Welcome to Monet cafe and to my patrons on my patreon page I'm sharing this video in two formats to both groups. I hope you enjoy this very interesting New way to paint with pastel some people may have tried this before but I'd never done it this way before I'm literally using the pastels almost like little watercolor palettes But first let me give you a little tour of my backyard for my subject matter I recently did a video which I will share with you guys on the Fibonacci sequence also called the Golden Ratio and how all of nature permeates this beautiful order sequence and design and when we learn these things it only helps our art get better So please be sure to see that video and now just enjoy this simple little tour in my backyard Well, I talked to you guys a little bit I wanted to make sure I often don't say please subscribe like this video and share comments It really does help my standing with YouTube and also I'm gonna be asking some questions during the video So I hope you guys will answer that's how this channel gets better is because of you You guys have shared with me that you like my recent format of laying my paintings out flat So you guys can see better and see my supplies I will be giving a full supply list in this video So I want you to join in on the fun Monet cafe will get a version That's a little bit shorter. My patrons will get the full version and they will also this is part of their homework assignment So this video has a lot of content, but I think it should be very easy to follow I think I missed my calling as a nature photographer. Has anyone ever done this with a little bloom? These are crepe myrtles in my backyard All right, let's get started Okay, here we go with the supplies you basically need a piece of watercolor paper I have one of these watercolor blocks. It's made by Kansen. It's the arches block and I love this because the edges are already kind of glued around the edges and it keeps the paper from buckling a little But I also like the real textured surface here. Now you could just use any kind of watercolor paper I thought I'd show you my little watercolor Tablet here or pad where I have used it to actually do pastel paintings Yes, you can do pastel paintings on watercolor I did not coat any of these with clear gesso that I often talk about to make a surface for pastel These were literally just done with mostly new pastels made by Prismacolor They're harder pastels and they can work on watercolor just fine So I find this kind of a fun and neat little way to sketch I don't even put any glassine or tracing paper in between them probably would be a good idea to do that But I find if they just you know touch the other paper They still look pretty much like they did when I painted them. Oh, that's my little Oreo in the backyard. I love her. She's my heart So anyway, you can use Watercolor paper with pastels and now in this video I'll share how you can use pastels to paint on watercolor paper So some this is just a charcoal sketch. Some of these things are just really Experimentation and that's what Monet cafe is all about having fun These are just some little color studies I did of a little waterway with some trees and we want to experiment We want to have fun and then often we discover new ways to do things what I am going to share with you today Using pastels like watercolor. I will definitely use again I absolutely had a blast doing this and I want to share as well that you don't have to use watercolor paper if you use Any pastel paper that's water-friendly such as the you art paper I just showed and also pastel matte paper is also water-friendly and the white Surface the pastel matte white works great with regular watercolor So I'm sure it would work great with this technique as well In this lesson I used primarily the Derwent ink tense blocks. These are great for doing under paintings And they are ink tense is the name because they're intense with color And that's one of the reasons that I thought this would be a great type of pastel for using this technique And indeed it was regular soft pastels I haven't really done much of that with this watercolor technique But these are literally almost like a little watercolor palette watercolors and pastels are really the same thing just Combined differently and in a little bit of a different format So I also recommend using Neocolor wax pastels for this technique you can literally pick these up and just paint with them with a brush and And use them like watercolors just like the ink tense blocks So I'll be using a combination of both of these I didn't use any regular soft pastels for this example now You could also do the same thing with new pastels harder new pastels they work Well, they're not quite as intense and bold in color as the ink tense blocks You can kind of tell it from looking at the video those are really bright and bold with color color, and they're a lot of fun And also keep in mind you can use regular watercolor in conjunction with the pastels because they are both made of similar substances they work great together and The goal is just to have fun have some Painting freedom time and don't keep yourself so much in a box that you can't play and now Of course, you're gonna need some brushes. I have a pretty decent set of some brushes that I like But you can use whatever you have I use a lot of cheap brushes as well Now this next little section is patreon only content They got the full version of this and I'm not going to make you guys watch this in real time the whole time So I'm gonna speed this up and just describe kind of what we did in our patreon group We've been working with the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, so I had my patrons for their homework They have homework over the weekends, which is fun homework. It's not like tedious. You want to do it It's fun, and then we share it all together in an album, but I have them go outside explore nature Find some things after watching the Fibonacci golden ratio video that I mentioned earlier it's the video right before this one and After exploring their world to bring some of the outdoors in or take some pictures of things and Literally to paint something that you you saw or you had in your life or in your backyard And then I had them I showed them how to create a graph And make a Fibonacci spiral and I wanted the spiral to be part of the painting the golden ratio it's a way you you draw out the blocks in the same sequence and the same measurements as the Fibonacci code or or sequence and It was a lot of fun, but you don't have to do this for this lesson. Let's just get to the actual painting I just wanted to describe that in case you're like, what is that spiral in the background of the painting? Okay, let's get to painting and we will be using pastels like Watercolor paints and here are some of the other flowers I collected from my backyard and I literally just laid them around my work surface area as Inspiration to paint I didn't work from a reference photo. I worked from real live models my little flowers so you can see how I laid the sunflower over to the right there and Once again, I'm just using a brush with water Just like I would watercolor and using my little intense palette there just like a watercolor palette tray Once again, if I haven't shared this already those little wells work out perfectly.  