustrations. As soon as I get done I will post pictures of the artwork.

This last month Ryan graduated with his MBA, and I'm so proud of him. He was able to do it online which was nice since he was working full time. I don't have any good pictures of the graduation to post, so this one will do.

fun weekend

This last weekend we went to a family reunion for Ryan's mother's side of the family. We accidentally left our camera at home, so I wasn't able to take any fun pictures of the weekend. I saw, though, that Jenni and Margie both posted pictures on their blogs, for anyone wanting to see some fun pics of the weekend. Friday and Saturday were spent re-shingling Ryan's Grandma Nelson's roof, and the workers really worked hard and did a great job. Sunday we went to church with all the family, and Monday was spent playing on the snake river at Ryan's uncle John's home. Ethan was excited when he saw the boat and the jet skiis, and immediately started signing boat and wanting to go play on them, although he didn't enjoy going on them once the motors turned on. Ryan did get him out on a jet ski once, and I got him out on the boat once, but he cried the whole time. Ethan still had a lot of fun running around and eating tons of chips, fruit and soda and playing with all the children. It was a lot of fun to see all the family and we had a ton of fun jet skiing on the river.

He cracks me up.