Yep, I realize that most of my photos on here are now missing. I had a bit of a gallery catastrophe and haven’t had a chance to do anything about it. I’ll get the gallery back up as soon as I can, but the old thumbnails and links will likely remain broken. *sigh* You’ll still be able to find any of the pics by going straight to the gallery and digging around, but not until I get it reinstalled. Sorry!
Finally got the next batch of Alphabet ATCs painted. E is for Elephant, F is for Frog, G is for Guitar, and H is for Hat are now in the gallery. This batch was done in goache except for the letters, which are acrylic.
Everybody knows about GIMP, right? The FREE open-source graphics program that Linux users love? Well, what you might not know is that GIMP will work under Windows, too. Unfortunately, my Linux computer doesn’t have the RAM for much graphics work. I really need to upgrade it. But I wanted to play with GIMP and my windows PC has plenty of RAM. So I installed it and gave it a whirl. It seems very powerful, though it will take some learning. I’m used to using Paint Shop Pro and even though it looks like GIMP will do most of the same things, everything is named something else or located somewhere else and it takes a lot of playing around to find it all.
The +PSP Group has a weekly challenge. This week, the challenge image looked like a wide silver bar with some elongated holes in it. We had to make something with it. I cranked up the GIMP to see what I could come up with. I made this fan, lying on a tile floor. It took me about 10 times as long as it would have in PSP because I was pretty lost, but it was fun. And I learned how to do a few more things and found a few more tools. I think I’m going to like it.
My A, B, C, and D ATCs for the Alphabet swap are done and now I’ve got to get to work on E, F, G, and H. I hope I can stick with it for the whole alphabet. You can see the others in my gallery, if you’d like. The Gallery link is in the sidebar, or you can just click on the C card to get there. A & D were done acrylics and B & C were done with a little set of goache pans I picked up at Hobby Lobby. I like the colors in the C card. The cup was really just white, but I was in the mood for color. 
This is the Merqueen. She popped into my daydream yesterday and demanded to be drawn, so I put her on an ATC. She’s very used to getting her own way.
I hated to do it, but I had to buy a new PC. Normally, I love getting new gadgets, but this time I knew it would mean having to get Microsoft Vista (shudder). I already had Vista on my laptop and knew I did NOT want it on my desktop pc, but alas there wasn’t much choice. One day, I’ll strike it rich and buy a Mac. 
Anyway, one thing among the various things that Vista refuses to cooperate with is my scanner. It will now only scan and save in bmp format. No more pngs jpgs tiffs or anything else. Although it isn’t very old, HP says they have no intention of providing a Vista driver for it. We should all just go out and buy NEW scanners that already have a Vista driver. Makes me wish I hadn’t bought an HP computer! Vista also doesn’t like many of my favorite programs and apps. Some of them will run acceptably in XP mode, some not. And they moved everything. And the new networking system they are using is awful. I think I will be spending a lot more time on my old Linux computer. It is time to treat it to some upgrades so I’ll have at least one computer around here that doesnt make me want to throw things.