You'll see me doing that later You can kind of see on that palette where I did it up to the top there now when I start out I like I said I have never done it this way before I started just applying the water Literally like a watercolor palette later You'll see me actually lift the pastel up I kind of angle it so that water doesn't drip down all beside it and And make the pastel kind of get underneath it and everything So it was just more of an efficient way to kind of prop the pastels up as I worked on them It's real easy though. Now. I really love this arches paper. It's a It's a block of Watercolor paper that is literally glued around the edges and it kind of keeps your your surface flat You know how watercolor paper buckles now if you add a lot of water it still will buckle some but it definitely helps and I like that. It's pretty heavily textured.  I mean you definitely want to use enough water That's one thing I've learned is water is your friend with watercolor painting If you don't add too much water, you can get kind of that painterly look where it kind of skips over certain areas and Just keeps that kind of textural grainy look to it. I like that actually I end up kind of covering that up anyway But I was having fun here and that's my encouragement to you with this lesson We're always trying to learn and explore new techniques and if we get so serious about everything It takes the learning away and it takes the fun away, too, you know That's an example with this yellow one how I was a little heavy-handed with the water and I started to see how it was kind of deteriorating the pastel and letting it drip down underneath it So that's why later. You'll see me lift them up like I described, but I'm going to share with you I'm mixing a little bit of that yellow and a little bit of the orange together and I'm using my watercolor palette next to me can barely see it to the Left there. I'm using that before I realized I could use those little wells there in the Derwent thing to actually premix colors in the same ink tense little palette there, so Now I'm going to show you how I approach painting these sunflower petals with the pastels as Watercolor. All right, here we go. I'm gonna zoom in and show you this a little better. What I do is I Come out just kind of thin from the flower and then I press the brush To get a thicker petal. I like to keep a little bit of air in there next to the center part of the flower Because otherwise your flowers end up looking all smushed together and later You can go in and add some of those petals that are behind that when I smushed a little too fast But I I noticed that that one was kind of smushed together when I looked over where the sunflower was laying down So but just keep in mind that sometimes it's good to leave a little space keep a little thin line And I am I'm looking at the sunflower how it's laying down So I'm kind of trying to recreate that one But see how I flatten the brush to get the petals wider. All right, I'm gonna speed this up a little bit now so you can You get the idea Now notice that I get my general Petals in and then after I get all the way around and once again, I'm trying I'm trying to avoid monotony or every see every Petal being the same or the same distance apart So I'm turning them this way and that way but after I get that first Kind of layer in the forefront of petals I go in see how I'm doing that and kind of add little hints of kind of a secondary layer behind it Now I'm just grabbing some the the paper is pretty wet Like I said, don't be afraid to use a decent amount of water when you're using water color Especially if you've got a good watercolor paper because it really does lend towards that painterly effect and Also keep in mind that water color. I mean I'm keep saying watercolor even though I'm working with pastel because it's going to behave Very much like watercolor You're not going to be able to Get the lights back again.  Now. I know that the center is Dark typically the sunflower centers are pretty dark I like the fact that they sometimes have a little bit of red in them Or I find that it looks neat a little red and purple in there with some of the dark and maybe a little hint of orange in there It definitely gives them more interest rather than just making a black center like so many people do So I'm gradually going to just keep working this up. See you can even hold the pastel like I'm doing right now Getting it a little darker. Also keep in mind that water color again We're using pastel like watercolor. It dries lighter typically So it's a balance for sure you want to make sure you don't get too dark too quickly But it also will dry a little lighter than you're thinking so now I do go in and add more of that orange I got that little liner brush. You see how thin that brush is it's a type of brush That's really good for doing little vines or little The veins that are kind of in the flowers, so I added a few of them and I was just playing Okay, this was not even supposed to be anything serious I thought it would be fun to try to recreate the Fibonacci spiral and do a painting over it and Again, it was a great lesson or I hope it's a great lesson for my patrons So and I thought the Monet cafe cafe channel would really love this part Which is about using pastels to paint like watercolor So I'm just giving the flower a little more depth a little more Vibrancy with color and having fun reds of a really fun or a really RNG kind of a red is a fun color to add To sunflowers instead of just the typical yellow and brown, you know, it gives it Just I don't know a little more pizzazz see how I've started to lift my pastels up out of their tray The ones yellow down there. You can see like the third yellow one up I had added so much water that it started kind of getting into mud So that's why I decided to kind of start lifting them up and that really did work Well, and I and I started to be more careful about how much water add now You can see here where I use the little Derwent ink tense box those little wells I use them just like a little watercolor Well that you would use I liked this color Because it's not it's a it's a cooler green and I noticed the sunflower leaves Were they were warm out in the sunshine, but they they weren't just so vibrant green when I brought them inside I really liked that coolness that they had I add a little warmth to it later, but um, but I'm just like I said I'm just playing having fun and Again, I'm kind of using that brush Sometimes I let it purposely skip along that textured surface because it adds that that artistic painterly feel And I kind of I kept playing with this you'll see as the painting progresses I just I didn't want to quit, but there's a point I'll share when I get to it that I'm like man I kind of wish I'd have just left it the single sunflower with the Fibonacci spiral I I'm thinking I still might go ahead and use my I'm gonna show you an interesting little marker when we're done To that works so well with watercolor on watercolor paper You got to watch to the end to see it, okay So there's a little teaser to keep you guys watching it does help my YouTube channel when you guys watch all the way through but anyway, so I Ended up doing more More flowers and more background Here's where I'm using a little bit of a darker almost a brownish green to give the impression of I had this sunflower literally laying down the the stalk of it is going up to the upper Right-hand corner, and this is where I was saying kind of wish I had just kept it like this like it was laying down I end up changing it in a minute to where it actually is more like it's