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Most Horrible Motorbike Ride Ever

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I took the most horrendous motorbike ride ever this morning on my way into work. I left the house around my usual time on a Saturday, about 7 a.m., and I saw on the Thailand Meteorological Department (TMD) radar on my phone that a pretty bad storm was heading our way and was, in fact, almost upon us. I threw on my rain gear, put on my sandals, put my shoes and socks into a bag, rolled up my pants, and headed to Vientiane on my ‘bike.

It wasn’t too bad on my way to Salakham village, a couple of kilometers away, where I stopped to get gas. After I left the station, the storm really hit and continued all the way, another 14 km, into Vientiane. ALL THE WAY! There was heavy, heavy rain, fierce winds that threatened to knock me over and kept blowing me around on the road, and much thunder and lightning that flashed and roared around me. With the heavy rain came flooded roads, some about a few feet deep and lapping at my engine, most of the way into the city. In addition, I had to take off my glasses, which left my vision severely impaired. Almost the entire ride was full of danger, and I rode accordingly–very, very slowly. I could barely see out of my side mirrors, so any traffic coming up from behind was almost impossible to notice.

I managed to make it safely to the school, but I was, even with my rain gear on, very wet. Luckily, one of the other teachers, Rebecca, had an extra Vientiane College shirt at her desk and loaned it to me while I taught my classes. The classes were successful, though I was still shell-shocked from the ride in.

The storm finished passing through about 8 o’clock, but, again, it was the worst ride I’ve ever taken on my motorbike and the most dangerous, including rides at night through terrible storms. Never again, hopefully!

Why I’m Slow to Post Digital Art

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I stated in an earlier post that I was back into doing digital art again. So, why haven’t I posted anything recently? Time. The lack of time.(But, read the end of this post to see my real time killer.) I’m involved in so many artistic endeavors and other interests that it’s impossible to keep up with everything. I’m stretched too thin and I should, undoubtedly, focus on one area instead of flitting from one thing to another. Here are the various interests I’m involved in:

First, and probably foremost, are the several Photoshop Artistry courses I’m either taking or have finished but refer back to from time to time. There is the original Grunge course that got me started on this journey and then, after that, the Awake group of artistic training. I’ve finished both of those, and I’m currently doing an ongoing monthly artistic group called Kaizen. I’ve been a member for several years, a total of 92 monthly courses, but I’m only at month 52. Gotta catch up! All three of these have been created by Sebastian Michaels, a wonderful teacher and guru of all things digital art. The original Photoshop Artistry: Fine Art Grunge Composition course cost $197, and the Kaizen group, which is closed to new members, costs $37 a month. It has been well worth the price. I don’t remember what I paid for the Awake group. It might have been free and was by invite only. I don’t think it’s offered any more.

Another group is Evenant, started by Scandanavian creators, Walid Feghali and Arn Andersson, which teaches digital Matte Painting and offers other modules (for a price, of course). I’m currently doing, when I make time, seven courses and workshops, including The Awesome Art of Matte Painting, Visual Storytelling, Cinematic Design and four others. They’re worth the price I paid for them, though the focus is different than the Photoshop Artistry courses. They’re related, though somewhat different. Evenant also offers Musical Composition courses, if you’re interested. All of these courses, as well as the Photoshop Artistry courses, have lifetime access, so I can re-visit them anytime I want.

Lest I forget, there’s also Shift Art and Shift Art Summit. Here’s a description of them from the website: Shift Art was launched on December 1st, 2015. The site is dedicated to highlighting Photoshop artists and their work with interviews, galleries and tutorials. The goal is to promote a new generation of artists using Photoshop as their main medium. To facilitate this, Shift Art offers a member’s only tutorial collection which includes tutorials by the featured artists. It’s $97 for lifetime access, which I have, and Shift Art Summit comes free with the Kaizen group mentioned above. Another worthwhile endeavor.

