Web Site Finally Coming Along!

Hello!

I finally did it. I finally got around to creating the basic design and menu system for the pages on this site. So, this is "it." There will, however, be one major exception to the site's uniform look: my "personal" section. That area is going to be totally different, and I am quite excited about it. That is where I will showcase home movies, photos and my favorite music. I have quite a concept for it, but I'm on a pretty steep learning curve here so bear with me please. I really think it will be worth the wait.

The "gallery" is where you can look at my paintings, many of the mountainous Big Bend region in West Texas. At some point, I hope to dig up some photos of older stuff I did and add those just for laughs, but otherwise the way it is now is the way it is going to be. I might change the gallery background to just a gradient or maybe something else, because I went a little wild with the butterflies and leaves while experimenting with custom brushes in PhotoShop.

The "About" area is basically going to be a brief biography and artist's statement. The bio is taken from what was on my old Art by Mary RoadRunner web site, with a few changes yet to made. I'll have to write the artist's statement, which will be a good exercise in creative writing. An artist's statement is basically a statement about how an artist feels about his work and what motivates him. Some artists use it to get political or sappy, but I am going to try to avoid that, although the beauty of God's creation has at times really overcome me. Highly detailed, realistic fine art is the way I try to convey my sense of love and awe.

Now, you are probably wondering why I am bothering with a web site. Primarily, it"s a place for me to share my oil paintings of landscapes, seascapes and animals. Most of the art is inspired from the desert of west Texas and is painted in a highly detailed, realistic style. And, frankly, I have to do something with my time. I can't sit around watching CourtTV or, God forbid, soap operas all day. Playing video games is also a tremendous waste of time, in my opinion. It's a nice diversion, but to do that all day is rather, well, you get my point. The mind needs to be stimulated and expanded, and computers and the Internet have been a blessing for people who are homebound like me. Also, I am going to offer my services to people who might be in need. I design and print business cards, as well as fine art giclée prints. Now, I can add web site design and even photo restoration to my bag of goodies. I don't plan on charging much because I'm still learning. It's kind of my way of doing an internship. Thanks to Adobe's CS3 design software, my printer and new scanner, I can retouch photos and do all sorts of useful things with very old or damaged originals.

"Resources" is where I will post links that are useful or interesting. I will also mention web sites of friends and relatives. I'll even explain how I do some of the tricks here - like font embedding. I'll tell you what software I use to get things done, and maybe even what doesn't work so well. I won't just stop at pointing you in the right direction, though - I'm actually going to give you some free stuff! Whoopee! Smilies and widgets and fonts, oh my!

Finally, there will be a contact form for those that happen to stumble upon this site and for some wacky reason decide they might want to drop me a line. Being the spam hater I am, that's going to be accomplished through a form with a captcha. Naturally, this is going to involve my first attempt at PHP and javascript.

Before you go, please browse the menu at the top of the page. It was a real booger getting it to render close to the same in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Firefox and Opera 9.5. If you notice any bugs, please drop me a line. Oh, by the way, Mozilla just launched Firefox 3.0 and it's screaming fast. It really rocks; you've got to try it! The only thing about it is that you have to install a plug-in to view embedded fonts, but that's not really too big of a deal. It also offers the option of using the the rendering engine in IE7.

One last thing. The above is a video presentation I created in Roxio Media Creator. I hope you enjoy it.