When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! At least that’s what the old saying tells us to try to do. But sometimes life gives you other things; including substances that you can only hope will one day make great fertilizer. I apologize for the long absence, especially since I barely got started before this interruption. Blogging isn’t done in a vacuum however, and sometimes, well, protofertilizer happens.

I’d rather not get into (or bore you with) my own private little hell, I’ll say only that some of the problems included, but were not limited to, an 87-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s, a 16-year-old “best animal I ever even met” dog with dementia, the Internal Revenue Service, my late father’s insurance company, and another company who’s name rhymes with “tears”.

At least the dog is getting better. Tito’s now on Anipryl (Selegiline hydrochloride) and the dementia that manifested itself as night terrors is gone. He’s remarkably old for a big dog, but has dodged death yet again, and is back to his wonderful calm ancient self.

Everything I talked about in my earlier posts is still going to happen, I just have to be more realistic about timing. Hopefully, those of you I lost with my absence will return as time passes and the entries continue.

Click here for a larger, more detailed image.

Like last month’s mammoth “how-I-did-it”, this is another digital painting done in Photoshop. This book illustration is a Sierra Nevada landscape and the major feature in it is the Thunderhead in the distance. Layering is perfect for “painting” clouds. Unfortunately, I don’t have any in-progress images, but there are at least 9 layers in yonder cloud. All were done at 100% opacity, but made into transparent layers of differing values (a couple at the edges are only 5%) before being merged.

Because I had to do it in black and white, I thought of Ansel Adams‘ photographic prints as I worked. You have to be more careful than when working in color, as only value separates the elements in the image. The white fir and the foreground beneath it I drew as a silhouette as if shadowed by unseen trees behind the viewer to brighten the granite and the cloud by contrast.