There are also Training for Comics (you might get an alert from your virus protection software, but I’ve never had a problem with the site), Phil Steele training for using AI in MidJourney and Photoshop, and the twice-a-year Dave Cross Photo Shop and Lightroom Virtual Summit courses, to all of which I have lifetime access. Again, they are a bit pricey, but worth it.

So, as you can see, I’m kept quite busy with digital art. But there’s more.

What’s my biggest time black hole? Playing computer games, mainly the long-running MMORPG “The Lord of the Rings Online,” or LotRO for short. I love Tolkien’s books and I’ve read them probably at least a dozen times since I first read the trilogy in 1970. LotRO scratches the itch. It also sucks up a lot of my free time. I play several other games as well, but they don’t engross me as much as LotRO. Those games include Eve Online, another time killing MMORPG, and a few other old classics, none of which I regularly play.

I’m going to start a Gaming Page on this website or include gaming into the main blog posts. If it’s a new page, just see the top menu bar.

Anyway, there you have it. My time is “precious,” to paraphrase an iconic adjective from The Lord of the Rings. I’ll eventually get serious with digital art again, so if you’re looking for some art on this blog, don’t worry. I’ll get some posts up sooner or later. Thanks for reading this somewhat long post.

Rainy Season in Laos

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Speaking of the rainy season in Laos, which I mentioned in my previous post, it rained quite heavily a few nights ago. The two ponds on either side of my house filled up and overflowed into my yard, a somewhat usual occurrence this time of year. In the past I’ve foregone the pleasure of taking my morning jog because it was impossible to walk out to the main road without getting my running shoes completely drenched. Normally, it takes a few days without rain and with lots of sunshine to reduce the amount of water in my yard.

But now I have a backup for that. My place of employment, Vientiane College, installed a small gym, complete with a few treadmills, for teachers and staff to use on the top floor of the building. So, before my normal class periods begin in the evening, I have time in the afternoon to do either some jogging or some power walking. Hooray, no more down time

I still have to take my shoes off and put them in a plastic bag while I wear my old sandals coming and going to the main road through my yard. It’s impossible, for me at least, to ride through the yard without putting my feet down to balance my motorbike through all the water, which right now is about three to four inches deep in a few places. When I get to the school, about 16 kilometers away, I can remove the sandals, let my feet dry, and put on some nice, dry socks and shoes. So, I can do cardio exercising without skipping many days.

The next time I get the opportunity, I’ll take a photo of our wonderful new, albeit small, gym.

Digital Art Inspiration

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It’s about time for me to start creating digital art after a long lay off. How long? It seems like it’s been a year, at least. The last piece of art I created was this piece looking down on the main avenue in Vientiane toward the president’s mansion.

Traffic on Lane Xang Avenue looking toward president's mansion in Vientiane, Laos.

I stated in a previous post that I wanted to get back on the creative wagon, so I’d better start.

I have a few ideas about my next piece of art. The one that most attracts me at the moment is one based on the song “Midnight at the Oasis” by Maria Muldaur that she recorded way back in 1973.

So, the next digital art I post on this blog will probably be from that idea. When will I post it? Who knows, but not too far in the future, hopefully. Perhaps I should make a video about the creative process for making it.

My mentor and guru, Sebastian Michaels of My Photo Artistic Life and Quill and Camera posts in the latest Living the Photo Artistic Life magazine, issue 135,

“The secret isn’t in the material. The secret isn’t even in what you do with the material in Photoshop.

The secret is in loving the process of creating art each day.
The secret is in falling in love with the artistic life itself.

As a creative photographer, it can’t just be about the one shot in a hundred that turns out worthy of your portfolio. It has to be about the feel of the camera in your hands, the controls under your fingers and the compositions you’re framing through the eyepiece. It has to be about that strange, almost dreamlike state you slip into as you seek to create something beautiful, original, stunning…

And as a digital artist working in Photoshop, you have to fall in love with playing with brushes, assigning blend modes, painting on layer masks. You have to fall in love with laying down dramatic lighting and shadows, with finessing textures and making subtle
tweaks to the toning.

