New oil painting and website update

I decided I was finished with the oil painting I'd been working on. You can see it below.

People occasionally ask me how I know I'm finished. My stock answer is it's when I realize that there is nothing I can do that will improve the painting. Unfortunately I've continued well past that point in numerous paintings.

I also spent the greater part of this evening scanning old slides to go up on the Ralph Art website redesign. I'd tried this earlier with an old UMAX scanner I've had for too long. I ended up opting to use a much older Nikon LS 1000 slide scanner, which did a much better job.

Upon reflection, I've decided to do a rolling relaunch of the site, which means it may not be finished, but it will be finished enough. Part of this was predicated on the fact that the current site is largely unfinished and the new site is a vast improvement, especially when it comes to maintenance.

The updated Ralph Art Website - sneak preview

I've spent most of the weekend working on the updated design of the Ralph Art Website Project, which is, though functional, pretty dog-ugly in my estimation. Need an excuse? I was in a hurry when I switched web-hosting providers.

This one makes extensive use of the JQuery library, which lets me bolt on some functionality (menus, slideshows and the like) that would take me forever to code manually. As befits my station in life, I've made extensive use of CSS to control the look and feel of the site. No tables and spacer gifs!

I've gotten the basic shell coded out (along with the homepage). Now I've just got to create the rest of the pages for the shell. Simple, right? I've got a lot of scanning to do to feed the image bank of art.

My goal is to get this thing on line before Fall Gallery Night 2009. And yes, I'll have a handful of smaller pieces up during Arts Goggle.

And now your moment of Zen....