It’s big. I used close to two giant Senelier oil pastel sticks.

How I love to get my fingers dirty. The Senelier oil pastels are especially sticky, yum!

I lied in my previous post. I have done a few small pieces lately, including this Brad Pitt make-over, painted over The Hollywood Reporter cover with Frank W. Ockenfels 3′s portrait of the actor/producer. In a time of photographs being “upgraded” with Photoshop, it’s nice to be able to “downgrade” one with “finger paint”, which is pretty much what oil pastels feels to me. “Happiness is oil pastel in your fingernails.” Of course, as always, this piece is work in progress.

Sorry, Brad. Really. Especially after all the good work you do in New Orleans, building the neighborhood with sustainable homes, through Make It Right, which, by the way, it’s going global.

I was lucky to meet and photograph other people who are making it right in New Orleans. The story was published in different publications, including El Mundo. You can see a gallery of really cool people in the Mercury Press archives: Rebuilding New Orleans five years after Katrina

A touch of humor to end this post:

I left the drawing in the studio for months. I wanted to continue painting it, but I didn’t. I can make many excuses, but the thing is that I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’ve been busy with many other creative endeavors, including writing The Magical Seaweed play, so I didn’t miss painting terribly (only a lot). But I did wonder whether I was ever going to finish this self-portrait.

Then, yesterday, after a day in which I felt like people didn’t care for what I had to say, including some of my students in the photography class, I hid in the art studio. I suddenly was in the same mood as the painting I had started over two months ago. I don’t remember ever painting with so much anguish. Below’s the result, although it’s probably not done yet (I ran out of orange!). I won’t touch it much more, as I like the looseness of some of the “brushstrokes”.

Some people don’t like that I paint myself looking sad. Is it because they prefer to think of me as a happy person. Well, I’m a happy person, but I do get sad, and I celebrate that. Besides, as I mentioned before, it’s easier to be serious than laughing when you’re holding a pose in front of the mirror. What do you think?

In the video I speak a little about knowing that the perspective wasn’t right, but that I went on painting without correcting it because I was afraid I would mess it up, even though I knew I would eventually change it. There are so many layers that I ran out of yellow from my Holbein set, and I had to use a Senelier oil pastel giant stick in order to complete the painting.

I’m also including a few stills below. Please excuse the distorted perspective of the images, it’s all part of the creative process… except I added more distortion at times with photos in which the camera wasn’t parallel to the painting, deforming the painting more than it was in “real” life.

Joan Calder’s “Airplanes in the Garden” has launched and it’s already for sale in bookstores nationwide. And the first reviews are coming in:

“I can’t think of a more rewarding, long-lasting summer strategy for entertaining (and stealthily educating) youngsters than reading this fancifully illustrated, engagingly written, instructional book.” — Billy Goodnick, Fine Gardening.

Children are loving this book for its illustrations and engaging story about monarch butterflies. Parents are very grateful, for the children are learning by playing and reading along with the main characters of the book, the monarchs Sergio and Stanley. The book even has a few pages with monarch butterfly facts and Fly Away, a song by Rebecca Troon that you can download for free.

I was very fortunate to work with Joan and with illustrator Cathy Quiel to make their dream a reality. The magnificent illustrations by Quiel didn’t always fit the spreads, and I had to add some content. I was very nervous to tinker with somebody else’s beautiful art, since I’m also an artist, after all. I tried to be as respectful as possible so that at the end you wouldn’t even see any changes.

Here are a couple of spreads I am particularly proud of:

Illustrations: ©2011 Cathy Quiel/cathyquiel.com
Story: ©2011 Joan Calder/airplanesinthegarden.com

PS. I love when I can contribute by sharing many of my talents in one project: Design (inside pages, cover and dust jacket), Illustration (invisibly enhancing some pages with Photoshop), Writing (helping with the author bios), Photography (creating the author portraits for Joan and Cathy), and public relations skills. Thank you Joan, Cathy and John for making this possible, and great luck with the book. For everybody else, purchase the book.