You have to fall in love with creating the perfect background, extracting models, and bringing together creative elements and artistic content.

You have to take joy in playing with the Warp tool, adjusting Camera Raw settings, stacking Filters.

To you, all these have to become as delightful as the feel of clay on the wheel is to a sculptor or the mixing of oil paints on a palette is to a painter.

And when each day promises a return to these delights, how much greater and endlessly rewarding is the artistic life you’ve chosen.

Not that being an artist is without its share of frustrations or fallow periods when self-doubt creeps in and threatens to throw a cloud over even the sunniest of days. But the solution when this happens, I’m convinced, remains the same:

Take a deep breath. Maybe revisit some of the issues of this magazine. And remind yourself again what it is you love about art and about the creative process itself.

If you find you’re putting too much pressure on yourself, if you’re wasting your time and energy comparing yourself to others, if you’re spending too much time on social media when you should be sipping tea, playing music, and making something…

It’s time to take up the tools of your craft again and spend some time simply playing, rediscovering the fun in all this, and reminding yourself just how much you love the process of creating something for the simple joy of it all.

An artistic life is a magical life in so many ways. But only when we see its blessings for what they are and continually fall back in love with all the little things that go into it each day.”

~Sebastian

Yes, words of inspiration from Sebastian Michaels, words that give me a bit of a kick in the you know where. So, back at it again. Stay tuned for more.

Pi Mai Laos 2026 pt. 2

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After the last post of April 15th, the next day I went into Vientiane to take in a few other places, a temple (wat) and one of the few restaurants that were open. Rather than post a lot of individual photos, I ran all my videos through the DaVinci Resolve editor and made one fairly short 10 minute video. You can watch it below. Enjoy.

My Latest Interest

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I haven’t shown any digital art that I’ve created recently, because, well, I haven’t done any. I haven’t given up on creating, but I’ve been spending a lot of time lately on something else. I’ve been working on my two new YouTube channels.

The older one, which has only 17 posts, is a channel about my adventures playing my favorite game, the MMORPG called “Lord of the Rings Online,” or Lotro for short.

The other channel is about documenting various locations in Vientiane and Thailand. It’s called Vientiane ‘n Beyond and it has only 3 posts at the moment, so I just started it. I hope to add posts to it about every two or three weeks.

If you want to take a look at either of them, click on the links below.

Vientiane ‘n Beyond

Lotro Minstrels at Play

Though neither of them has attracted many views or subscribers yet, I’m having a lot of fun creating them, especially the editing part. For editing, I use DaVinci Resolve, a free (although it has a paid version) editing software that is used by editors of Hollywood cinema. It’s awesome to work with but there is a bit of a steep learning curve. Still, give it a try if you’re interested.

Having written that, I’m still going to do some more digital art and as soon as I get some done, I’ll post them here, as usual. Be on the lookout for them. Talk to you later.

To the Moon . . . and Beyond?

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Woo-hoo, it’s a great day for space fans, like me, as Artemis II sent the Orion capsule to it’s journey around the moon. I was awake at my usual time, around 5 a.m. Indochina time, and I was able to watch the launch on the Youtube NASA page. It was wonderfully exciting to watch the flawless liftoff and the aftermath of the capsule orbiting the earth in preparation for its ultimate voyage to the Moon, which begins tomorrow.

I’m a big fan of space exploration, whether it’s being done by unmanned spacecraft or by humans in space, but especially manned exploration. I hope to stay alive long enough to see humans eventually step on the surace of Mars. I know that there are many who disagree with this opinion, but that’s OK. I won’t hold it against others who might say that we should take care of our problems on Earth before we spend resources on space. I understand that point of view, but in my opinion, we can do both.