growing on a stalk with other sunflowers So I don't regret any of it because I had a good old time, you know, and you're always learning the more that you do so I'm adding a little bit of variety in color and But again, I like the simplicity of just the Fibonacci spiral with the sunflower But I want you guys to play and Don't get so there's a little bit of warmer green that I'm adding don't get so oh Just hard on yourself. We can't do that. Can't we artist? I'm talking to myself too, you know Because I do it too and don't compare yourself to art other artists learn from them But understand the people that you're probably emulating or recreating their work They've been doing this a whole lot longer than you have so That's where I'm using that little liner brush, you know, some flowers have these little Outer tendrils that come out sometimes from it. So again, here's where I kind of liked the simplicity of it But I decided to use I think this is where I decide to do a little bit of a oh not yet I still do a little bit on the sunflower, but I end up doing a little bit of a purple-y background and And I liked it, but I think I want to do this again and just do the single sunflower So alright guys, you enjoy this. I'm gonna let the process of this keep going. You see what I'm doing now I do end up I've never done this before but I've always heard about watercolor artist using salt to give texture or to give some Interesting effects and I used some salt in the center of my sunflower But here's why I'm gonna start adding the purple. I think yeah But I don't think it was wet enough or it could be because I don't use regular eye dyes I die salt. Is that what it's called like table salt? It's really bad for you right here I'm applying water. You'll see that I I end up adding the purple to it. This is a wet on wet technique It's gonna make it just really really loose. Okay, so I do kind of like the purple. It's kind of nice But um, but anyway table salt is not good for you I won't give you the whole scientific reasoning, but I just I use This salt called pink Himalayan pink salt And it's so much better for you, but I that's all I have So I used it and it didn't give the texture It could have been because I didn't have it wet enough in the center Or it could have been because of what type of salt it was. So as you can see, uh, the purple I really do like the purple as a kind of a complementary color to some of these oranges and yellows that are going on So, um, again, kind of liked this simplicity. Maybe just the flower and a little bit of the purple I kind of liked that. I got a little drip there. You see that so I thought I'm just gonna go with it So I get some of that purple. I take my brush put a little water on it and I just hit the brush on my hand and voila You got a little fun Abstract kind of thing going on it Now this is the sunflower that I decided to kind of use um and just keep playing and going with it I literally just kind of traced around some of the leaves. I thought that might be fun So, uh, I don't stick totally with that composition there of the flower But it was kind of a neat way to do it.  Try this technique with the watercolor I mean with the past I keep saying watercolor because it feels like you're using watercolor um, so Try it with uh soft pastels. Do me a favor. Let me know if you try it. Let me know of your um results And if you're a patron if you're in our patreon group, of course, you're going to share My patrons share in an exclusive group that I have. Oh, I do like that turquoisey the color that I added to All right, maybe I am liking adding more. Um, my patrons have an exclusive patreon group in facebook um And uh, if you become a patron, I share the group and everything with you so you can share your work We also have in the patreon group where I have these albums where my patrons share their work in these albums Not in facebook because some people aren't on facebook and it's so cool because I get to see all of your work together in this neat album And uh, it's really fun and I give you guys points for your homework which leads to a prize Every month i'm giving a prize for art supplies Most likely typically it'll be dickblick a gift card So every patron who participates in the homework assignments gets a chance and the more you participate The higher your chances are of winning the dickblick card each month. So it's just a lot of fun So, you know, obviously my patrons are watching this and they'll be doing their homework, which is cool Now if you're in mone cafe and you're not a patron and it's only five dollars a month to become a patron I really do appreciate those who pay. There's some people who they don't even, you know Participate in a lot of the stuff They just pay to help this channel because I'm I'm bringing art lessons to people everywhere Which is really cool to me So, you know, you can do it just to support this channel or you can do it to kind of participate and have fun with This we're like a neat little art family So but if you're just in mone cafe and your financial means aren't where you can support and or you're just too busy And you don't have time to support You can and you prop many of you already have become members of the mone cafe art group on facebook Because that's the art group. We just hit over 10 000 members One of the biggest pastel art groups in facebook on facebook So and it's loaded with people who will help you We've got artists of every level, but what I love is the fact that it's it hasn't left lost its sweetness Everybody is still so kind Advanced artist will answer your question if you're just beginning. So it's just such a great resource for you guys To grow and learn as an artist now. I am gonna tell you I was going to ask you guys some questions I want to ask you guys now that i'm using pastels like watercolor watercolor is probably my second favorite medium to pastels and You know, I named the channel mone cafe for a reason Because I didn't want to totally isolate myself to only doing pastels And I thought mone cafe was kind of like a neat place You know, it's like a fun free loose impressionistic place. We can get together and learn art I mean, I wish we could all just have coffee and paint together But this is the online way that we do it and I wanted the name To be broad enough to where I could introduce other mediums and mixed media So that leads me to my question Let me know if you like me adding in every so often a little watercolor tutorial I mean, even if I'm using just watercolors rather than mixed media with pastels So, um, are you guys okay with me not just doing pastels and introducing some other things here and there? Let me know in the comments also most likely I I know I'm not going to veer totally away from pastels That's that's my love, you know But um, but I would like to get your feedback if you'd like to you know, mix it up a bit sometimes I think it would be fun. Uh, plus I think exploring other mediums only Increases your Art skills abilities when you learn how different mediums behave you might realize hey I like doing a little mixed media work mixed media only meaning kind of what it sounds you mix different mediums like pastel and Acrylic and watercolor. I like acrylic painting too. So um, so again, let me know Okay, now i'm intensifying this first sunflower because it's going to be the star of the show it's the one that's closest to us and the biggest and um, the other ones I do add a little bit of fun You know color to it, but