You never know what will inspire you…
My rendition of Andrew Wyeth’s “Master Bedroom – Dog on Bed”
I posted this photograph on my Facebook page of my “little girl” making herself at home on the bed.
One of my friends said it looked just like Wyeth’s Dog on Bed
Thanks to Photoshop and “justthisgood” for his Youtube tutorial, “Perfect Sepia Tone Effect” for helping me create the best looking sepia tone.
Back in the 1970s, one of my favorite television shows was “The Waltons.” The fictional Walton family was a large, loving family who lived in a fictional mountain town in rural Virginia. The show was set during the time of 1933-1944, a time when my mother would have been growing up on her parents farm in what was then, rural St. Charles County. I remember Grandpa had a barn that was full of smells, some good and some bad. He kept his cows in there and that was the only inside place the cats were allowed to be. It had a hayloft that my boy cousins loved to jump out but I don’t think I ever got the nerve to do it. Yesterday, while we were out on the motorcycle, we passed this barn and I snapped this picture. Brings back memories.
Crime Beat: Murder, Mayhem and the Mundane
Searching for my family history in the microfilms of old newspapers such as the St. Charles Cosmos-Monitor and the St. Charles Banner News, I realized what great, colorful stories were written in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries. St. Charles and its surrounding communities were the sites for many homicides, suicides and accidental deaths that were vividly written by reporters of the day, and being a commissioned police officer for almost 30 years, these stories were right up my alley.
I compiled examples from each decade from the 1870s to 1920s in a book entitled “Crime Beat: Murder, Mayhem and the Mundane, As Reported in Newspapers of St. Charles, Missouri 1871-1916.”
A rather comical entry from 1890 Letter to Editor of the St. Charles Cosmo complained about the “cow question”. Taypayer writes:
“What protection has a property holder got in our city where cows are left to destroy his beautiful lawns, gardens and shade trees…what protection has a merchant got who pays his license to the city for doing business, and has perfect right to set vegetables, produce, etc., two feet from his building for display, and a cow comes along eats them and goes its way happy…when a cow jumps his 4 1/2 ft. fence or knows how to open his garden gate, steals in, destroys the nice garden and shrubberies that the housewife has been cultivating for yard and ruins all?”
Some other entries are:
The cover art was designed by me using Photoshop from a photocopy of an ad in the St. Charles Banner News. The article “Murders of Officers Blair and Lamb” was published in Vol 28, No. 4, October 2010 issue of the Saint Charles County Heritage, The Bulletin of the St. Charles County Historical Society.
it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a picture, at least one that didn’t have anything to do with my toes. My soon to be daughter-in-law asked me to accompany her and her mother to a bridal show at the Americas center in downtown St. Louis.
Doors of Saint Louis, Central West End poster available from Relish Cards & Gifts, 22 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO. As a fundraiser, Bruce Shoults of the The Great Frame Up Central West End, asked patrons to enter their doors into a contest to be chosen to be included on the “Doors of St. Louis, Central West End Edition” poster. The chosen doors where photographed by me and the design based on a previous Doors poster (designer unknown)was developed by me in Photoshop CS4 into the poster seen below.
Doors of Saint Louis, Central West End Edition
To start our new year, my husband and I went to Lone Elk Park in St. Louis County. We didn’t see many Elk but did see a heard of buffalo. 
One “lone elk” had bedded down on the hillside. 
A Year of the White Barn
I love barns. I wish I’d been raised on a farm. I love animals and growing things. I love to hear a rooster crow and gather eggs and watch things grow.
Every day on my way to work, I pass by this white barn sitting right off the highway. I decided to document the look of the barn for a year. One photograph each month for a year.
patti
For the past month I have been working on a collage which contains all the people and things that enrich my life. I’ve experimented with several different methods on the collage, but I am drawn to the colorized ink drawing. Not sure about the pastel border. What do you think? The finished product will be 30″ x 20″ and will be displayed over the couch in my living room.
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