• pepperminte (stylized watercolor portraits)
• kelcan (abstract oil landscapes)
• rplowman (collages—I interviewed him for the June issue of The Artist's Magazine!)
• jezze (gorgeous prints—I interviewed her for my book!)

To limber up your imagination, find a quiet spot, shut your eyes and call up an image of something you know very well, perhaps your cat. Take time to let the image form clearly in your mind. Then change it—make the cat another color, give it wings, watch it fly.

"We need a voice that looks broadly," said Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. He is advocating a senior position, not necessarily a Cabinet post. "We are calling for a person at the executive office level who understands there is a National Endowment for the Arts, but also understands the arts portfolio in the Education Department, the State Department—and in addition to the nonprofits arts, is looking at cultural tourism, broadband access and trade through records, movies and videos."

The easiest way to make gray with an opaque medium is to mix black and white. The richest grays, however, are made by mixing complementary colors.

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

Act like a professional. "I don't have to be businesslike; I'm an artist." If you've said this before, you're fooling yourself, and you'll probably be taken advantage of. Successful artists place a premium on professionalism and good business practices.

Hal is living a perfect life. Everyone adores him and everything always seems to fall right into his hands. He's got the looks, he's got the charm and he's got Dali, his new girlfriend. Little does Hal know...his whole world is built around him.