The most amazing online digital art school now has my July class open for registration. Go register now at the DIGITAL ART ACADEMY for the Digital Paint Brush class. Four all different lessons in July covering different subjects.

What you need most of all for this class is IMAGINATION and after that Corel Painter X. We will be doing lessons that are ONLY applicable to Painter X. So if you do not have Painter X, wait for class to start and download the FREE 30 Day Painter X for your platform.
We are also going to using Alien Skin SNAP ART to create layers that will bring new dimension to your art. Alien Skin SNAP ART also have a FREE 30 Day download, so again, wait till class starts to download and install it.
A Wacom tablet is truly the only way to be painting. A mouse can be used, but I highly recommend a Wacom Intuous 3 6×8 tablet as the minimum for painting.
Each week we will be working on a different subject. You may use your own images or the class reference images. It is highly recommended that all your own reference images be 8×10 @ 250 dpi as the minimum so you can truly see what you are painting. Smaller or lower resolution images make it difficult to see the brushstrokes and also hard for you to see details.
The Line Up for the Four Weeks:
Portraits: New techniques to speed up your portrait paintings and simplify them
Landscapes and City Art: Learn ways to improve your non-people art
Painting with Vibrant Color: Ways to look at color and add more color depth to your paintings
Texture and Finishing Touches: Adding texture to paintings and a variety of finishing touches
Once we finish a weeks lesson we will NOT be going back to it. These are Four SEPARATE lessons.

REGISTER NOW as this class already had a waiting list and is filling up fast!

Although the “book” doesn’t ship till January (or sooner!) I have started a Flickr group where I will be posting video tutorials for it and invite everyone to show off their work using the project lessons in the book The Art of Digital Photo Painting Masterpieces. Right now it’s an incredible deal on Amazon at a low prepublished price. Amazon has bought boatloads of it so we are hoping that you all love it!

You are all invited to join the Flickr Group now so as soon as the info and videos start posting you will be ahead of the game. JOIN HERE It cost nothing to join and you will be in on the first tutorials posted and videos!

BUY the book now and be one of the first to get it shipped to you. At this low price, buy gifts for friends for the holidays also! As soon as I see some of the comps (also known as galleys meaning the design layouts) I will get them posted on Flickr. The mock ups are awesome that I saw!

So join the Flickr group now to keep up with the news.

Impressions of Fishing, originally uploaded by marilynsholin.

Here is a new fast painting done with Painter X. It was for the new weekly challenge at the Digital Painting Forum.

Blackbird Frame and Art Gallery had a wonderful opening yesterday at their new Lexington location which is full of light and amazing frames and art. My good friend and artist Binna Green had a showing of her fabulous ceramics and her "Goddess" greeted you at the front door! We were so taken with a beautiful battered colorful tin mirror by Silo Valley Copperworks Jesse Lee that it had to come home with us. Like many artists in Asheville Binna and Jesse are too busy to get their websites up but you can see their work at the gallery live and in person.

After the opening we went to Rezaz for lunch which was, as always, fabulous but the stand out for me was the humus with pomegranate and walnuts. WOW! Fabulous! Everything was good but that really got my attention.

Had a wonderful "artful" day and now it’s back to work.

This is an exciting project! How I wish I had time to take off to do it! There are a million reasons why I SHOULD but even two million reasons why I can’t right now. We have to choose our priorities and while I can’t choose this one this year, there’s no reason why I can’t encourage others to do it.

DAY IN THE LIFE ASHEVILLE PROJECT

I hope someone reads this and participates. Years ago I was part of the Day in The Life of Miami project with ASMP in Miami, Fl and it was an exciting few days (planning meetings and after work also) and I still have the film (yeah, guys, we used to use FILM!) I shot from that I think. I covered children for the day and the cross section of children in Miami. From the secure safe kids playing in the parks with their mommies and nannies to the handicapped and waiting for surgery kids at the Ronald McDonald center by Jackson Memorial Hospital.

But the most life changing kids that still to this day are in my heart and memories are the ones I met and photographed at the Miami Children’s Home.It was an emotional experience I will never forget as I was swarmed by dozens of kids of all ages begging me to touch them,hug them and take their picture. I was not allowed to take their faces so I had to create shots that did not show them, but still captured the emotion. The stories each child had that the volunteer told me kept ripping my heart out.

Afterwards I donated whatever I could to them to help out. I even went for a few meetings to get trained to work with them, but the emotional pull I felt from them was just too much and I decided to support them from the outside. I couldn’t get so personally involved with each child and hear their story.

Bottom line being, A Day in the Life of Asheville might be YOUR life changing, meaningful experience and if you can do it DO IT and make it part of your life.

Absolutely could not resist sharing this. How fast can we get one of these babies? It’s going to be a whole new world soon!

 Digital Paint Palette

A growing SCAM on the internet is a site called www.tagged.com. BEWARE of it and do NOT join it. I was sent an email that invited me to join TAGGED by a friend of mine on Twitter. When I went there and “logged in” with my email address, which is not unusual, to see the message the person sent me, it said I had more friends there.

Bottom line is I joined the FREE side and before I knew it they STOLE my entire address book and even though I wasn’t even logged into my AOL address, they also got those from one of my accounts and sent them all an email saying to Join me there and that if they said NO I wouldn’t think they were my “friend”.

I did not authorize this email and it reminded me of when Elliott joined Stumbleupon last year and had the same thing done to him and through his power and influence, got them to stop doing this.

I did NOT invite you, please unsubscribe from that site and don’t authorize anything to be done. One person told me they have a PRO side and he signed up to let them bill him through his phone bill! This is really a confusing and underhanded site. Tell your friends also to not go there, EVER.

In keeping with having new things for our Digital Painting Forum, we have updated our Avatars. Of course not without help!

Mikeys was done by http://hanzzcaricatures.blogspot.com/

Hanz also did one for me, but I ended up using this one from my video which tied my brand more together. But Mikeys is Perrrrrfectly HIM!!!

So here we are in all our 2008 Painterly glory!

To be blunt, many think hard lines and vectors are digital art. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s the new art and after it’s on the canvas the embellishing and painting and varnishing begins! Have fun with it and don’t ever think “digital art” again. Think ART! Period.

This is one of my pieces printed, painted, gold leafed and embellished. I am not afraid to show this canvas close up!

Here’s a close up section of one of my most popular and my signature painting on a gallery wrapped canvas:  Bourbon Balcony