Antonio Piromalli Home and Art

Painting landscapes with acrylics is both relaxing and rewarding.  Let your personal style come through and you should find this a great hobby. Acrylic paint is a medium that can look like an oil painting or a watercolor painting when finished.  It depends on the artists’ style and how thick they apply the color.  Either way, starting out by painting landscapes helps to get your feet wet in the world of painting.

You can learn to paint a landscape on canvas paper, canvas board or stretched canvas.  I always suggest practicing your techniques first on an inexpensive canvas or acrylic paper.  I am a sort of perfectionist with my art, and tend to become frustrated easily.  By practicing first, then applying it to the finished piece I feel more comfortable.  You may be satisfied without practicing.  Painting is about what makes you feel good! 

Keep your supplies handy.  Have your spay or mister bottle handy to keep the acrylics moist, keep a water supply handy for the brushes, and always have paper towels handy.  

Let’s create a simple landscape painting.  Lightly sketch in a horizon line with pencil about ¾ of the way down the canvas.  In this case out emphasis will be the sky because only ¼ of the painting is land.

 Wet the sky with white gesso.   Add some color to the same brush and starting at the top, use criss-cross strokes and blend down to the horizon line.  Use any color.  Daytime skies can be blues & purple.  Nighttime skies can be these colors just darkened with reds and oranges near the horizon.  Blend the colors as little or much as you like.  Now your sky is done. 

Now it’s time to create your land or hills.  Chose a medium to light green and with horizontal strokes lay in the distant field or hill.  Keep things interesting by sloping it.  Change the green slightly by darkening it and add a couple of more layers of fields as you work your way forward.  The darkest layer should be in the front of the painting. 

That’s it!  Anything else you add to your painting is a plus.  One or two distant trees would be neat or maybe just a single bird in the sky, low to the horizon. 

I hope this little lesson helps inspire you to have fun painting landscapes with acrylics.

Getting used to a new operating system is always hard, but there are many little tips and tricks that you can learn along the way to make the transition much easier.

One of the tools available in Windows that I use all the time is the Menu Bar. This is the bar across the top of most program windows that includes items like; File, Edit, View, Tools, Insert, Help, etc. The “Tools” menu is especially helpful when I want to change the settings for a program or window.

Let me give you a quick example:

When I am hunting for a file, it is not always visible with the default windows settings, so I have to be able to view hidden files. To turn these hidden files on, I click on “Tools” in the menu bar, then click on “Folder Options” and then click on the “View” tab in the folder options window. On the View page, I can quickly scroll down and click on “Show hidden files and folders”, then I click the “OK” button to save my changes. Once I have followed these steps, it is much easier to find the file that I am hunting for, especially if it is a hidden system file. Once I have found my file, I can quickly go back and follow the steps above to turn off the hidden files by clicking on “Do not show hidden files or folders”.

In Windows Vista, the menu bar is not visible in most windows. I find the loss of these menu bars very frustrating because I am always changing settings using those menus. If you are reading this article on a computer that is running Microsoft Windows Vista, check it out; click on “Start”, then click on “Documents” you will see the contents of your documents folder, but unless you have turned on the menu bars, you will not see them. I cannot tell you how many times I was stumped by the absence of these menu bars when I first started using Windows Vista computers!

Today, however, I have good news for you! If you are working on a computer that is running Vista, and you need to make a change or two that you know you used to be able to find in the menu bar, you can make the menu bar temporarily visible in Vista just by tapping the “Alt” key on your keyboard!

If you are using Vista, try it now by following these steps;

1. Open a window by clicking on the “Start” orb (new name for the round buttons in Vista and Office 2007″ and then click on “Documents” in the right hand side of the start menu.

2. Your documents window will open. You will notice that there is no menu bar showing though.

3. Now, tap the “Alt” key on your keyboard just once. The menu bar will appear near the top of the window. It will stay visible until you use it, or until you tap the “Alt” key again.

I can’t begin to tell you how much time this little trick has saved me when I am using or working on computers!

At few years ago using Windows’ earlier version was a treat. Ask those who started computers with DOS. Now there are much more choices for users.

Choosing the software you need, is one of the important decisions. Assuming that you have decided to the shop for operating system for your computer, you will need to decide whether you want to use the Mac or a Windows operating system. Both perform similar tasks, though they are different in their appearance and functionality. Many users think Mac OS X is more stable, secure and easier to use than Windows. This debate aside, Windows is compatible to more number of gadgets people need to connect with computers, such as mobile phones, sat-nav systems and portable media players to name just a few.

Those who choose Vista will need to pick the version that suits them best. For consumers, Vista comes in three different forms: Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate. Upgrades from XP are possible. There is only one version of the latest Mac OS X (Leopard), which is bundled with all new Macs. You can also upgrade an older version of OS X to Leopard. If you move from Vista Home Basic through to Ultimate, you will get more features. Like Home Basic does not come with the new aero screen appearance of the Premium and Ultimate versions. Similarly, only Vista Ultimate ships with Windows Bit Locker Drive Encryption to encrypt your private data and Shadow Copy for easy back-up.

MS office is another utility without which most users cannot live. Buying Office packaged with a new computer is cheaper than buying it later off the shelf. By the way, there are many applications (like OpenOffice) that do a similar job to Office — and some of them are online rather than installed on your machine. For email and as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook, users can have the Vista mail program included with all versions of Vista. Free alternatives include Thunderbird or web-based email such as Gmail or Hotmail.

Which operating system are you using?