The New York Times published a wonderful story about a man who died and saved seven lives in the process, thanks to the organs that his wife made available to people in the transplant waiting list. You can see the story here.

The photo by Béatrice de Géa was also published in the story that Carlos Fresneda did for El Mundo Crónica, the printed weekly supplement, alongside one of my photos. Carlos wrote another story for elmundo.es, along with the video I prepared. And I wrote another piece about what a movie about Julio could be like, directed perhaps by Iñarritu.

Mirtala is an amazing woman. She shared her home and her love for her husband with us. She even showed us a video of her husband giving a sermon at their church.

I took two days to write this blog entry, while surviving a bad cold, and it was worth it.

I started this blog about a year ago, right after completing the performance of “The Last Play on Earth,” the play I wrote and directed in collaboration with the children at OAS Middle School. It was titled “There’s Life After The Last Play on Earth”

For the last few months, I have been busy with writing and directing “The End of Rainbows,” and with other fun projects that I haven’t been posting here. This play deserves its own post, which I may do later, but in the meantime, you can visit its website, and/or the gallery of photos I took during the second performance.

I also have to admit that I got tired of blogging, and of blowing my own horn. I know that some people enjoy my horn-blowing, and thus, I will continue to post here about the creative projects I’m involved in, as long as blogging doesn’t keep me from creating fun plays, emotive paintings, informative articles, entertaining books, flabbergasting videos, or engaging photographs.

One of these projects was filming a video of Paul Diaz, a whistle-blower for the San Onofre nuclear plant. It was published in El Mundo, with editing and Spanish subtitles by Piero Menor.

I’ve also written several pieces on nuclear power for the El Mundo blog I contribute to, in Spanish. The last two were the most-read blogs in all of elmundo.es the day they were published. “The Big One for Today” talks about the dangers of a large earthquake in California. “Trusting the Devil” talks about the history of the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, practically in my backyard. The third piece, written right after the Japanese earthquake; “California Trembles with (Atomic) Fear” made it to the top ten of elmundo.es.

I heard a quote today about a woman speaking against the renewal of uranium mining in Virginia. I paraphrase: “They say not to worry because it’s 30 miles away from our town. That’s not justification. I love all of my state.”

Today I wrote “Winners and Losers after the Oil Spill” for the newspaper and it is right now on the cover of both editions of the digital El Mundo, the one from Spain and the one for the Americas, plus as the main article in the Science section (it later became the second most-voted story of the day). Interestingly enough, the blog I wrote about oil spill quotes, “Don’t Cry for the Spilled Oil”, on June 2, 2010, is among the most-read US blogs this week.

The piece about Virgil Peck, “Shoot the Immigrant Pigs“, also made it to the top ten. I am still shocked by the comments from some of the readers. I actually like to answer my readers, even if I don’t agree with them. For this reason, and because I tend to document my stories exhaustively, I don’t believe I’m a good blogger. By the time I’m done, I spend more than my share of blogging hours. Nevertheless, I enjoy the conversation. I would love to have the energy to also translate them to English after I’m done. Otherwise, there’s always Google Translate… Still, I keep writing them. I wasn’t very happy about the one I wrote to commemorate International Woman’s Day. I would have liked to write something more positive, like the story I wrote about Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, the year before. Zainab is my hero.

Finally, my friend and editor Carlos Fresneda, published several blog entries with the portraits I took with him for the EcoHeroes Project:

• Liz Walker, director of Ithaca EcoVillage, and author of “Choosing a Sustainable Future”.

• Ubaka Hill, drummer and founder of the Million Woman Drummer March.

• Graham Hill and Ken Rother, who started Treehugger.

Other projects deserving their own posts:

• Completing the design of an amazing children book about monarch butterflies.

• Painting the largest self-portrait I’ve ever made.

• Continuing the 100  self-portrait phone photo project.

• “Waste to Resource” video, shot and edited for the Green Short Film Festival.

• Photo shoot of Law & Order event at UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center.

And more. I’ll keep you posted.