I the the little one in the middle that's back in the back you as an artist you have the ability to um Create detail where you want it and it's usually a good idea to not make everything so detailed all over the whole painting So, uh, that's why that little guy is kind of subdued and in the background Um, so anyway getting close to done and then I'll share with you a little bit about the markers that I used if you're doing the Fibonacci sequence Combination with this painting. I'll tell you what I used to to accomplish that. I love these markers Well, I just realized it's almost at the marker section. So I'll just keep talking. I did add a little bit of depth With some darker values. Um, this is where I said I kind of made that sunflower with the stock I probably made the stock a little too wide But I I wanted to get a little bit more of the darker values Um, and also to ground it a little bit. You'll see how I add some of A darker value down like where the the roots would be or where those stalks are going down I also didn't really I wasn't liking that background to the upper right because that's when I had had the flower laying down I decided to make it kind of like a sky rather than the leaves I would had made before that's the neat thing you can change things up What I did is I actually after I was done Again with watercolor, you better preserve your light or you can't get it back So because I had already made that sky in the upper right dark, I literally just got some new pastels of a light blue and a A white and I lighten it up.  I'm doing a little bit more of the little splatter technique just having some fun Getting creative on a saturday and it was awesome All right, so here's where I was telling you I reinforced my Fibronacci spiral with these pasca Markers these markers are awesome for using on top of watercolor Now the cool thing is they have white as well as black So I know that was a lot of information in one video But I had a lot of fun with it and I hope you learned something I hope you will try using soft pastels like watercolor. Wasn't that neat if you try it Let me know what you thought become a patron if you'd like and happy painting


This paper reviews the current state of research into biodegradable orthopedic implants made from magnesium calcium, MGCA, alloys. It discusses the microstructure and mechanical properties of these alloys, as well as the manufacturing processes used to produce them. Additionally, the corrosion resistance of MGCA alloys produced using various processing methods is evaluated. Finally, the potential economic and social benefits of developing such implants are discussed. This article was authored by Ubengua and Maysam Salishor.


Welcome back to another Apple's NTR's vlog. So today is going to be a very highly anticipated Pinterest board video. I'm gonna try and keep it very short and sweet, but I know a lot of you did say that you wanted to see kind of like the vibe or like the style or theme that I'm planning on doing in the new house. And so I have sat down and I've kind of just talked through my Pinterest board here for a few minutes and I'm not going to ramble because I don't want to make this video a hundred million years long. But basically, I'm going to walk you guys through my Pinterest board and show you all of the ideas I have for the new house. Alright you guys, so I'm here with my Pinterest board and this is my new house Pinterest board. I have plenty of other ones. If you guys want to follow me on Pinterest, I will put the details of that down in the description below. But this isn't about, but this video is not about Pinterest. This video is all about the theme, motif, vibe of the new house. And so what I'm going to do is just kind of scroll through my new house Pinterest board and just kind of talk through like the vibe and the plan for what I want to do with the new house. Okay, so as you can see as we scroll through here, we have a lot of like country western vibes and that is exactly what I want to go for. My previous house was very country, farmy. I've always been a country girl at heart. I grew up in the country and riding horses and doing all the things. Country music has been a very big part of my life and so the vibe I'm calling the house is country western chic. So we're not going to do things like, you know, deer heads on the walls.  We're not going to do skulls and things like that. But we are going to go for like a country western vibe without going over the top. If that makes sense. Like, I don't want to do like hunter stuff because we just aren't hunters. You know, we're not into that, but we love country music. We love country western movies. And we live in a very rodeo inspired town. And so the Wild West chic rodeo kind of situation is the vibe you're going to see here. We have very like dark wood tones. We have rust brown and oranges. We have gold. We have black. We have white. We have fur. We have vintage. It's just there's a lot going on here, but like when I went to Nashville last March, I absolutely fell in love with the way that everything there was kind of decorated with this like vintage gold glass fur and just like, you know, plants naturalistic. And so what you're going to see here is kind of just a reflection of all the things that I really love. And then I'm going for so I'm just going to scroll through here and just kind of talk about a few things. As you can see, I've got a lot of like, I like the ruffle look for curtains. I love the like brass gold for fixtures. I love like the wooden pearl look with the dark wood and the black. I love this burnt orange like velvet look with black and white for our bedroom. The baby's room is looking or is going to be looking very like Wild West themed. And just as we scroll through here, you're going to see a lot of like a country western vibe without it going over the top. Like it's very much rodeo like buffalo black and like wood tones. So this picture here, this actual image here, if I can get it bigger is the inspirational picture that we're using to plan our actual fireplace in the new house. So we're hoping it will be as close to this as possible. We're not going to have the vaulted ceilings or anything like that, but we do want to make our fireplace look as pretty close to this as possible. I really love these like blacks with the wood tones and the pompous grass and like the vintage glass. We are planning on converting our hutch that we had in our old house into a bar hutch because my husband is a whiskey connoisseur. He loves collecting whiskey. He likes tasting it. He likes, you know, he just loves like that's his thing. He loves it. And so I would like to convert our little hutch into a bar hutch for him. And so you can kind of see those little inspirational pictures here. And then also in the laundry room, I want to do like a very like minimal but useful situation here with like a countertop and all the laundry underneath. You can kind of see in this picture, this is like a great image of the like style I'm going for with like the leather brown, the black, white, maybe some pops of green in there. In the kitchen, we're planning on doing a quartz countertop around the perimeter, but then doing like a dark stained butcher block for the island just to give it some contrast. You can see in the little art pieces I'm looking at or that I've pinned that I really want to go like a western vibe, like a rodeo situation. I love this one. Howdy. I love all the cactus in here and like the different textures with the fur and the pompous grass and the lace and the ruffles. I really like that kind of vibe.  