squeegee joined in and replied with this 3 years ago, 3 hours later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,793
@previous (B)
I drew that on my phone last easter, lol.
here's Houston at night I drew on my phone last month. phone sketches are like 20 minute pass times. I do those and post them at people if I reference some pic they post. lot of pets. I'll just spam art here from now on.
squeegee replied with this 3 years ago, 7 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,800
Someone's rescue dog. It had passed away and this was a memory their history I think. No one asks for these, I just sketch pictures if they seem interesting. These are just for me to be doing something like practice. And I post and flag their name so they see it. They're usually surprised and think it's neat to see. This one was really cool, and yeah, people love their pets so much.
I'm working on developing the skills in oils to do Ala prima style paintings. This is as close to that as I get on my phone to that kind of painting. Look up Ala prima to see truly skilled techniques. Mine universally fall short of atm. I started back making physical painting in November. I'd never oil painted before. Just lots of acrylic painting in School. I stopped for 13 or 14 years or more.
squeegee replied with this 3 years ago, 10 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,802
@1,218,798 (D)
Buddy, I am the first to agree with you. But there is no skill cap. I can try to just make better work each time. That's it. If I can work enough then maybe one day we'll disagree. But I see every little fuckup and know shit work when I see it. And this is shit work. But, i use a giclee fine art printer and the quality of the paper and inks are archival fine art prints and are perfect. The artwork I send, that's the weakest part. As it should be. If it sucks, that's because I'm shit. It won't suck because I'm too cheap to have a high cost of materials.
Posters cost 3 or 4 bucks. Giclees cost a lot. But holy shit, these aren't poster prints. They are art gallery prints. But the images are mine and that's what makes them sellable or not.
squeegee double-posted this 3 years ago, 4 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,803
This print was done at 15"x20" on metallic silver paper made by Moab. A discontinued product, so likely a 1 off. Any others would be on ultrawhite cotton rag paper.
Also, it's sold. Just haven't printed more. Cause money is expensive
squeegee quadruple-posted this 3 years ago, 8 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,805
Bluebonnets, this was drawn on my phone, the last print I posted was drawn on a tablet in clip studio paint using a wacom stylus for graphic design work. This particular one was a small proof print to mostly confirm colors on my tablet matched the printers value range. And to see transparent effects over black. The giclee black inks are veeeeery black. This caMe out better than I thought it would, I am super highly impressed with the giclee system. No doubt, if you ever buy any art anywhere, if it's a print, and it's a giclee process and good paper, it's the highest possible quality for fine art prints.
Anonymous E replied with this 3 years ago, 4 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,806
@1,218,804 (squeegee)
It's a good show. Kind of a psychological thriller. More psychological than thriller, though. It's about this mysterious company that the protagonist works for that requires employees undergo a procedure that "severs" their brains such that they cannot remember their personal life at work or their work life at home. I had to binge watch it and I don't often watch shows anymore because I'm too picky.
Anyway, there's a painting in the show that is similar to yours that has special significance to some of the characters.
squeegee replied with this 3 years ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,807
This was the original sketch from Aug 12, and one of the first things I'd drawn since 2008 I guess when I did the last acrylic on glass painting I made for a friend.
squeegee double-posted this 3 years ago, 15 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,810
@1,218,808 (E)
Indeed. Blue bonnets and I have a long history of making bad art. For some reason this won several local and regional cultural art contests when I was in 7th grade and placed 4th at state in Austin and hung in the capitol for a Minute. Technically it was required to have some slogan as part of the posters, and I hated that and made this instead and still won 1st 3 times to get to state and they couldn't place it in top top 3 from Texas going to the DC competition. And 4th wasn't even a thing, but they presented the 3 winners and the best loser of the bunch and the whole thing was weird and I was 13 and had to wear a suit and was mostly embarrassed at every step because I procrastinated and finished it quickly and it was not my best effort. And of course it's framed an hanging in my parents living room like a dang carravagio. Still trying to do good blue bonnets.
squeegee quadruple-posted this 3 years ago, 5 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,814
It's not Holland. Just Paris. I saw the view in a porno! But it is 2 60x48 inch panels in the uncompressed image so a print would be stupid big. Like actual bay windows and realistically scaled. I was experimenting.
squeegee replied with this 3 years ago, 6 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,820
My favorite president to paint! Better than Lincoln, better than Washington.
