Edit: Aha, got it! This is Flowering Trees in Washington State, watercolor, about 3 1/2" x 5" on the left half of a page in my watercolor journal done with Winsor & Newton Artist Field Box pan watercolors. Photo reference is posted on WetCanvas.com in the April 10 Weekend Drawing Event images thread hosted by WC member Elainepsq, who provided images from the Pacific Coast. Every weekend someone else hosts it and posts images of a variety of subjects, it's a cool activity in the All-Media Events channel.

Well, I'm trying to add another image for today's daily art but it's not working too well. I've had a lot of bad days the past month or two, spring does that to me in Kansas. The weather's been more changeable this year so I've had a lot more downtime.

Yet I have been keeping up daily art and posting it on my Livejournal blog: http://robertsloan2.livejournal.com -- quite a few days were just little three or five minute gesture sketches but I've got some other good things up, recently a yellow rose painting in oil pastel.

This summer for the Summer Fun Run on SFFmuse, I will be editing my 2004 Nanowrimo -- used to be The Hunt, now it's become Curse of Vaumuru. This is the one set in the magical North American Pleistocene, two shamans who share the totem of Smilodon fatalis and the one spirit that hasn't deserted them defend the Black Rock tribe against the cannibal Blood Eater tribe and its greatest warrior sorceror, Vaumuru.

Vaumuru cast a curse of stupidity on the Black Rock people and that kicked off a world of hurt.

I love the plot, love the setting, love the book and think it's a lot shorter in length it really needs to be to do that story justice. So this summer I will be expanding it in the edits, probably from about 80,000 words to about 120,000 words. I've been ruminating on it a lot during this drawing spree and it helps.

Heck, I may even be up to drawing the landscape, the tribal characters and the Smilodons by the time I do this, my art is getting better too.

One more try -- today's Daily Art:

Nope, nothing happened when I clicked the image icon. Annoying. It worked last time.

All right, solved, it's working now. Don't know why the popup wasn't coming up but at last it did.

Sunfish is 6" x 8" in oil pastels on canvas paper. Painted from a Walter Foster book, How to Paint Wildlife Portraits in Oil Pastels, Oils and Acrylics by H. P. McLaughlin, I did it to illustrate my review of the book on www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com, my oil pastels website.

I started it in mid December and it's now got over 50 pages of product reviews, basic art instruction, oil pastels techniques, various step by step projects and other good content. I'm getting really excited about the site. It has more traffic than I expected for its not being up that long.

All that traffic encourages me to write more and draw more. So check it out, I have lots more good oil pastels paintings and drawings posted there along with lots of good articles. I do mean lots and lots!

Well, once again it's been a while since I blogged here.

I have been working on my new website: www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com and doing a lot more small format art, fewer ACEOs lately. I set up the first page in mid December and have been adding one to three pages every good day that I get.

Ever since 2000 I have been planning to write an art instruction book. Last October, I bought a package that included hosting, software and a business plan from www.sitesell.com aka SBI! (SBI! stands for Site Build It!, the software that's included.) The hard part was the setup and choosing a topic so that I'd have a perfect-scale topical niche for the project.

I didn't expect that to be an entire art medium but when I googled on oil pastels in order to find information on them... lo, the only sites I found were art supply stores selling them and a few artists' personal sites and the Oil Pastel Society, which I joined.

There was my niche. I planned to create a site with basic information and then sell my book print on demand, knowing that any topical nonfiction with a real but narrow readership will pay out and become a permanent reference. Around page 20 or so, I began to understand the site is the book.

It can go a bit larger than it would in print format. I've got well over 50,000 words on it and that's a conservative estimate. In the process, I keep editing my older pages as I see places I could tighten or minor formatting errors. One happy result is that I seem to be writing better nonfiction lately.

So check it out if you've got any interest in art. I have a Basic Drawing section with several art lessons in it already that aren't dependent on oil pastels and a Techniques section with more that do use oil pastels. If you don't have a lot of money for art supplies, some of the student grade brands run $5 and change for a honking big set of 50 or 60 sticks, more than enough to get started with a cheap sketchbook and not worry about using up expensive art materials.