You know what I mean? Like having little pops here and there. I do plan on putting in a vintage door in our pantry. It will be a sliding pocket door, but there is a place here called Fallon's that sells vintage doors. We are planning on putting in in our kitchen a custom range cover hood, I guess is what you would call it with shelving on each side. This was kind of the inspiration image for that just for like having open shelving in the kitchen and not so enclosed. Right now we plan on carpeting our stairs, but in the next couple of years, once the baby is a little bit bigger, I would love to do something like this for the staircase. We do have an apron style sink that we have ordered. And so that will kind of set the tone in the kitchen. And then I love these like brass and glass light fixtures. I think they're beautiful. So you guys can kind of see like what I'm going for. I love the idea of the subway tiles. I know that they've been kind of overdone, but we are going to just ceramic tile our showers. Both the kids bathroom and the master bathroom will have to have ceramic tile inside. We didn't order any bathtubs that have like the plastic or I guess plaster or whatever that's called surround. So we will be ceramic tiling those. But as you can just see through some of these pins, you know, I am going for like a Western vibe without it being like too like country like foresty. I want to like kind of channel like rodeo country music Western movies. I have a rug very similar to this one. And so kind of using the rug as like a main piece and then designing around it. So yeah, I just I really love like I love this for the boys bathroom upstairs, like the guest bath. I just think it's so cute. And I think Western really like goes both ways. It's like, you know, feminine masculine. You can add pieces like the pompous grass to really soften it up. And just adding like an accent wall of paint like painting a wall dark gray or black or adding some wallpaper, or even like a little strip of this like Wayne scotting can really really like up the vibe of your house. I love this light fixture with like the candle look and the wire and the black. The leather is really, really nice. And then we really like this banister idea with the rebar. I think that's so cool. So anyway, I don't want to ramble too much in this video. I just really wanted to show you guys because I've had a lot of people asking like, What are you going to decorate the new house? Like what's the vibe going to be? You know, obviously a lot of what I have now for the old house will totally work for this. Maybe just a different coat of paint or a different couch or a different pillow covering will totally change the vibe. You know, ordering special fixtures for light switches and lighting can really change up the house without going over the top because obviously I'm not going to be able to achieve like everything in these pins. It's just it's my inspiration. So anyway, this is the vibe that I'm going for in the new house and that is just country western chic, I guess is what we're going to call it. Hopefully I can achieve this. It's going to take time for sure. But I'm really excited about it. And yeah. All right, you guys. So that was my new house Pinterest board. I hope that you enjoyed it. I know that my style is probably not going to be anywhere close to your style. But this is just kind of like the vibe that I love, my husband loves and the style that we're going for for the new house. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you would like to see more house decor style videos in the future, go ahead and drop a house emoji down in the comments below. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, follow me on all the socials and I'll see you in the next one. Bye guys.


Welcome to the Longmont Museum. My name is Justin Veitch. I'm the manager of the Museum's Stuart Auditorium and we are coming at you live and direct from the Stuart Auditorium this afternoon via Facebook live. Live Longmont Public Media.org and local Comcast Cable Channel 8 and 880.  We're happy to sort of see you I guess. Thanks for being there. I want to make sure that we recognize the people who make these kinds of programs possible. The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Friends of the Longmont Public Library, the Stuart Family Foundation, many members and donors to the Longmont Museum. Thank you all. We simply couldn't do all that we do without you. So thank you. I'm happy to report that Friday afternoon concerts are back. Yes, after a year it's been a year of not doing these. We have returned although it appears you haven't. So we're hoping that you're out there at home or standing somewhere with your phone staring at the concert in a parking lot somewhere or something. My god you could be just about anywhere watching this. So glad you're here. Tonight you know we're kicking off the Friday afternoon concert series this afternoon and we'll be doing this the first Friday of the month for the next three months. So February 5th, March 5th and April, oh I think it's April 2nd or something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong out there in Facebook land. You can always visit our website for more information. www.longmontmuseum.org and while you're there you might want to check out and see what else we've got going on. We've got quite a bit happening. We have an incredible impressionism show up right now. It's going to be up through July. It's proving very popular. We can't accommodate too many people in the building however due to COVID. So we recommend purchasing your ticket in advance online via our website. You want to check that out. Anyway without further ado this afternoon we are delighted to have a pair of distinguished musicians from Colorado. Christina, oh boy. I need a glass of water don't I? Christina Jennings of course and Matthew Dane and this is actually a makeup sort of a half makeup concert. Matt was going to join us for a concert back in the spring which we had to cancel and you know why we had to do that. So tonight this afternoon I mean we have Christina and Matt with us. Christina is the flute teacher at CU Boulder and a nationally recognized soloist. Matthew is principal violist with the Colorado Opera and frequent performer of chamber music along the front range. COVID has provided these two with ample opportunity to perform together a lot. They've been making a lot of lemonade in other words and it helps that they are married and live under the same roof. So as an example of everything they've accomplished in the last going on a year they're here with us this afternoon to provide us with a musical interlude amidst all this. Ladies and gentlemen, Matthew Dane and Christina Jennings. