YouTubin'

Well, I feel like I'm back among the living!  I've spent the better part of the past week putting together a slideshow video of some of my drawings and paintings.

My normal creative process is anything but meticulous.  I had to radically shift gears to make the video.  I found it to be an extremely arduous process.  A simple thing like identifying suitable fonts became a frustrating undertaking and I'm still not sure I was completely successful.  I fiddled around with the slideshow images for hours on end.  The learning curve for my video editing software was extremely steep - things that worked in the editing software's prevue feature failed miserably when exported to a regular video file format.  But, I learned a lot in the process and I believe the experience will serve me well in the future.

The easiest part of the whole process was the soundtrack.  A local (Shenandoah Valley) musician, Lee Blanton, performed at the same venue as my solo art exhibit about a year ago.  At that time he gave me a sample CD of his music.  I contacted him a few weeks ago via email and he graciously gave me permission to use his music on my video - thanks Lee!  I was very anxious to use Lee's music because of our mutual "Southern" connection.  Lee grew up in the small town of Shelby, North Carolina and I grew up about six miles away in the small town of Gaffney, South Carolina.  My art and his music have strong Southern influences and I believe they work well together in collaboration.

Here's the video -




Thank you for watching.