100° Studio Loft Party

I've obviously been neglecting this spot for some time now. Mostly due to the amount of things I'm working on—as life goes in waves, so does blog writing. Usually during the end of the day I don't have any brainpower left. At the beginning of the day I'm hunting for freelance gigs on the side. On the weekends I make a conscious effort to relax as best I can as possible—and if that doesn't work, I'm usually doing something for Proteus Creative or doing Javascript and JQuery tutorials.

So the neglect comes from a couple of important dates August has seen and passed:

-for awhile now I've had my own studio in the Arcosanti lab building. I totally cleaned he space and made it my own, and it's more or less my second home nowadays.
-I have begun painting again, with three to my name and a fourth in the works (I took a break for a week or two).

Now, Arcosanti has some great spaces for parties, and I've been to a few. It's a way for the whole community to unwind and relax. When Friday hits the usual question is: "So, what's going on tonight and tomorrow?"

Well, when I cleaned out the studio space my first thought was that it would be a great thing to have a party in there. Specifically: a wine and cheese party, with two huge paintings on either side of the room.

So that is pretty much what I did.

6 bottles of wine (ratio of 5 red to 1 white, of course), 5 different types of cheeses, some crackers, olive tapenade, sweet peppers, a huge knife that I found in the studio that ended up being the cheese knife, and one data projector later, I did "my turn" and gave back to the community. Here are the recordings of such (thanks to Alfonso, since these are his pictures: www.alfonsoelia.com )





Paint Splatters on the floor.



Peter contemplates the second painting.



Cheeses.







Signatures.



I have pictures of the new paintings as well. I'll be putting them up here soon. But in this shot you can get a bit of a look at the second one.



Shadow people.

Website in 5 days (or, my brain hurts)

Whew—what a weekend.

After working with Concrete5 for a few days I realized that the design I wanted to produce for Proteus Creative was much more ambitious than my skillset within the new CMS could provide—at least, within the timeframe I wanted the site to be in existence (i.e. yesterday). So I did something I rarely do—I set up a compromise, or a preview site.

Head over and take a look: www.proteuscreative.com

Internet Explorer users beware! I've only tested it in the Macintosh browsers so far. Though comments and critiques are welcome if you spot something that doesn't seem to work right.

It's designed to be a halfway point between a splash page and the whole site that I have planned. Basically, it's enough to let clients know I exist and show them the best of what I do. It should be enough to get a few freelance gigs here and there.

Though the design is simple, it is running on a full Concrete5 system, with a few modified javascript/php blocks I've implemented. Some of them took a little twisting, but it all seems to work the way I want it to (again, at least in Mac Safari and Firefox).

From design concept to finished upload, the whole thing took about five days—most of it being done on the weekend. Today and yesterday were a blur, as I head my head fully… well, stuck in concrete.

But now it's there, and I've already learned a lot. Now at least this can bide me some time to actually sharpen my skills and work towards implementing the big fish.

Enjoy!