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here as classical musicians. There is nothing that brings us more joy than being able to play music and in a beautiful space like this with an actual acoustic with dressed up clothes and here we are for a program a short program that really amplifies diverse voices and gives you the whole range of emotions that one can experience and through the through the instruments of the flute and the viola. Thank you so much for being here and Matt will tell us a little bit about the first piece. Jonah Sarota is a good friend of ours, excellent violist and a colleague in the summer. Jonah wrote this piece for us last summer and we're just delighted to be able to play it for you today. I'm actually playing viola demore on this as you can see it's a without getting too long. It's a 14 string Baroque instrument. I play the top seven strings and the seven below resonate for a unique sound. Jonah was very excited to and he was game to give it a try to write for it. He was inspired by quantum mechanics to write this piece. You might think that entanglement might sound a little negative but I think in the quantum mechanic world it's a positive thing. So we basically start apart and eventually find each other and grow together. Hope you enjoy. Next I will share with you a solo flute piece called Homeland by Allison Hogan's Lull and this is a piece that was in convergence of three disasters in the summer of 2018. Hurricane Maria, the civil war in Syria and the US political arrest. Allison Lulgan's Hall says when you are forced to leave your country in order to survive, when the people of your country are completely divided. When your country has been destroyed by a natural disaster, a human disaster is home still home. The next piece I'll be playing is by the Baroque composer Christian Petzold. Petzold was a he is not a household name now however he was he was a contemporary of Bach and Vivaldi and in fact knew them both. This piece was written it does it doesn't come to us in a manuscript form it's a it was written down by a friend of his. There's a lot of flexibility in how we play it so I it's in multi movements as are the Bach suites. However what you'll notice is these are much these are sort of like a little character sketches compared to Bach suite movements so the whole thing is about maybe 11-12 minutes and I hope you enjoy it. The next two solo pieces are pieces that my students were working on this past fall and I was inspired to learn them by the beauty of the compositions and the way the students played them. They're both joyful the Telemann 11th fantasy in G majors in three short parts and the next piece I'm honored to play is Annika Sokolowski's Bulgarius composed in 2012. Annika is my new beloved colleague at CU Boulder we are so lucky to have her and she's written a lot for flutes so it's a name you'll be hearing if you if you follow me. She says Bulgarius was inspired by the breathy timbre of the Bulgarian cabal and the complex meter of Bulgarian folk music. Bulgarius is a virtuosic dance for solo flutes. All material for this piece is original save a couple of bars that were inspired but that inspired the composition.  The next piece we'll be playing I'll introduce and then Christina will introduce the last one. This piece by Irina Esmail also a friend of ours she wrote this piece in 2017 originally for flute and cello it's titled Nadia which means river in Hindi. I think to me what that means in this piece from the experience of working on it is that we have a couple there are a couple of different ragas that she that she uses and I and basically the you'll hear the two of us kind of you can imagine us being just parts of the stream flowing down sometimes together sometimes apart and complimentary not always necessarily sounding like we're playing exactly together drifting in and out of of synchronicity hope you enjoy. And then we'll conclude with a duo by Dev Yen which is perhaps the piece that we've played the most I think we was probably the first piece of music that we ever played when we met in 1996 and it's traveled through us and through the years and here we are in 2021 closing our program with it thank you all so much for being here it's a pleasure to play. I hope you'll please join me in thanking Matthew Dane and Christina Jennings for spending this lovely afternoon with us it was a really gorgeous concert and it's funny what happens with a little bit of captivity and isolation huh a little bit of captivity a lot of captivity and isolation goes a long way absolutely gorgeous thank you so much I hope you'll join us again sometime beautiful afternoon please join us in a month on March 5th for an afternoon of jazz with the Heath Walton band and then again on Friday April 2nd at 2 30 with espresso and a little more jazz this time gypsy jazz and some swing thank you for joining us and be well out there


Choose different music and spice up your storytelling. Did you notice I have three different music tracks for this video?  Don't forget sound effects are so important. Drag the music and sound effect to the part that you want more sound elements. Here's the result.


Why do men act interested but they can't seem to commit? This is a question I keep pondering over and over and over again. And I think it's because of dating. That's right, dating. Now, give me a minute to explain this in a little more detail. But what I mean to say is dating is no long, dating today rarely has a purpose behind it because when men, and this is looking back in history, when men were in their 20s and 30s and they were single, they oftentimes wanted a wife, they wanted the mother of their children, they wanted to start a family with someone. So there was a definitive purpose in the process of getting to know someone and they wouldn't waste time with someone that wasn't a fit for them because they were driven by this purpose. So now let's fast forward a bit and we'll think about men over 40, men and women over 40. The vast majority of people over 40 are divorced. And most of those divorced people have children. So that drive to start a family with someone, that drive to build a life, to have the Christmases together and be grow old and having the grandchildren come over is no longer in the blueprint. And I think one of the challenges for men in particular that there's no real blueprint of what a relationship should look like in midlife. There's no real understanding. So what's happened is I said earlier, dating and what is dating? The purpose of dating should be to decide if you want to be in relationship with someone, but more importantly, if you want to eventually get married to this person, I think that should be the purpose of dating. The challenge is today, the purpose of dating is purely about entertaining one another being each other's company in some cases being each other's therapist. I think for those in midlife, I see a significant amount of relationships where they're actually therapists to one another. And I'm guilty of doing this myself, quite frankly, it kind of innately built into my profession of being a professional listener and talker. So I'm guilty of this. And what I mean to say is relationships today lack a sense of purpose. So here's what happens. A man can genuinely care for you. He might be attached to you, but the same time, is he actually in love with you? I think when a person lacks a sense of relationship purpose. So let me, I wanna dive into this relationship purpose for a moment, because this is critically important. Relationship purpose, I want you to think about this ladies, men who lack direction in their life, they don't have a purpose. They're oftentimes the least attractive of men because if a man doesn't have a purpose, he can't really be the leader in a relationship. Not that men should be the leader, but he can't necessarily direct or be a co-participant because his life needs a sense of purpose. And quite frankly, ladies, you need a sense of purpose. Now the old sense of purpose was the man was the provider protector and the woman was the homemaker. They each