Advice For Artists

I loved visiting with Jenny Oaks Baker. Artists have so much to share about their work. We can learn from each other and be encouraged in our own artistic endeavors. What can you do today to renew that spark that wants to ignite? Write a poem, sing a song, take a photo? It's the summer of your budding talent. We have all been given gifts. What fun to express our creativity. I welcome your thoughts on what you have done this week to "Invite the Light". I'm going to paint a mural, build a window of a piano and make 13 girls camp fused glass pins. What about you?

Creating Video Clips

Those who follow the activities of our studio know that we love teaching and find video to be a very useful way to teach. Our first video took 5 years, 3 producers and many hours to complete. It turned out very well and is our top seller.

When we started on our project series, we decided to avoid continuity errors by shooting the video straight through and then inserting extra shots later. We keep the original video, with any flaws and mistakes. This way we don't have the nightmare of losing information that we had to fight with out first production. We are currently working on our sixth project video. They have each been fun to complete.

Now, we are beginning to shoot little video clips to make our blog and websites more interesting. This has been frustrating at times because I have gotten close to completing a video project time after time and hit a snag and been shut down. Finally I have found a piece of software after trying to use about 15 different software programs, including: adobe premier pro, microsoft movie maker, roxio final cut 7, showbiz, showbiz DVD 2, The entire AVS suite, and Quicktime pro (just to name a few).  This software that finally works with no glitches is Cyberlink Power Director 9. If you find yourself looking for a video editing tool for the PC, this is it! It's very complex and I have much to learn but after all the many programs I've attempted to learn and then running into problems, and printing off hundreds of pages of (sometimes usless) manuals, it's great to have a place where I can focus.

Last night I downloaded the trial version and this morning I was able to complete 2 quick videos about advice to musicians. The following are links to the YouTube videos.

Jenny Oakes Baker

Musicians

Since it works so well, I'm set to but this software and you can get it for only $49, imagine that, the best software at such an affordable price!

Date Night - Fan Lamps

We had so much fun at our Date Night for 2 class. The fan lamps turned out great.

It made me smile to see the couples helping each other. "You are doing such a good job on your solder joints." and "Here, would you like to work on this side?" and even " What ever color you choose will be perfect."


It was good. We will definitely do this again. Working with Susan Glenn is always a pleasure. She sets up lots of date nights. Enough talk, here are pictures.

Date Night For 2

Every once in a while we want to go on a date together. That's when David opens the car door and has a little cash in his wallet. At those times we look at each other and say "What do you want to do? I don't know, what do you want to do? I guess we'll go to dinner or to a show." That can be fun, especially since we don't go out often, but we came up with another choice.

We are making a video on how to make little fan lamps and thought, "Hey! lets have a couples date night and everyone can make one of these." Brilliant! So if your dating ideas are running stale, come join us. It's June 17, 2011 at 7pm. Go to datenightfor2.com to sign up (see the link above). I think it will be fun. Today I am making some to see how easy they really are. It's my adventure to see if the patterns I made work like I think they will.