I will say that I was reluctant to read the "Twilight" series only because I had very high standards after reading the complete Vampire Chronicles by Rice. And felt "Twilight" would pale in comparison to the deep brooding characters from "Chronicles."

And then I was working on a page layout to coinside with the movie release of "Twilight" and became a little more intrigued. I borrowed the first book in the series the other night and am already more than half way through it. I'm hooked. The read is super fast and while the characters are not nearly as complicated as Lestat is from the "Chronicles" series I'm still finding them interesting and yes, beautiful.

Here is a sneak peak of my page layout for "Twilight."

The finished page will be published in the York Daily Record Nov. 21.

It's election night. And I'm going to be here awhile.

I've been updating my Adobe Flash interactive map about every 30 minutes.

It's hard, I admit it to keep updating the map. Knowing that Obama has been announced the next President. I'm kinda like well everyone knows who won, why keep updating... But that's not my call, and the numbers keep rolling in and so I keep updating.

I shouldn't be complaining, tonight is a historical night and I think it's cool that I'm a part of it.

To see my Flash election map in action click here

So, it's about 11:30 p.m. and my husband and I are getting ready for bed the other night. And I just realized oh sh#@! I totally forgot to create my centerpiece for Brad and Sue's Wedding shower at work. My husband, being so helpful first suggested I used a 2 Liter empty soda bottle and stick some flowers in it and called it a cenerpiece (see, I told you he's not very helpful.)

I felt awful, so instead of going to bed I set out to create a centerpiece. I drew my art using Adobe Illustrator.

Here is the art.

I sent the files into my work and when I came in this morning, I printed them out and glued each illustration to matte board. And that's how I finished the centerpiece just in time for the Wedding shower.

This graphic ran in this past York Daily Record/Sunday News Viewpoints section.

I had a lot of fun creating this graphic. Nothing fancy going on in the graphic, it's the symbolism of the game that makes this such a great graphic.

I can't wait for this to be published in this week's Viewpoints on Sunday.

And another look at the art with added details.

The highlights and shadows are a combination of the gradient mesh tool, gradients and blends. I did use the blur filter on the shadow behind her pearl necklace.

This image is the preview mode.

Ok...ok... my husband put Diesel up in the cat tree... But ha! It still makes me laugh.

The shingles are finally done and starting to work on the exterior. My dollhouse kit came with wood siding, but we decide to stucco the outside instead. That's what I'm doing in the photo below.

It's a lot of work building a dollhouse.

Here's what I've been working on for the past hour...

Can you guess who it is?

Here's another illustration about 10 mins into.

I'll give you a hint it's NOT Sarah Palin and here's another illustration, about 15 mins into.

Ohh, come on, you must have some clue?

Okay, it's Sarah Palin. Just joking it's not.
Last illustration cause I'm getting sleepy and should be in bed by now.

I'm sleepy, will continue this in the near future...

Good Night....

Here's the sketch

So this gives me a basic idea where the writer is going with his idea. I then start building my package based on his sketch. The idea was to layout the players on the page in their playing position on the field. I drew a baseball field in Adobe Illustrator and brought in images of the players and positioned them on the field.

Here's a sneak peak of the final page, to see the enitire finish page check out tomorrow's sports section in the York Daily Record/Sunday News.

With on staff photographers limited and my magazine production deadline looming, I asked my supervisor if I could try and shoot the fashion spread for September/October edition of Smart. He said, sure. And here's the result.

After taking each piece individually I went into Photoshop and bumped up the contrast using levels, and then adjusted the sharpness.

I took the photos on a clean white background. To soften the flash reflection off the patent leather shoes, I held up a white paper napkin. You can use this trick when taking other photos and the flash is to harsh.

Dropshadows were also created in photoshop.

After the images were ready I went on to laying out the spread. I new that one image would be main, and then the rest would fall in line. I wrote the headline and decided that I needed to make the headline a little standoutish with out being over powering I used a thin modern looking serif font. I also like to play with font sizes and nestling of letters as you can see with the lowercase "b."

The rest of the design is clean and to the point, which makes the spread visually appealing.
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RSS Forward feeder

Another RSS Forward feeder (this one seems slower and I had trouble with it)

The importance of Metadata

Social bookmarking

Robb Montgomery Web site

click gohere

And the other odd thing, why is there a MTV Music Video Awards? When was the last time a music video actually played on MTV. I think you need to have MTV2 to see any videos.

Here are some of her sculptures that are on display at YorkArts She won an award of distinction for her work "Passage and Presence: Figure Series," composed of several ceramic figures in this weekend's YorkArts fine art juried exhibition.

Artist statement: I am making art to communicate the restless journeying of life, how the body inevitably decays, and how we as humans are all intrinsically flawed and broken. I am continually amazed at the many products and procedures intended to keep the body looking and feeling younger. Through my artwork I am examining the notions and stigmas related to old age, this is evident in my piece Passage and Presence. The piece is a series of small busts whose bodies are in various states of decay. Particularly I am interested in the way that the mind may be decaying while the body remains intact. Or how a broken body may be hindering further development of an ever-aging mind.