had a role. There was a mutual exchange going on. Now for those of us in midlife, where many of us both are struggling financially to take care of ourselves. I want you to think about this for a moment. Roughly 80% of Americans, those here in the United States obviously I'm saying, are, I don't have enough savings to really cover them should there be a financial disaster in their life. Why I'm bringing this up is, it's hard to support yourself, right? One of the benefits of being coupled is you can share expenses with one another. So you're struggling to take care of yourself and he's struggling. And what I mean by struggling is, I don't mean that the water is up to here and you're constantly doing this, but it's like here, okay, the water, okay? You're not, you know, when you can literally stand on ground and don't feel like you need money to support yourself, it's a lot easier than those that are in the water trying to make a living. Okay, now, why it's important to understand this if you're both in this, I need to work mode to support myself. And there's no benefit. You're not commingling funds to support, you know, to support the we. Oftentimes the relationship has a purpose to it and their mode, because two people are in their mode of their own taking care of themselves. They really haven't co-created this we relationship with a sense of purpose because relationships that have purpose oftentimes have a stronger direction. Now you might be thinking, well, what purpose is there, Jonathan? Well, I think the main purpose of a co-creative, let's just call it a spiritual relationship is to help each other heal childhood wounds and traumas, help each other get past your individual triggers, go through the experience of sometimes butting head so you can get through it. And to become more of a, what's called a self-actualized person, a more evolved person, a more awakened person, whatever term fits your boat, I think that's the real purpose of a relationship. A relationship can wake us up and some relationships don't go the distance because of this and that's okay too. Now, one thing I've contemplated recently for myself and I really coming back to this marriage or coming back to this piece of what, the dating is the problem. See, dating today oftentimes leads to just a following few things. It leads to either just hooking up. So a lot of people are dating just for hooking up purposes. Sometimes one person is the hooking up purpose and the other person has a desire to get married, but there's a lot of convoluted stuff going on in between. The other aspect is many people are finding themselves in what's called a situation shift. They're spending time together, they're having sex together, but there's no real direction or they even find themselves in casual relationships. Which means again, you're spending time together, you're enjoying each other's company, maybe not enjoying each other's company, you're connecting, you're having sex, but there lacks a real purpose behind it. You see, when a person is intentional about commitment, they're really intentional. And I learned something in my most recent experience is that when I really decided I wanted to be a husband, when I stopped thinking about, I think for the longest time I was, well, first off, after my divorce, the last thing I wanted to do was get married. I mean, like so many people, okay? And a lot of you feel this way, I don't wanna get married again. And then for a while I was looking for, when I decided I wanted to get married again, I was looking for a wife. And what that means was, or what that meant to me was, I wanted someone who would make me feel happy. I wanted someone who would make me feel happy. In other words, she would do all these, when I was looking for a wife, I was looking for someone to do all these things to make me happy. And I realized that I was almost dependent on someone else for my happiness. I wasn't really in a state of happiness and joy. I learned to enjoy my own company. I was okay with my own company. Not, let me reframe that. I was okay with my own company. I don't know if I necessarily enjoyed my own company.  And what I learned in this experience is that it's not about being, you know, looking for a wife. It's actually, could I be a husband to someone? Could I be a true partner? Do I want to be a partner to someone? In other words, can I come from a place of giving? Okay. And can I meet someone who also comes from a place of giving? So if they're giving, I have to be able to receive. And if I'm giving, they have to be able to receive. And this is where a lot of angst happens in the relationship dynamic. So I think the problem today is dating is that if most people aren't dating with a purpose, a sense of intentionality. And this made me really think about how we choose people in our lives because I think for the most part most humans have a broken picker. They don't know how to pick a good partner in their life. Those at least that have options. In other words, they get enough emails in their inbox, you know, from dating sites and they get, for women if you're getting asked out, if you're at least have, it's on a scale from one to 10, if it's, if you're capable of a six, seven, eight or nine, in other words, you're getting attention from men that are interested in you, then it's all about picking. And the same goes for men as well. The problem is, and I've been really contemplating a question that came up in my most recent live stream was most everybody starts off dating as kind of they're on their best behavior. Okay. As Chris Rock calls it, the ambassador of their best selves. Okay. And I've been thinking a lot about this best behavior. So how can you get, how can you quickly determine someone's emotional IQ, if you will, emotional intelligence, emotional maturity. And one of the women in a recent live stream brought up a question that she was asked on a first date and she was rather put off by it. But, and I really thought about this, I think it actually has some validity to it. And the question was by a man to the woman, he asked who filed for divorce? He asked this on a first date. And she thought that was way too deep of a question to ask on a first date. Okay. And I can see how someone feels that way and they may not want to give the details of what happened. Okay. But I want you to think about this for a question or for a moment, excuse me. Let's say you asked a man the same question on a first date. You're having nice chit chat. You're just like, hey, I'm really kind of curious. You know, you were, you said you were married for 12 years or you were married for 20 years. You know, who actually filed for divorce between the two of you? Now, 70 to 80% of the time it's women. Okay. So most likely he will say my wife filed for divorce. Now, if he, no, that's all you asked was, but if he starts to go into the details of what happened, I want you to really pay attention to what might happen because most of the time people do this after a divorce. It was his fault. It was her fault. They do this, okay? They point the finger at the other person. This particular deep question, and I'm gonna say deep question, you know, the fact that she thought it was inappropriate means that there's some, there, it's, you know, at most people like to date on the surface level and this is going below the surface, right? If, and these are, you know, it could be a challenging question too. There's some depth to it. Who filed for divorce first? And if he starts to say something like my ex-wife filed for divorce and he begins to throw her under the bus, you know what, she didn't, you know, she was a difficult person.  