TODAY'S FEATURED POST

GHOSTS

Greg Ruth

  Without the slightest blush of apology, I am very fond of  ghosts. As with most horror genre items, the vast majority of the stories do fall a bit short, but I will roll the dice each and every time because when they land, there is nothing better than a fantastic ghost story. I was the only kid in 4th grade whose favorite show was the Ghost and Mrs Muir from 1968 with Hope Lang,…

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EVERYDAY ORIGINAL

Gabriela

YESTERDAY’S POST

Image

Short Take: Foreground Darks

Gregory Manchess

August 6, 2025 - Recently in one of my online classes for SmArt School, a few students were having trouble creating visual interest in their compositions. The pieces lacked depth. The culprit wasn’t the design of the main elements, but the distribution of values. Generally, the students think of the background as dark, but they also wanted to put their main subject in dark clothing, and all the darks in the subject were the same darks as in the background. They initially thought the farther away from the foreground subject, the darker the background becomes. But unless they were depicting someone in a subway, or darkened room, the background can be lighter. What was necessary for them to gain depth and enhance the silhouette of the foreground subject was to slightly lighten the background color value and allow most…

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