This is Trump being photographed pointing at the solar eclipse he's staring at. You can almost see smoke rising off his sizzling retinas. Pure, ultraviolet radiation being slightly gravitationally lensed directly imprinting the blindness through to the back of his skull thick enough to stop it.
You gotta love the guy. He is a comedy genius like mr.bean but actually really really dangerously stupid. Not just comedically. I've drawn several of this image.
squeegee double-posted this 3 years ago, 27 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,824
@1,218,816 (B)
It is a dall-e 2 image from a promt I gave it. Then I fixed it, did all this other stuff, and had made a novelty children's book cover as a 1 minute video demonstration of how quickly I could go from a verbal description to a prototype image and the iterative steps to get there and thus produce illustrations as a fast prototyping type process in a fraction of the time and cost of hiring an illustrator to handle the complete process.
A pitch for a toy business model service for self publishing children's books.
Anyone can write a little kids book about not crying over skinned knees or whatever. And no one really does because even bad illustrators spend times making them, and illustrating a kids book and paying the artist, copyrighting images and doing revisions and stuff is just thousands and thousands I'm cost, and then you have to sell a LOT of books that publishing companies have already not wanted to develop.
But this took me 30 minutes and I made a video with it. And is licensed to me and can be sold or transferred or whatever. So a 12 page book about saying g'night to caterpillars or something? Done in a brief afternoon.
People can custom make their kids super specialty books about whatever weird narrow little interest their 7 year old spergs over.
Such as this book about correctly distinguishing communicable zoonotic diseases and humane pest control methodologies. Ages 4-8
Sure, ur kid can tie their shoe, but do they know what to do if your parrot has ornothinosis? If they don't put it down then how adequately prepared are they for responsible nature conservancy?
squeegee replied with this 3 years ago, 9 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,829
That's all just the digital stuff. Fast and no cost materials. Practice stuff to get my hands back. Real work is a long process. Oil paintings take 6 months to a year to dry fully after the last stroke. And active work can take weeks, months, or in some cases like the thick impasto style of the impressionists, degas, cezzane, van gogh, those took years to paint and more to dry.
My little apple study took a week. But like 2 hours work time. This shit is amazingly difficult. I love every minute of it.
squeegee double-posted this 3 years ago, 11 minutes later, 7 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,834
@1,218,825 (B)
It was the best of the group of horrors that got shit out. They're all on the video on my fb. Most of this stuff is done for the exercise and skills I can pickup from having a variety of projects. The more stuff I spam with the name Buni on it the better for establishing presence wherever I'm self promoting. Being an artist for a living is mostly being a whore and talking up your goals as in like the whole Artist's statement about why their work is important, valuable, worth money, and socially or culturally significant. Masterbation essentially. Shameless public weasel thumping. Using big words it's bullshit. But, required by galleries and museums to go oh, a seriously furious masterbater.
squeegee triple-posted this 3 years ago, 15 minutes later, 7 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,837
This one sold. Took 6 weeks, but also was thinned a lot with medium, turpentine. Solvents thins the oil and reduces drying time, but the 2nd pass I used a fatter medium of 1:1 turps to linseed oil.
The rule fat over lean means painting wet to dry and needing more fats in the oil so it slows the curing process. Oil paints don't dry, they under go polymerization and that locks the pigment Into layers and if you paint fast drying over slow drying you get delamination Areas, cracks, and at worst it just falls apart. Fat over lean let's the layers lock to the layer below after that layer has dried and that's one reason my oil paintings can last for 1k years or more.
