We are so excited and blessed to have a new member in our family. Baby Evelyn Rae arrived healthy and perfect......14 months ago. I haven't been keeping up with my blog. Why didn't anyone come up with a better term for this? Blog is such a horrible word. I have been painting less all the time with the extra girl in the house, but I am loving every minute of it. See...now that's a lie. There are many "minutes" that I don't love. The second kid does NOT make things twice as difficult, it is some percentage much north of twice. Evie has figured me out already though, and I have to say, both these girls have me right where they want me, wrapped around their tiny little fingers. The next few weeks I will be starting work on this years batch of stamp entries. This spring I have taken around 30,000 pictures of waterfowl so I have quite a pile of reference material to sort through. Today's stamp contests are usually won by entries that have a photographic look to them. Not photo in the sense that there is more detail, but rather actually looking like a photograph. With a portion of the scene looking out of focus like a camera would record the scene. Our eyes focus instantaneously so that is not how we view the world but it does make for an impactful entry. I have never been a big fan of the blurred out background but these are certainly not art contests. So you have to do what you can to compete. They are design contests. Like all designs and trends they are ever changing. If you look at the stamps done in the 70's and early 80's you will notice that they are all very different from the modern designs. There was a much higher emphasis placed on putting together a complete setting. Usually there is an attempt to include some of the background habitat that the birds live in. Today's entries are mostly zoomed in views of the birds, on water most of the time. Because of this, I have been doing a lot of swimming duck paintings over the last few years in order to get more proficient at the effects that water has when it wraps around and behind a moving bird. It is very challenging and fun to paint. Wish me luck! After 24 years of entering the Federal I could use a summer off.