Perhaps, Croatian artist Joseph Zbukvic is the best watercolorist among contemporaries. The only disappointment is that he only paints urban landscapes, sometimes featuring horses. The world deserves more 🙂 Take a look at his works! I always watch watercolorists with great interest and admiration because their technique does not forgive mistakes.
I played around a bit with converting mp3 music into sheet music. It’s called Sheet Sage. You feed it a YouTube link, and it spits out a PDF with sheet music and a midi file. The result isn’t exactly great, but it’s better than I expected. Here are two videos—one with the original track, the other with how the midi sounds (I changed the default instruments a bit), and the sheet music right here.
original:
how it sounds:
That’s the bad idea 😉
The first portrait from life! Yet another small step towards excellence (still a long way to go). Huge thanks to Marcia Klioze for the opportunity and direction
peek-a-boo
I continue my series on fascinating artists. Artist Vladimir Davydenko (born in 1966) currently resides and creates his art in Moscow. His expertise spans several genres: portraits and still lifes, landscapes, and paintings with religious themes, yet all exhibit a photorealistic style. All posts similar to this can be found at https://beinginamerica.com/category/art-rauf-likes/.
By our house blooms a Japanese Kousa dogwood (cornus cousa). It’s quite a large tree
Liza is currently in Germany. Or rather, well… she spends more time in Germany than anywhere else. She’s taking full advantage of the opportunity to study in Europe. From her base in Braunschweig, over the past month, she has visited Prague, Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, London, and most recently Munich last weekend. Liza is on a tight budget, and her trips are all about maximizing savings. She bought a monthly pass (apparently a BahnCard) that covers, conditionally, all regional trains in Germany. But because of this, her routes to destinations tend to be rather circuitous. For example, it took her 10 hours to get to Munich from Braunschweig using regional trains, and 13 hours to get back. The trip to Munich included 9 changes, including at Herzberg, Nordhausen, Leinefelde, Bad Langensalza, Augsburg, Nürnberg, Seesen, Erfurt. On her way back, she accidentally boarded the wrong train, which added a few more changes and an extra three hours to her journey. Isn’t she a hero?
She is now planning a ten-day trip to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France next week. Wow, I’m jealous.
American artist of Chinese descent, Mary Qian (born 1973 in Shanghai) currently lives and works in Chicago, engaging in graphic design, but also dedicates several hours each day to painting. Primarily using oil paints, the main subject of her work is the female figure. Stunning works!
It turns out there are differences in how people count on their fingers (there’s even a term for it — dactylonomy). It could easily give you away as a spy 🙂
In Russia and countries of the former USSR, counting to ten on fingers starts by bending the pinky of the left hand and progresses sequentially to the bent thumb of the right hand. However, when it’s necessary to visibly show a number, the hand clenches into a fist and then opens first with the index finger, followed by the middle, ring, pinky, and thumb.
But in the American convention, for example, counting starts with the index finger. The thumb is kept pressed against the palm to show numbers from 1 to 4, and only extended (along with all four fingers) to indicate the number 5.
In countries like Germany, France, Italy, and others, it seems that locals generally start counting with the thumb (=1), adding one finger for each subsequent number up to five.
In Eastern countries, such as Iran, they often begin with the pinky of the right hand, and finish with the thumb. But these are all linear systems.
In Japan, however, the finger counting system is reversed. Instead of showing numbers by raising fingers, it’s the fingers that are hidden in the hand that indicate the number. It starts with the thumb and hides the subsequent fingers in the hand, counting upwards until a closed palm shows the number five.
In China, counting up to five is more or less the same as in the West, but after six it becomes peculiar; there are special configurations indicating 7, 8, 9, 10.
The way to show “2” might lead to misunderstandings if someone accustomed to the Chinese method sees the German “two” with a thumb and index finger, because it would mean “8” in Chinese finger counting (see below). I find it very fascinating (and useful!) that you can count up to 10 in Chinese using just one hand!
When showing the number “2” in the UK the American way (with the index and middle fingers), be careful not to turn your palm inward toward yourself, as this gesture is perceived (or used to be perceived, but who knows whom you’re dealing with) as an insult in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 