So, here’s to more space exploration and good luck to the crew of the Orion space vehicle on this present journey!

Journaling

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I regularly do a lot of journaling using several different methods. I used to do all my journaling in a notebook, and I still use that way on occasion. It’s a visceral feeling, kind of, feeling a pen in my hand moving across a somewhat textured paper. I think it puts me more in touch with what I’m thinking, sending the brain signals to my hand and fingers. It’s unmatched by digital journaling.

However, having said that, I do a lot of my journaling with digital software, in particular with Day One journaling software. I like using Day One because, with a fairly cheap premium version, I can create many different journals, easy to find all in one place. I have several journals that I write in, including a daily journal, gratitude journal, tips, headlines, school, gaming, YouTube, and a few others. This works better than having journals flung far and wide, and having to remember where they’re at. So, yes, I use digital journals now mainly.

But I still use my paper notebook on most mornings, right after I get up. I read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron some time ago. In it she explains about doing a morning journal, basically freewriting every morning for about 30 minutes, more or less. I started doing this a couple of years ago and I still incorporate this idea into my daily journal, although I don’t freewrite for 30 or 40 minutes, like I used to do. Time constraints. Time is my most precious commodity, so I dole it out to different areas of my life with care. The morning journal is one area that suffered a bit. Again, though, I still do it on occasion.

I find journaling to be an important part of my life. It’s a bit like meditation, especially when done in the quiet hours of the early morning. Do you journal? Leave a comment if you wish. I’m curious to know what kind of journaling you do.

Day One Journal App

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I’m pretty much into journaling, whether it’s keeping a physical daily journal in my paper notebook or writing morning pages in another notebook.  I started my daily journal as a modified bullet journal and I still keep it that way. In it I keep ideas for digital art projects, resources, things to do that relate to art or things to do around the house, movies to watch, books to read and other items. Unfortunately, I don’t keep up with it daily and, in fact, I only add an entry maybe once a week. My morning pages journal I just began a few weeks ago, and I write in it every morning, quite happily. Click on the links above if you’re not sure what kind of journals these are.

Although I enjoy writing with pen on paper, which has many advantages, I recently found out about a digital journal app that I’ve completely fallen in love with. It’s called DayOne. . It’s digital journal app that can be used with an Android or iphone, with a Mac or Mac tablet and with a web browser, which I mostly use because trying to type on my phone just drives me crazy. If you’ve always wanted to journal but just hate the idea of writing with pen and paper, give DayOne a try. You can do almost any kind of journaling with it. It’s free, but paying $34.99 a year for the premium version gives you so many more options on how to use. Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with DayOne in any way whatsoever, so I get no compensation for touting this product.

Day One App logo

Term Break

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I’m sitting at home on a Monday morning, listening to the rain patter down, but there are no Monday blues here. We’re at the start of a month-long break between the second and third terms at Vientiane College, a break which started last Wednesday and continues through September 11th. I don’t have any specific plans for the time off, but I’ll probably pop over to Nong Khai in Thailand for at least a few days of shopping and relaxing. I also want to make a few videos of some places just down the road from my house, namely Buddha Park (Wat Xieng Khouane Luang) and the Lao National Ethnic Cultural Park. I was going to visit those areas today, but with the current rainfall, I’ll save those visits for another day. I also need to see (no pun intended) an ophthalmologist to get my eyes checked and to get a new pair of glasses. The temple pieces have broken on the pair I have now and are being held on with short bent pieces of a paper clip running through the screw holes. Looks weird, but works and I only wear them when I’m on my motorbike.

The rain is fairly gentle right now, but it was coming down more heavily a while ago. When it’s really pouring, I have to keep an eye on the ceiling in the bedroom because it drips occasionally, though not too often, maybe once or twice during the rainy season. I have to remember to get the landlord to do some repairs, though he’s often out of town.

That’s it for now, so enjoy your Monday wherever you are. More later.