I am trying to get this to upload an image, since I have got plenty of good new art and wanted to share one of my latest with you. Unfortunately, that function doesn't seem to be working right now. Ahh, there it is. The uploader was in another window and didn't layer over this one, that's why I missed it.

Apples in Blue Silk was painted in Erengi Art Aspirer oil pastels on watercolor paper primed with Colourfix clear sanded primer -- a wonderful surface that holds soft pastels or oil pastels to many more layers. Good for colored pencils too. Also makes a great barrier layer for watercolor or graphite underpaintings and sketches, so that nothing dissolves up to mix with your pastels.

ACEO Norwegian Forest Cat, watercolor, 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" listed for seven days on eBay. Painted from "Astonish Leaving" by wazabees, the brilliant Norwegian catographer and owner of Wazabees Cattery, who raised Astonish and eleven other young Norwegian Forest Cats. He's got his daddy Baltsar's odd eyes, but in the other direction.

I've got a bigger update than today's art though!

I'm working on another novel. Nothing new about that except that this one is going to be available in November, and what I'm working on is the final edits.

The Steel Guardian began as last year's unofficial "Three Day Novel." I didn't budget the $50 entry fee for the official competition till it was too late, but as I have for several years, wrote along with it for the sheer joy of doing another book and seeing what I can do in an immersive, no-sleep blitz. The results have been over 40,000 words every time since the second time when I barely edged over it, and last year's was a whopping 75,000 words. I even slept. Wow. My typing speed is quietly going up every year on the Dvorak Keyboard.

The results were a bit rougher than some of my roughs, in specific ways. I changed my mind on some character names and charged right ahead using the new names without stopping, because I was on the clock. The timetable did one other thing. I reached what I thought was an end, because it did bring all the character's internal conflicts to a dramatic conclusion and the rest seemed so anticlimactic.

But when I reread it, I recognized that I'd put off the final conflict and blown it off in a paragraph synopsis at the end. Handy to have that paragraph to tell me what happened, but readers would probably rather enjoy every detail of the final battle instead of just some note that it happened and who won.

The prose wobbled between pages full of red ink and pages of clear smooth prose that amazed me for coming out strong right from the unconscious. I write the way Impressionists paint, alla prima. I get the idea, find out who the characters are, and jump in to find out what happens next letting them decide what they're going to do about it. So it's all character driven and very fast to get down the rough. I reread it several times during the year. I winced at the character name variations. I grumbled at the amount of work involved.

Then I got down to it recently and plowed through. My daughter, Kitten42, offered to critique. She's got razors. She got trained by an insane genius martinet of an English teacher who actually loves good prose and taught Kitten to be brutal about it -- not an academic who prefers obscure literary tricks but someone who knew the nuts and bolts of good storytelling as much as she did literary history. Kitten learned well, and she's a copywriter now making several thousand dollars a month freelance.

I flagged a slow bit at the start for a deeper rewrite, got red ink on the rest of the first chapter, did that and started editing on through. I got all the bugs and name changes out and sent it back to Kitten, and when I hit the end spent 48 hours painfully shifting gears from "cutting" to "creating" and wrote the final chapter. It worked. It worked so well. Now I'm editing it again every time I look at it, but it's a good solid ending and had some major surprises that weren't in that little paragraph synopsis I threw away. One last very cool twist.

We are both hard at work on it again, while I prepare to send it to Booklocker. Angela Hoy's services looked better for quality and cost than any of the other POD publishers, and Angela does accept-reject on what comes in. It's a benefit. I won't be shelved next to the Mary Sues and the family history with exactly 68 readers. The price went way down with a bonus for doing my own cover -- which I'd want to do anyway with print on demand. This is not the sort of book that would look right with a photomanipulation cover. It needs a decent illustration of something real in the book, either a character drawing or a scene or montage, something that's more like the type of fantasy cover art I've always loved. It's a challenge for me to do it, but being able to use good author art is a perk of going indie. My art's improved a lot lately, but I was decent at design for years thanks to my typesetting past.