It's. Lot of work to fuckup and have fall apart in a few years. Properly handled tho, oil paintings will out last your pud thumper.
squeegee quadruple-posted this 3 years ago, 16 minutes later, 7 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,843
I'll post more, I have hundreds of these things around. Studies, master works, drawings. This is a master's copy of a charcoal portrait by John Singer sargent. Using Faber Castille Pitt graphite and loose charcoal drybrushing techniques. Illustration was my most developed skill set. Painting is pretty much a thing I started delving into since November 10th, so a few months. itll be a year before I'll be at a beginner-intermediate range in knowledge and brushwork. 5 years, I'll maybe make my first good painting. If I actually stay obsessed with it and do it aLl day everyday. Decades if I start and stop. Never if I play paint hobby works. Of course I may not be good at it. And just stay shit
spectacles replied with this 3 years ago, 11 hours later, 20 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,891
@previous (G)
that's the drying time for thick applications of impasto. alla prima means wet on wet and you usually spend 3 hours for a portrait start to finish, then the drying time varies based on mediums. oils added to paint add to the time it remains wet. solvents mixed in will dry faster. linquin is a synthetic and works like oil to give better flow but dries faster than solvents. there are thickeners as well that go into impasto mixes. and alkyd based oil paints which are their own set of properties. and newer still are water soluable oil paints which are also different, and literally hundreds of different mediums all with characteristics from toxic to odorless olive oil, vegetable oil, stand oil, heavy, thick, low flow, extracted from weasels, vegetable based, seeds, paint thinners, Murphys oil soap...
and aside from alla prima the is the direct method of oil painting and indirect method, the use of techniques like glazing and scumbling, grisailles, under paintings. these are all different in everyway. and why rembrants looked different from Caravaggio and the Mona Lisa doesn't look like van Goghs self portrait. alla prima is done in a day work time. still has to cure a year and why his brother Theo had all of them in his care. read van Gogh's letters with theo. they are published online, and you can even read what was said about the ear incident. did he cut it off himself, or did Paul gauguin lop it off with a fencing foil during an argument and van Gogh covered up for him because he gay loved him? it's an open question, but the letters give insight into that too, and why van Gogh didn't sell his paintings before his death, figured his pricing, and regulated the curing process which was and still is why oil paintings take a long time between the first layer of gesso till delivery to a buyer commissioning the work.
direct is a process of building wet onto dry layers, and I mean touch dry, not a full cure, but is still days to weeks between applications. but depending on size can take months or a year. depends. like John singer sargents ww1 mural, gassed, which is 20 yards long by 6 ft high. even with hired apprentices that took a long time to finish painting and had time before a full cure was ready for final varnishing.
today we have gamvar varnish which can go on to touch dry paint, so weeks or so after the final stroke was done. but thats kinda new, traditional varnishes are not used until at least 1 year after the last painting was done. and very few oil painters use that kind of varnish -people are generally unfamiliar with the fiddly bits in the process and most people think everything works like acrylics which dry entirely in a day and can be delivered and done like 1 hour photo developing. dark room developing is time consuming.
and I can do a digital painting in a few hours, uploaded to the printers in 3 minutes, and they can produce a gallery quality print within an hour, and FedEx it to me overnight and I can have it in hand and framed up and delivered by lunch time.
then there's indirect oil painting. lots and lots of thin washes over dried washes built up on top of a monochrome grisaille under painting. kinda like air brushing a Grey corpse with makeup and thats how old masters perfected painting transparently to make veils and lace and delicate whispy semi opaque layers, water effects, atmospheric occlusion like fogs. jesus. chiaroscuro lighting - Rembrandt style figures emerging from darkness. even just shadows, or beams of light from point sources casting rays into a dim room. all these things have different methods to get the effect you're after.
I'm barely scratching the surface here, there's also opaque paints like burnt umber, semi opaque like ultra marine, alizarin crimson, semi transparent zinc white transparent paints like transparent mummy. there are a thousand years worth of variables to consider when talking shop with oil painters.
I appreciate your comment for questioning the distinction I didn't make, but real talk, everything I just mentioned has many further distinctions and covers essentially only 2 years studying at a decent atelier. maybe 3. a full understanding of all the fiddily bits is a life's work kinda pursuit. even art history degrees are Hella light overviews compared to mastery of all the methods the old masters learned and invented and perfected till the day they died.
