The Oft Asked Questions

are: how is your painting going? what are you painting now? what are you doing now? Obviously, the answer to the first two questions is, not well and nothing, respectively. It's another reminder that even though I write a blog there may be no one reading it; or those first questions wouldn't be getting asked. I reference this post more than any other, http://jeanives.blogspot.com/2010/10/retired-again.html and here it is again if you haven't already read it.
Question 3 often comes from people who are still on the career and family track and can't imagine the concept of free or unpaid time or from those wondering how I am channeling my creative energy. They look quite quizzically at me when they ask, especially those who know how busy my art business was. Filling my days isn't a problem and most of the time the filling is satisfying or even rich and tasty.

One of the tasty bits has been discovering digital book publishing. When we were east last summer,  http://jeanives.blogspot.com/2010/09/kith-and-kin.html my sister-in-law, Betty, introduced us to www.blurb.com a publisher that she had used to create a photo book of one of their trips to Europe. Wow! I had seen people's wedding books but the idea of recording a trip was fantastic. In my innocence I didn't realize there are hundreds of similar publishers and went with Blurb which, in my opinion, was a brilliant choice. Now that I am wiser about these things I would still choose Blurb: you can back up your book, the program tells you as you go if your images are too small to publish well and resizes them, it's less expensive than many publishers, and the books are delivered within a week of ordering them. How could you not love it? Inspired, I decided to create a book for Joan & Rob Tweedie  and for us us) because they are such good friends and because they gave us the opportunity to travel with them to South Africa to experience their world. I have to say the book turned out beautifully, even for a first effort. I had already made a DVD of the trip so had done hours of photo editing which made the book part go pretty quickly.

hard cover, 'image wrap' 8x10

When we returned from Iceland I was inspired again and created a book for my sister who had traveled with us and again it's gorgeous. This one took longer as I had to sort through all the photos the 3 of us had taken, and since we were there in November many of the photos had to be lightened to reproduce well. As I was working on that one my hard drive self-destructed so I barely made the Christmas present deadline.

I have now embarked on a REALLY challenging project; family photos. When my mother died almost 9 years ago we were left with old documents and photos, some dating back 120 years. I have scanned everything to electronic storage, cropped retouched, and generally enhanced hundreds of items and am almost finished putting together a photo journal of my family of origin. It's been fascinating putting the pieces together and figuring out who is who. When the book is finished we'll have a coffee table style memoir as well as the electronic files and them we can dispose of the unwieldy and never-looked-at originals.

my computer screen on the 'edit' page

preview view of the family book

Jim used Groupon to try a different company, Picaboo, for a BC travelogue. It's more of a photo album than a photo journal, and was quite a bit more expensive than Blurb. It has the advantage of a stitched binding rather than glued, which might matter to some people and only comes with a linen peak-a-boo cover style.

Picaboo cover style

fun layout but not much narrative potential

My shoulder is still a big problem and as the layers of scar tissue get thinned out it is emerging as a neck and nerve constriction with tendons and muscles compensating like mad to alleviate the difficulty that I insisted on ignoring. So even though I haven't lifted a paintbrush since last May, except to paint walls, the shoulder has not recovered. More physio, massage and chiro...