The other big news is that next month I'll be launching a new website, themed on writing and especially fantasy writing. I'll eventually have two of these informational sites up, one on writing and one on art, cross connected as they relate to each other. I've been doing a lot of How-To articles online at eHow.com, Hubpages.com and Qassia, especially eHow. My articles are getting lots of comments, tons of views, thriving online... so it's time for me to start pulling them together into one place by topic. The site software has a newsletter function, so I'll be able to set up a newsletter for The Steel Guardian and future works.

This is just the first. Back when I first did Raven Dance, which paid out six or seven times over with no marketing, I had grand hopes. I also had plans that were thwarted by my situation at the time living in a homeless shelter. I could not get online to market the dang thing. I couldn't put sig links or announce it anywhere. I could get two or three hours a week at the library for my mail and that was about it. By the time I got out of the shelter and had online access, I was also sick as the proverbial dog and had lost energy for marketing and staying on topic with something that was already done and had already paid off. I made some efforts and put an AOL page up for it, but that didn't last long. When I switched services I let it lapse.

Things are different now. I understand the processes I was speculating about then a lot better, and I have the resources I didn't at the time. I've never just bought a wholesale order of my book and offered signed copies, though I did a few for readers who sent them to me with postage to send them back. Kitten's become an SEO expert, something I hadn't even heard of when I made my marketing plans for Raven Dance.

So I'm taking both the high road and the low road. The Hunt can go the high road, queries and submission package all over the place, starting from the highest paying publishers on down. The Steel Guardian, which has a great setting I know I can smell more novels in, is my indie series. I'll be doing another book in Arkatyr (the main kingdom of the setting) this fall again for NaNoWriMo, another jolly online event where I can immerse in creating a new book with plenty of other novelists to hang with.

I didn't get the entry fee in for the 3 Day Novel this year either, but I wasn't prepared with my research yet for the one I want to become my formal entry. So the Canadian Dinosaur Novel goes on back burner for next year with a whole year to research it, and this year I've got no idea what I'll do on Labor Day Weekend. Except there's a good chance it might be in the same setting as The Steel Guardian again, because I'll probably be living there till I send off the manuscript to Booklocker.

So this fall I'm digging in, writing and editing a lot. Also drawing, to see my daily art check out my other blog: robertsloan2 on LiveJournal.com where I'm already familiar with posting images. Hmm. I see an icon up there... let's see if I can get this one in. I did it today based on a photo reference from a DeviantART friend.

It's been a long, long time since I posted here!

I am not in Minnesota any more, haven't been for years. I left Minnesota in 2006. I got Social Security in summer 2005 and it's been renewed once, so I am not on the Endangered list of people who are disabled and can't work but don't have any resources either, any more. Yay for me. I have had surgery. I have had two years of recovering from my surgery and I'm back to the state of health I was in at Colorado, back in 2004 but not living in a high altitude where I can't breathe either.

Life has been good for me in my absence and I've posted a lot more at my LJ blog: http://robertsloan2.livejournal.com and at DeviantART: http://robertsloan2.deviantart.com -- both of those were very active during my absence.

Ari is asleep on our waterbed as I type, he is All Right. He is more than All Right. His health has improved even more than mine, since with greater prosperity has come a better cat food budget. He now eats Royal Gold Katz 'n Flocken super-quality cat food from a local pet store, one of four brands of super high protein cat food the store gave me samples of. He didn't like one of the samples, liked two of them better than his usual food but went nuts like a cat food commercial actor when it came to Royal Gold Katz 'N Flocken.

He slimmed down because I moved in with Kitten into her house, an actual house, with lots of rooms and stairs for him to run up and down and his own dog to chase and many toys and space to get exercise, then gave him high protein food. Now he gets the Midnight Crazies again at varying times of the day and bangs around like he was a ten week old kitten again -- a fourteen pound kitten that's all muscle. He didn't actually lose weight. He more started working out and is now a very solid, sleek, muscular cat neither fat nor skinny. Best of all the new food improved his temperament. When he isn't playing Destructo Kitty, better nutrition mellowed his attitude about other people -- and he loves the whole family, he is friendly with Kitten and with her new husband Karl and at least tolerates the children.