I admit my hands on time working with some of these methods is limited to literally 3 month +- and a lot is just academic art history, or more currently explained distinctions to focus studies on the concepts I'm learning and to see through the noise of overlapping glazes when working on a graisaille layer when doing a master study. I will also show examples of these concepts, because i'm not done with this answer, bear with me, let me speak from my actual experience and show results.
and I have 720 pictures to go through of just my paintings. its maybe 70 paintings but I take a handful of pics in different lighting and camera settings so give me a tick and I'll look at other questions or take exception to oversimplified broadly scoped assertions because the fiddley bits are where the art exists. not in the blanket assertion that does a disservice to van Gogh's singular genius amongst the post impressionist movement in which he was regarded like a god by his contemporaries and the movements after. and I dont care what the Wikipedia overview says, Gaugin, Seurat and Cezanne were the "good kids" the established salons and schools didn't shun and so they are elevated as the leaders of the post impressionist movement, van Gogh was reluctantly included as one of their peers, he was basically daddy making them all radically evolve their styles to keep up with the LAW that van Gogh stated in a days work that shook their understanding of color theory and expressive representational abstraction of form to their cores. he was the burning bush, and they followed him around like Moses and run across France shouting eureka when their work showed in the salon and van Gogh was tripping balls and having epileptic fits like the Greek oracles. a single van Gogh painting revolutionized whole schools of establishment art and this directly led to the democratization of art sellers and birthed fauvism from modern art in royal academies and there is a direct line from van Gogh through to Picasso and Braque, cubism, post medernism and van Gogh is still the god damned principle influence on how to see and represent form through color value and abandon the idea of hue as being important. it rocked the very foundations of long held dogmatic belief, and was revolutionary, and why the impressionists painted in muted tones and made pretty, just always dour, gloomy and washed out hues like monet. I hate most of his work. some is okay, but their goal was expressive brushwork nothing like the disruptive post impressionists followers that made color their bitch when value rose as the king of academic methods still taught today.
everywhere is going to say he revolutionized color by using vivid and bold colors. this is a fiddley bit, hue means color identity. red. yellow. blue. value means how light or dark a chosen hue may be. saturation is how vivid or deeply pigmented the the hue is at a chosen value. it's fiddley. but it's genius level SEEING that van Gogh just had and his rejection of the establishment "art authority" led him to stray pretty far into color theory, uh, development. it was like Newtonian mechanics and van Gogh saw the relativistic nature that is in the value range.
black and white pics and tv shows. a red dress and a blue dress filmed in black and white just looked the same grayscale tone. 2 hues appeared to be the same color. but a black dress that was as dark as blue was just black. but no where near the grayscale of the red or blue. this happens because grayscale is an intensity thing, and blue scatters lift to be blue, but black sucks in light and has low intensity. thats value. thats the magic sauce for color theory. hue doesn't matter at all when it comes to representing accurate forms. only value does. that's why monotone can be as detailed and descriptive of form as full color pictures. paint any picture with RANDOMLY selected hues throughout, and fix that color to the correct level of light/dark, and in the end you have pretty standard run of the mill modern "color expressive" representational expressionism and most people call it abstract because it seems like the right way to label paintings done in wild imaginative colors that don't exist in nature. people aren't rainbow colored "calico cat" like people. anyway, that's representational realism and today is common af. but in 1905 this brilliant insight is still hugely controversial because it is so obvious and simple once you see it and understand it and the art establishment pooh pooh'd deviation from their rigorous "correct" and required art education and they actively excluded outsider contributions, van Gogh was one, and he is literally the archetypal mad genius revolutionary and unrecognized artist trope is even a thing.
but really he was marginalized and shunned for being unorthodox. he was also a drunken psychotic with epilepsy and was violent and argumentative. buuuut, he was being selected against purely because he challenged their traditional thinking. and he didn't need them. so he mocked them in a painting and quit 2 weeks later. and organically grew a following with his reputation and sent impressionism into obscurity eventually, blah blah blah fauvism, blah post modernism.
