Picture your photos and art in a museum!

My watercolor painting, "Giant Swirls," museumized by Dumpr.net!

Hey!  Ever wondered what your artwork would look like in a museum?  Wonder no more!  Using this cool website, Dumpr.net, you can upload artwork, photos, and more to create your work on billboards, museum walls, rubic’s cubes, etc…  Check it out!

Once you’re done creating, Dumpr provides you with the embed codes to quickly post your goodies in social networking sites, and uploads to Flickr.

Very cool!

Awesome Folding Print Rack

Yo, artists! I can personally attest to the fact that this print rack is AWESOME!

I recently purchased two of these from Jerry’s Artarama for $39.99 each–quite a bargain! AND, they only take about 5 minutes to assemble. Six small screws into properly-aligned pre-drilled holes, and voila!

I’m using one of these in a local gallery, Art of Ricardo, and the other will go out to craft shows with me. It’s very lightweight but incredibly sturdy–I’ve got about 100 prints on it now at the gallery with no problems.

FOUR stars! Grab one (or two) today!

Groovy Gal’s Saturday Night (or–the film you must see: The End of the Line)

As you will come to know over the coming months, Mr. Groovy Gal is obsessed with documentary films. While I want to curl up on the couch and snuggle and watch a good drama or mystery, he wants to watch a documentary about peak oil or genetically-modified food. We negotiate, but I do seem to see an extraordinary amount of documentaries. I whine a bit, but in the end, he always surprises me with really, really good ones. I learn a lot. So thank you, Mr. Groovy Gal.

Anyway, on to Saturday night. We have awesome shrimp for dinner, and he keeps telling me that tonight’s documentary will explain to me why our large shrimp, which five years ago would have cost about $12/lb, only cost $6/lb. Man, was I intrigued… So we eat and settle down to watch a film he’d caught on the Sundance Channel titled The End of the Line. Subtitle: Imagine a world without fish. No, seriously–imagine a world without fish! Now imagine that experts predict that occurrence to happen in 2048. They’re pretty specific about it. And they’re not imagining it.

I would strongly encourage all of you to get to the theaters, search your cable listings for Sundance, or rent/buy this DVD when it’s released in the coming months. It will stop you in your tracks. It may even lead to a change in behavior, which, of course, is what is needed if we don’t want to imagine a world without fish.

The reason our shrimp were less expensive than in the past is because the larger fish, the ones that eat shrimp, are disappearing. Think about it–when the predator goes away, the crustaceans will play! Populations of lobsters and crustaceans are actually increasing, while countless larger fish (Blue-Fin Tuna, for example) are being fished to extinction. Did you know that Canada placed a moratorium on fishing for cod in 1992, because of the dwindling numbers and which is still in effect, and that 18 years later, the population has not recovered? Be prepared for many sobering facts that may be hard to swallow, literally…

What can we do? Check out the website, and begin to be more aware of where the fish you eat comes from. The Marine Conservation Society has produced a Pocket Good Fish Guide for the UK that you can download and print out–and yeah, it works in the US, too. Unfortunately, the US does not require stringent food labeling that much of the European Union does, but that’s another topic for another day…

So, that’s what I learned about tonight–the plight of our oceans from over-fishing. It was educational, and I still got to snuggle and get a foot massage! It’s all good!