Another physical change to the gorgeous Ari is that his fur, which had over the years coarsened a little, changed. It's now kitten soft and silky again. He is the only grown cat I know who's covered with fluffy long kitten fur. He's super soft and when he gets snuggly it's incredible, he's beyond other cats with that wonderful silky pelt. He still sheds many Cat Hairs of Inspiration on everyone!

They are two and four. I am a grandpa! Gaby aka Bamm Bamm is two and has just reached full running bipedalism -- he went from walking and running with some wobbles and a kittenish tubby sort of clumsiness occasionally going four legged, to standing up straighter and running like his older sister with better balance. Just in the past week, his walking went through this new phase and his speed went up by yet another factor. Human kittens have that same bounce factor that the furry ones do. Sascha is four.

Sascha likes bugs, dinosaurs, yeenas (hyenas), simbas (lions) and animal documentaries whether prehistoric or modern. Grandpa bought all the Walking With series and shows them to her on his laptop, then after seeing Whitetip's Journey one too many times, bought a four-pack of National Geographic nature specials and Eye of the Leopard, a single one. I'm putting together a good nature library on DVDs and Sascha loves it.

I did some novels over the years, latest one being last year's Three Day Novel, "The Emerald Sword," which I might publish online as a serial while releasing it as another indie project. This year I plan on actually paying the entry fee. I am researching some of the trickier novel concepts I had in mind -- a dinosaur novel set in the Cretaceous, starring Albertasaurus sarcophagus if I can find enough information on it, otherwise I may have to pick a different predator for the star character. I bought another Bienfang Notesketch for my dino-notes so that I can sketch the critters and combine the sketches with the notes about them and get a better look-it-up reference for all my research while actually writing than having to stop and go to the bookmarked websites or sort through the massive dry tome I bought on Amazon, The Dinosauria.

I put in a lot of time working on nonfiction. Not all of that is finished. I have worked on Street Sketching off and on, but need more mobility and energy to start the final work on it -- going out and doing portraits as a step by step project, getting models and paying them with a free portrait to have a variety of models and projects to put in the book. I'll need both photo references and life sittings with some of them, others I'll just need to get photo references and their signed model waiver understanding that I'm going to use their picture in a book and thousands of beginner artists will draw their likeness badly for free, or well when they start getting good at it.

I also started working on The Colored Pencil Realism Workbook, a project that mutated off the vague idea of doing a colored pencils book. If I am self publishing, that means I can use the handy spiral bound flat on your worktable format for it and put in little extras like blank pages to do the exercises on, blank color charts to fill in using the colored pencils you actually have, neat things like that. That's my current nonfiction project and it is going swimmingly.

I am also finally working on the graphic novel, Three Dead Punks and a Telepath, since I managed at last to get the manga style well enough to draw what I need to for the book. I've got a manga book borrowed from Kitten that's good enough for me to be able to do it, though I'd also like to get the action poses photo reference book sometime to go along with it for better action poses. Its cast changed. The redheaded telepath is a boy and not a young clone of Jean Grey crossed with Tori Amos any more, though he is a Tori Amos fan.

I will be picking away at penciling that for as long as it takes, until I have the story finished in pencil, then ink and color enough that I'm a month ahead at all times and start posting it online weekly. Watch for updates on the graphic novel. I'm doing a regular novel prose version as well that I'll probably serialize too.

I hang out at eBay Groups a lot now and collect ACEOs. ACEO is Art Cards Editions & Originals, it's art the size of baseball trading cards. Real art, either limited edition prints (usually small editions like a dozen or two) or originals, but done so small that if I do one it doesn't take forever to finish even if I do colored pencil realism or something that insane. So I've been doing more art again too.

I am starting a new website next month or in three months, depends on my finances and how cheap I can fix the CDRW on my laptop -- it's starting to whine and suffer, the motor on it is going out. If I can get it fixed cheap enough I may still be able to do an SBI site in July -- but even if I don't, I'm saving up for a site from http://www.sitesell.com that will take a few weeks to put together in presentable form. This will be my Art 'n Writing site, full of cool things, and have among other things a newsletter you can sign up for that'll come with useful little articles and occasional short fiction in it.