point is saying he did most paintings in a day and didn't spend a year on anything is right, but also needlessly obfuscates the real insight into his method the same way saying he mastered color obfuscates his actual role in revolutionizing color theory.
his method was "in plein air", traditionally a watercolor method, and the technique of alla prima "wet on wet" applications of impasto according to his understanding of value in color theory. and he destroyed a lot, like none of his early stuff survives or is questionably his at best. he'd often times spend a month painting the same haystacks day after day SCRAPING off the shit work to do it again the next day. so, yes, his actual surviving works show only the last single day of iteration and work, but that days work took him decades to prepare for skills wise, but also all the trying shit out to see what worked phase is hidden in the statement did in one day. later in his work he trashed less and less because he had mastered the very complex skills he needed to pull off starry night after only 21 attempts at it. possibly more.
dont diminish the work of geniuses by assuming their greatness was merely a gift and was effortless. van Gogh suffered a LOT and and put a great amount of time and effort and his own vitality into his wrenching into existence with purpose and force he MADE these thing exist because they didn't just appear on his canvas everyday like mana from the god of born talents. he fucking sucked shit and he knew it and he studied and struggled and discovered and invented masterpieces by great work and he simply had the will to spend a month painting a pile of straw in an empty field - the ugliest most boring thing ever - and a month of nothing but fuckup and expensive materials thrown away. and he was never a rich man. that's just what people saw and knew him to be. Vincent the mad genius of Arles, painting hay stcks for moths and years every day screaming at cows and punting broken canvases in the dirt. that someone who wrestles with God and fight for those "gifts of talent" that finish the work to something supernatural. "I wish I was born an artist." what? "gifted and talented?" fuck you. he fought god for every brush stroke until he had made them, eh, meh, acceptable. he didn't like how abstract he made starry night version 21. it pained him. read his letters. clear to everyone else in the world since who's seen it. its the most well known painting in the world. and is still so far beyond his time its relevant in todays styles - the Mona Lisa is an old piece of shit no one wants in their house because its an old piece of shit. important, old piece of shit. but starry night? is everywhere. and will be for a long long time. didn't impress van Gogh though. it easily could've been strewn about a cow pasture like the thousands and thousands and thousands of works that once existed for a day. 900 survive. worked for only ten years. 3650 daily paintings possibly. most of it was made garbage by the man. not because it was bad. just wasn't any good as he saw it. his entire career was spent doing nothing but trying to be better than he ever could actually be. he didn't know how to succeed, but he knew when he failed and that didn't destroy him, failure defined his successes because we see the successes, and can't see the mistakes that riddled his work.
I actually have talked about all of these things in further detail on my Facebook. I need a better channel to push everything through, I'm not even getting close to whats already posted, like, all these questions have answers and pictures, I'm going to get bogged down doing all hoeing no showing.
spectacles triple-posted this 3 years ago, 41 minutes later, 21 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,895
@1,218,857 (D)
nope. I had a real job. what's an MFA going to do for me? I'm better off going to an atelier. the Houston museum of fine art hosts and atelier and also has a block program for funding resident artists. 12 slots a year. looking at going through the atelier program and after start applying to the block program every year until i get in or I die. 1 will happen before the other at least.won't
spectacles quadruple-posted this 3 years ago, 11 minutes later, 22 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,896
@1,218,848 (F)
blue bonnets isn't going to sell 3000k, and the other his limited supply of that paper, it could be different paper, but wouldn't be quite the same. also, I can do a better design for that metallic paper that the rain picture. so not considered specifically those, print verifications basically. proofs. but stocking quantity? yes. I've looked at it. let me ask, put a price on those. without numbers from me, just 9x11, 15x20 what would you figure someone would pay. I'm just curious for the discussion.
spectacles decuple-posted this 3 years ago, 4 minutes later, 22 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,218,907
It's a huge print 30x20
There in a coin on the ground she shot out of the air. Between her and Duke somewhere. It's hard to find with a magnifying glass It's so small. Clearly defined tho
The scroll work etching on the gun is all in the print too. Giclee is really something else.
