Last week I ordered the cheapest tablet I could find - a Wacom Bamboo - after seeing so many people playing around with them at the IMC. Some people had $2000 tablets, but I found this one new for about $60 shipped. How could I not try it?

OK, this is a whole new way of doing things and one I'm far from fluent on, but I can already understand why some artists haven't picked up an inking pen in ten years. This is art with undo. Once you can actually handle one the way you can a real pen/pencil/brush, and are also fluent with Photoshop, yeah, I can see how you could do amazing things with one of these. This is a quick fumbling screw- around with mine, stumbling and tripping and me not at all comfortable with looking at the screen instead of what my hand is drawing.... but still, there's something liberating about it.

Rebecca warned us against getting too dependent on them. She senses the allure of the dark side. I see what she means.

This poor lady emerged from the woods nearby soaking wet, jumped in the car, and rode home (not far). Her tags don't have any contact information, just a rabies number, and the local police can't figure out who she is. I walked her around the neighborhood for an hour or so knocking on doors, but nobody recognized her. The police said the basic choices were to take her in for the night, or release her.

She seems to like the blue blanket.

I'm guessing she's a yellow lab, around 8 years old... very sweet and well-behaved, and very tired. Cataracts in the eyes, but well-fed and I can't imagine she's more than a quarter-mile from home. Hopefully tomorrow, we can find out where she lives and get her home. Meantime, if she's yours and you somehow are searching the net for a lost dog in Amherst, MA... call the police, they know how to reach me.

Actually a day early with this one, but I did my color wheel backwards so I have to re-arrange the swatches, so I can use the extra time.

Mute color scales: pick two colors on opposite sides of the color wheel, then mute them with each other in steps across the middle. This neutralizes them. Nearly every pair passes through a somewhat yucky shade of brown in the middle, although not the same brown.

This is how it feels to be caught up at last. Took eight days.

Yes, another paint-by-numbers, but this one involved four adjacent colors on the color wheel, with shading or tinting as needed to match the values on the grayscale original. Interesting.

Another paint-by-numbers exercise, this time in color with a midrange value and shades and tints.

This is kind of how I feel after trying to do four modules of this class - a month's work under normal circumstances - in one week. I missed by one assignment, but I'll get fully caught up tomorrow.

Today the swatches turned into this:

I'm pretty happy with this, actually... a lot of very careful measuring and cutting, kind of a refreshingly manual process.

Now if I can get module 4 done in just over a day, I'll be all caught up.

A lot of expensive paint went into these things.

Tomorrow: cut them up; put them in order; pick the 24 that present a clean, steady gradient through the color wheel; trim them; mount them; charge on to module 4.

This one also took a lot longer than I thought it would... re-mixing all of the nine steps of the value scale, painting this design the hard way: manually, with lots of careful masking of areas with tape and precision cutting, waiting for areas to dry before re-masking off the other side, fixing tiny mistakes... yarg.

Now on to color, finally. If I can do two modules in three days, I'll be caught up by Sunday night... that's still the goal.

The mad dash to catch up in Color Theory continues... I hoped this one would go quickly, but it took a good chunk of the day. Basically just a paint-by-numbers in a four-value scale, but it involved a manual transfer of the layout to bristol, careful color matching against yesterday's 9-value scale, and very careful application. And then cutting and mounting, plus the value swatches. Much more work than you'd think.

Next up is an abstract value painting, which I need to get done tomorrow... and then shortly after that we start in real color. Preparing a 72-hour insane dash starting Friday morning to try to get caught up in full, but they weren't kidding: this class has a ton of homework, even when it's not at twice the normal pace as it is in summer, even when you're not 2 modules behind out of the gate and trying to put in double double-time on those.

First assignment done. This took a long time. From the painted swatches below, choose nine that represent an even scale from white to black, cut extremely precise one-inch squares of each of them, and mount them with no space between on a sheet with no visible adhesive.

It may not look very exciting, but I think, immodestly, that I did a hell of a good job on this first one. That's not a photoshopped somethingorother, that's painted, cut, mounted bristol board.