Kitten has an SBI site, her husband Karl has an SBI site and I'll be adding mine to the household's web-stuff very soon. This is all part of a strong desire I have to become self supporting again like I was back in my street art glory days, so that when I sell pro novels, I do not lose the entire proceeds to Social Security cutting me off and expecting me to live as if I was still on Social Security. It's demoralizing to think of getting a full scale book advance and then being dropped in the deep end to live on it with no guarantee of any more novel sales. I went through enough trouble getting the Social Security to want to have to go back and forth on it, plus have that come into my life without being able to use the windfall as a windfall and make a big tangible improvement in my life instead of going on as if I hadn't done it.

I have articles up on eHow, most of them are on art topics with the occasional amusing random topic I pulled from requested topics, like how to remove cat urine from your couch. You can find a full list of them in the footer of my DeviantART journal, which I've kept up pretty frequently and update whenever I add another eHow article. I've begun doing more magazine-like articles on http://HubPages this week, and have four of them up including a review of Arlene Steinberg's new colored pencil book: Masterful Color.

Here are the HubPages articles links:

How to Create Five Minute Art
Why start with a big set of colored pencils?
Tools & Materials for Colored Pencil Realism
Review: Masterful Color by Arlene Steinberg

Ms. Steinberg actually commented on my review so I am all honored and happy. Also she corrected a comment that I made on the comments thread, read the comments thread on the review for more information on the book and the Steinberg technique. Her techniques are amazing and gave me another skill leap in colored pencil realism. One that goes beyond photorealism into "This looks like real things and makes photos look flat and unreal."

So my life is going well, my writing is going well, my art hobby has finally turned into something cool to write about and fused with my writing career in a solid way, and I will be posting here again now that I have finally gotten the password on this blog sorted out. I had some problems with it for some time by an old email being associated with this blog, so I lost the password and couldn't get in. But now I can get in on my Google account and it's all good again. Whew!

I missed being able to blog here, but am very glad it's sorted out again now.

Well, the latest thing in my life is that I moved back to Minneapolis. I moved in with an old friend and her family and other housemates -- about half the people in the house are related, and it's a big house. It's very cool. I've now met all my housemates and neighbors in the building, even the busy ones who aren't around every day. I have seen the Great Library of SFF and my jaw dropped to the floor -- one of my housemates is a book collector who got together with another book collector and I thought the books down on the second floor in the living room were great. I was wondering where the fiction was. Till I went up and visited their rooms going through to the third bathroom when the other two were in use.

Wow. It was like seeing a normal size town library in a reasonably literate town -- except that 90% of it is SFF and the paperbacks are more numerous than hardbacks. I was stunned. It's alphabetized. I can borrow books, but I'll have to be careful to reshelve them because this is not a public library where people getting a reasonably good paycheck reshelve everything. This is a private collection and it must have taken them a long time getting them that organized.

I've got 31 days of residency before I can get General Assistance up here -- the up side is that it's only 31 days instead of New York's six month residency. I might go a few of those days without some of my medication, or not. A friend in Colorado is going to try to pick up my February prescriptions and if he does, great, then I won't have to worry about being covered till I get on the GA Medical plan up here. If not, I could be in serious trouble.

I've got nine left of my one-a-day medication, and that one makes a huge difference in how well I function. But I needed to get moved in. Starting February 1, I have a 100,000 word Novel Dare at Hobgoblin.net and that's going to help if I have to do without one of my medications entirely and skimp on the other. Writing is analgesic. If I get completely distracted by focusing on a new novel, I can ignore pain a lot better than if I'm not writing. Hopefully instead, I'll get my medication and it won't be a problem.

I wrecked my back and legs yesterday in a massive effort working on getting my room cleared out. I like my room. It's private, it has a door, I can go in there and close it and focus on writing or whatever without too much trouble and it has two windows. I'll get enough light in there. But it had been someone else's room. Someone else moved down to the second floor into a different room but had years of stuff up there stored or up on the walls, lots of little personal things that I felt awkward trying to deal with. When I asked, she told me it was okay for me to pack them up so for a week I've been packing small stuff categorically and trying not to damage anything because it's not my stuff. I don't know what's important or not.

