Hard Board

I finally got around to buying some "hard board" at Lowes the other day. This stuff is like masonite, but it's sort of finished on both sides instead of just one like the old sort of masonite. I will probably need to sand it a bit and put gesso on it since the stuff I got is brown like normal masonite. They did have some white panelling board near where I bought this but that was about $16.00 per sheet. This stuff was about $7 or $8 a sheet. I had the guys at lowes use their awesome saw thingy to cut it down in to a bunch of 7 1/2" strips. I'll later go with a saw at home and cut off little 5 1/2 inch strips to use for paintings or color pencil drawings. I think for pastels, real masonite with the fuzzy back would be a nice support. For color pencils though, this stuff with a maybe gesso on it after I sand it down to rough up the surface a little might do nice. It got me a whole bunch of potential paintings that can be 5x7 " or so (plus 1/2 inch for borders in case I put the paintings in a 5"x7" photo frame eventually or scan it and crop it down for use on postcards on cafepress.com or lulu.com)... will be an interesting experiement. The board was 8'x4' orignally... so you get a lot of board for your money.

It's always neat to find articles that mention you...

It's always neat to find articles that mention you that you.

I am mentioned on page 13 of the 2004 Fine Arts Quinquennial Review

Please pray for Jon.

My cousin Jon Thomann has been in the hospital the last week. He fell down a flight of concrete stairs and did some major damage to his head that required brain surgery. He has not fully become consious yet, but there are indications that he is becoming more active. This has been a trying time and has been hard on all of us.

Please pray for his recovery. If you would like to know more about his current situation, his girlfriend, parents and brother are keeping us all updated with this website/blog:

http://caringbridge.org/visit/jonthomann

If you would like to help out financially, there has been a new Support Fund recently set up. You may send checks to the

Jon Thomann and Family Support Fund
P.O. Box 1262
Columbia MO 65205-1262

For more information on the fund and its purpose, you may contact Cathi Harris at 573-220-6582.

re-integrating my online identity...

WOW! I've tried to put together an online art portolio for many years. It's probably one of the few things that I've tried over and over and kept failing to do. I graduated from college, in December, 1999 so most of the freebie website hosts from back then were not all that good. Today things have improved massively. It's neat to go back in time and see some of the stuff I attempted and remember why I gave up.

I remember the first year or two after college, I tried to put several sites online. Many of the hosts from back then have all but died off. All the stuff I was trying was mostly all hand coded html, javascript, and very bad scans of photos taken with a 35 mm analog camera. I remember finding lots of problems with various online places due to finding limits on the freebie website hosts and things because of space limitations. I remember trying to make thumbnails for each jpg. Remember, I'm just a painter... all this html editing stuff and web design stuff was stuff I was learning on my own outside of classes.

I remember trying to cross reference several free website hosts to try to get more space online than any one would allow... I remember finally giving up on all of it, and just focusing on turbosquid since they have free space to sell photos on and have a nearly unlimited amount of space... Anyways, today I stumbled across one of my old sites. I just changed the index since it's ancient and it still had my parent's real address on it as well as phone numbers. What an idiot I was to post that info for real. You can go and look at it now but it'll mainly just redirect you back to here.
http://master_artisan.fortunecity.com/index.html

Here's the part where I was part where I was starting an online gallery...
http://master_artisan.fortunecity.com/installation.html

Around that time fortuncity's little bitty free webspace was about the only alternative around as well as several other freebie places... all of which have mostly died off. Don't try to reach me at the email address listed over there since it's out of date and no longer used. No wonder I never got an art job... I kept changing my online identity too much, making badly coded webpages with links and images that didn't link well, and overall was in over my head... Well, now that blogger is here, I plan to stay, even if it means my google page ranking will never be too high. I might try to download the jpgs from over there and re-make something like that here.

Look at those huge ads fortunecity put on there.

I'm in another blog...

Just made this blog in case anyone accidentally mistypes my other blog's url. My blog is kept at http://www.jeffthomannsart.blogspot.com, not http://www.jeffthomannart.blogspot.com. I figure some folks may mistype and forget the S. This is for those of you who may have done that in error. Just click the link above and no one will know. Thanks for stopping by.