I did joanlansberry.com first. It was easy to choose, the yin/yang head from my logo was not difficult to shrink down. The one for aztriad.com took some more thought. I wanted the triadic aspects reflected, that this website reflects the work of three different people. I settled on three circles of equidistant secondary colors. I chose secondary over primary because it is easier to adjust tonal values to make them equal, so that when turned grayscale, all circles are the same shade gray. For instance, in the red-yellow-blue primary scheme, yellow is so much lighter than blue that to make the yellow dark enough to equal a lightened blue, it might have looked funky. It would be so much muddier in hue strength, that it would seem out of balance to the others.

When I showed Julia my result, she liked the colors, but thought the circles should touch. Not easy to do that with only sixteen pixels, but I finally got a way that doesn't look too offcenter. Here's the way they look in Mozilla Firefox and Opera:

Yes, I do have a LOT of browser windows open!

Saturday, June 3, 2006 A

"Amused By Big Things"
8:36am

52 Figments questions is "You just won the grand prize on the TV show "Thrill of a Lifetime"! What will your Thrill of a Lifetime look like?". The sensory imagining of white water rafting is what first came to me. That is after all that travelling, which we already covered, which would be my first choice. Never mind I am weak of joint, and YES, that poor strong man at the front there would have to be doing most of the work. Let's just say he'll find THAT out after the trip begun. And can I pack enough waterproof sunscreen for my uber delicate skin? It is probably more of a fantasy than anything. When my Dad and teenaged I used to go on canoing trips, no WHITE water there, I thought he worked us too hard. I wanted to just paddle out into the middle of the beautiful scenery and float and enjoy the scenery. He wasn't having none of that. Row, row, row! Still, I didn't appreciate those trips as much as I would now.

For more recent watery thrills, which I did enjoy to the max, I remember Laura and I in the water at the San Diego beach in the early 90's. Fortunately, we took pictures:

thoroughly enjoying it...

Laura having a good time, too...

I loved the sensation of the waves hitting me and kept going deeper into the water. Wave after wave, it was just so exciting. Pretty soon Laura was yelling at me, "Come to the shore, the LOCALS are leaving, it's time to go!" Reluctantly, I did. She then started telling me about the undertow, how all of a sudden you can be pulled under. When the locals leave, it's a good sign that we could be in danger of that happening if we stay. No, we were wisely safe about our fun.

Oh, those were wonderful times!

Saturday, June 3, 2006 B

"Cool Entertainment on a Hot Day"
4:55pm

It's hot out there. The official record declares "111.9 °F / 44.4 °C". Isn't that a bit of weaseling? 111.9 °F?? Why don't they just come out and say 112 °F??

It's hot. And few fools are out there baking in it. We rush from cave to cave, and one such nice cave is the movie theater. We went to see X Men III: The Last Stand. It was good. Man, was it good! Okay, if you don't enjoy this type of movie, don't identify with the mutants in some way, it might lose you. But otherwise...

I'd like to sketch many of the characters from this movie. I'd like to get Jean Grey in her raging temper, with the glowing eyes. Oh, yes, and Wolverine is hot. But the character that most intrigued me is Charles Xavier, as played by Patrick Stewart. There's just something in his eyes. He sees much.

Okay, maybe I haven't made him look entirely like Patrick Stewart. I dunno, the face just doesn't quite match. Maybe he just looks a whole lot older. But I like the expression of the eyes, the look of extreme awareness, maybe extreme worried awareness. This fits the character.

This picture was originally colored pencil and ink on computer paper, then I tweaked it digitally.