We finally got it all out yesterday, and another housemate is doing a barter arrangement for vacuuming and helping me get set up in there. That rocks. Together we got several more days worth of stuff brought down and then last night the person moving out got the last three stacks and packages that were set out in the middle of the room. She changed her mind about leaving the desk up there and lending it to me though, so I'll be looking for a desk on Freecycle and using my rolling cart for a desk. Or putting a plank across stacks of plastic tubs.

Barter housemate got the idea of shampooing the carpet instead of just vacuuming, which will rock. Having the room deep clean before I unpack any of my stuff will help a lot for me to figure out how to keep it clean with minimal effort. I've been working on this for about eleven days not and it'll be one more day's delay, but in the long run it will help. Ari won't get confused by the scent of various other cats -- it'll be all clean and he'll have his box and recognize it.

I love him and I miss him. He's spent most of the time I've been here down in the basement rafters hiding from the dogs. Since the stairs are one of the dogs' favorite hangouts, he has a hard time getting upstairs for anything. Yesterday he did creep upstairs at a time they were all asleep and I gave him a whole bag of Pounce treats and a lot of food and water, we spent hours snuggling and purring. He even stayed up here in the second floor living room while I slept and woke me up stomping on my chest and purring. But when helping-housemate and I went upstairs to work on the room, he ran down the stairs again. Poor little guy. Another day's delay will be hard on him, but at least he's safe and warm inside and nothing happened to him during the days he vanished.

The dogs are not actually dangerous to cats. They're playful and like to chase them. The other cats have learned that if they don't want to play, all they have to do is lay down and refuse to move. Ari has a phobia though. They're big and he's terrified of dogs. I can see the tails wagging and hear the difference between "come play" barks and aggressive growling. Ari can't distinguish that and has been terrified since the night we got here. Having his own room where we can shut the door and dogs are not allowed at all will help him a lot.

In a month or so, the house will also have puppies. Efforts to separate Sam from Frodo and Ginger weren't enough and clever Sam managed to get around them, twice, result being a litter of blue heeler pups and a litter of large red half-heelers, both of which litters the owners seem confident about placing somewhere (probably on farms, since these are really big dogs and the blue heelers are great herding dogs). What it means for me and Ari is that I'd better get everything I own upstairs if I don't want it chewed.

I'm living on the third floor. This won't be as bad as New York because I'm not crossing a huge sports field sized yard along with climbing the stairs, and the stairs are indoors. It's easier to stop at landings and not take them all at once. Laundry is going to be an expedition once a month but when I do it, I'll bring down a book or my laptop and hang out in the laundry room till it's done.

I've had two years of recovering from New York. My good days are more functional than they used to be, but I can tell that living here will take strategy and days of recovery when I go out to do things. It could work if I'm very careful and don't go out often.

My friend invited me to stay "as long as you need to" and said about rent "donations gratefully accepted." I know from past experiences that if there's any economic hardship, it creates a huge tension in the household and can wind up in my having to leave. But I found out what the suggested rent is if I'm working or getting enough from benefits to pay it, and that this state gives General Assistance to people who have "temporary or permanent illness and haven't been able to work for 30 days, but are not also getting SSI. Well. I am still trying to get SSI and that would be $545 a month which would make the rent easy, and even General Assistance up in New York was $427 and could still make the rent possible. I'd be a bit tight but I'd actually have some money left over every month for spending cash or, because I'm still getting settled, furnishing my room bit by bit when I've gone through the old stuff from previous tenants and gone through Freecycle to see what they have. I need to get a bed, a dresser and hopefully a usable armchair with a lot of padding.

Down in the pile of stuff abandoned by previous tenants I thought I saw a rattan armchair with cushions, that if I cleaned it up and added more cushions could work and fit the bill. That could be very cool. I'm going down today just to see what's there and if I find anything good, get help getting it upstairs after the carpet's dried.

It'll take work, but I think I can make that room cosy and hopefully manage to stay longer in one place than I have since I left the shelters and NY subsidized housing. Time to go see what's going on and bring my scared cat some food...

Wow, I didn't realize I still had this blog. Cool. I thought it was deleted for inactivity, but I guess not. That's very cool.

Guess I'll update it now and then since I know it's still here. :)