Anonymous G replied with this 3 years ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,918
> I'm barely scratching the surface here
No it is called running off at the mouth and spouting off in circles. You spend way to much time on the internet to ever become a good artist. You're to busy reading shit and trying to be somebody in cyber space.
spectacles replied with this 3 years ago, 3 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,924
@previous (G)
lets unpack this. what do you mean? you have strong feelings about this and speak so surely. what about this bothers you enough to cut me down to size? what should I do, in your opinion, about these things you brought up and made sure to tell me? feel free to tell me how you really feel.
spectacles double-posted this 3 years ago, 8 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,926
@1,218,913 (F)
y'all complain about traffic, and no posts, and people left, Wah wah wah, its all over the front page.
what is the perfect amount of posts I should do?
y'all just kinda complain and bitch and moan about everything. it's really off putting.
just saying. Ave yall tried, like, not constantly being mad and bothered by things that both happen and don't happen as much or not enough as things there are that are happening at any given time?
Anonymous B double-posted this 3 years ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,936
just saying. y'all should be nice and interesting like me and not so dumb and boring. sorry if that hurts your feelings idiots, I'm just more interesting and definitely have my shit together unlike some retards here (everyone but me)
Anonymous E replied with this 3 years ago, 5 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,938
@1,218,894 (spectacles)
Some schizo on tinychan has been spamming questions about how to sell 3000 pieces of art for the past year or two. Along with other barely coherent posts about learning programming and other topics. That's what he's referencing.
spectacles replied with this 3 years ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,939
@1,218,934 (B)
I believe you implicitly and take that to heart, my self esteem requires that I mock you for it to feel better about myself. that'll show you trolls on a troll board about trolling who's the trolls.
spectacles triple-posted this 3 years ago, 23 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,941
@1,218,938 (E)
ah. well if they haven't stumbled across the recommended strategy in a year then they're just doing it to get a rise out of y'all I would guess. I just assumed tc was still just about shitposting. mc is apparently about not trolling, hurting feelings and only being sarcastic and complaining. I try to fit in but I just do it wrong. I probably dont talk about trans people enough. and post exactly the correct amount. I've been cancelled like 3 times. minichan sucks. I just can't do anything right and everyone thinks so too. but also the opposite is true. and nothing is.
spectacles sextuple-posted this 3 years ago, 10 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,944
@1,218,937 (B)
do you believe things that aren't true about yourself just because someone says something about themselves? if I say I'm the best looking genius here does that mean anything? or is it shitposting? if I called myself ugly and dumb all the time, will that just go ignored? or will people pile on and agree? or tell me I'm wrong? or just complain about it?
spectacles septuple-posted this 3 years ago, 5 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,945
blue bonnets are the most woke flower cause its against the law to pick them. the state flower of Texas is a special snowflake. and our bird is the mocking bird.
just a thought.
scenticle replied with this 3 years ago, 4 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,959
@1,218,944 (spectacles)
I'm so offline it hurts y'all. You guys are chronically online and trapped in the realm of personas while Im up here, transcending ego entirely. it's a great place to be. you cant mock me because I'm so offline. Y'all need to learn how to ditch this pussy nonsense of feeling inferior to me. I don't blame y'all for it but it's kind of pathetic. Y'all only pretend to not like me because I'm different and not because I'm unlikeable and abrasive. Y'all are abrasive. I quit again.
spectacles replied with this 3 years ago, 40 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,218,960
@previous (scenticle)
well, when you say it like that I guess it must mean I'm the one with a problem. I guess I'm not perfect after all. y'all don't like me and I'm unlikeable and abrasive. y'all. i get it now y'all. you're right. thanks for the sarcastic and mean spirited, arrogant mockery. I needed to hear that. I guess I do need to evaluate my behaviors and motivations and treatment of people and work on the things that I couldn't see were problems because I was so busy trashing everyone all the time. all the time. I thought I was going to have to go anonymous and never stand out. but, no, you're right. I should work on me because you've got a good read on things. I'm the transparent one. not you anons. thanks for turning things around on me.