She was, she wasn't a good mother.   But if he begins to throw under the bus, pay clear attention to the tone that he's describing. This woman who is most likely the mother of his children, but Tony's describing about her. This can reveal toxicity. This can reveal narcissism or this can reveal woundedness. In most cases, when someone starts talking about their previous relationships, it oftentimes reveals woundedness, okay? When a person enters into the process of dating and exploring a relationship with someone, if they are deeply wounded and they've done no work healing, okay? This will be a problematic condition in this dynamic the two of you are engaged in. So he can act interested. He can be, you know, he can find you attractive. He may physically want to be with you. However, this woundedness is going to preclude him from actually committing down the road. And in addition, if he doesn't have a clear idea of what he wants down the road, and more importantly, if he's not in a position to be a quote unquote partner or husband to someone, you might find yourself, you know, in a position where am I willing to accept? Should I accept this person for where they're at in their life at my own potential expense? See, many of you want to figure this. You're trying to avoid getting hurt, right? And I don't like the idea of avoiding getting hurt. What I invite you all to do is to be more of a detective because you have your own emotional well-being at stake. And because we've so adopted attraction chemistry as the driver for a relationship success without, you know, really understand, do we share the same values? Are our lifestyles compatible with one another and more importantly, is this person emotionally mature enough? Do they have the skills to actually be in a fully committed relationship? This is why I am such an advocate for radical honesty, laying your cards on the table and the rules of engagement sooner rather than later. And I think the drive, particularly for men, the drive to be physically intimate with someone outweighs their consciousness of, are they capable of actually being in a relationship with someone? Have they healed from their wounds and do they actually want to be a partner with someone? And now that I have this awareness about, I, you know, and I invite you all to look at it from your own vantage point too.  What I'm really saying is, do you want to be a partner to someone else? Does the relationship have a partnership purpose associated to it? Whatever that looks like, I know a couple who are in their 60s, they met and they fully integrated into each other's lives. They each have grandchildren, they have children that they support in each other's lives and they fully integrated into each other's lives as partners. That is their purpose because they fully integrated each life into this and now their purpose is partnership for this unity. Now, this is challenging for many of us in midlife because a significant percentage, let's just say those early divorced people, those that get divorced in their 40s, oftentimes have young children. Okay. And in many cases, men don't want to be the financial support to someone else's children. I mean, I'm not saying it's always the case, but that's the case and they have their own children to raise. Now, some of those couples get into, integrate into each other's lives and they develop partnership from that position. But a lot of men don't want, I'm just being blunt here, they may not have the resources or they don't want the responsibility to be a caretaker to your children. And that's a critically important question to uncover right ladies, before you have physical intimacy with someone, I would really have deeper conversations about that. I once dated a woman who this is some years back who had a 13 and 15 year old and my children are grown. And I was like wrestling. I mean, I liked, I was attracted to, I wanted to have sex with her and we did have sex, but I really didn't want to be the support person to our children. I mean, I wanted to do it from the peripheral if I'm being honest with myself, you know? And a lot of times we think of it from the peripheral but when you get down to the nitty gritty, when someone has young children, they are responsible for these children not up until 18 years old, but really up until 25 to 30 years old, you feel a responsibility for your children. Okay, that's those in their forties category. For those in their fifties and sixties that have probably have kids out of the house, the true purpose of the relationship is finding a way to integrate into each other's lives. And this is where so many people fall short. And this is why I continually recommend a series of books. By the way, there's links below to get a copy of all the books I recommend, but I really want to invite you to all, I talk about this book incessantly. It's eight dates by Drs. John and Julie Gottman. These are the critical conversations to have in those early stages because dating is a vetting process to decide if you want to explore a deeper committed relationship. And yet the vast majority of people today date for hooking up situationships and casual relationships. So why do they act interested? And should you accept this? I think what you should do, or this is maybe not, I would encourage you to do is really get crystal clear on who's really compatible with you, get crystal clear on your values, your lifestyle and your own emotional maturity and ask those deeper questions very early on to determine real compatibility because in those uncovering questions, you can determine a lot of wounded people that are probably not capable of going the distance.  Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. I'd like to hear your thoughts. Post a comment below. Also for those in my group, please tell your friends about Midlife Love Mastery, send them to my website, Jonathanasley.com. Have them click the group coaching button so they can join our fantastic group or they can check out and you can send them the link below to Midlife Love Mastery. And if you need some additional support, hey, schedule a discovery call with me, follow me on Instagram, check out all the books I recommend. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone a pet, Teddy Barrah pillow. Give it or them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.


How this 19-year-old African boy became the world's youngest president by mistake. On April 26, 1967, Valentine Esagraebo Melvine-Stressor was born. He was a former military officer who served as president of Sierra Leone from 1992 to 1996. After previously serving as a junior military commander, he became the world's youngest head of state in 1992. Three days after his 25th birthday, he was the leader of a gang of six young Sierra Leonean soldiers who overthrew President Joseph Sedumamo in the 1992 Sierra Leonean coup. They established a military junta, the National Provisional Ruling Council NPRC. After nearly four years in office, Strasser was deposed in a second military coup led by his deputy Brigadier General Julius Modibio in January 1996. Strasser is one of only two Sierra Leonean heads of state who were born after the country's independence. He is also Sierra Leone's second Creole to be elected president. Strasser was born to Creole parents in the Allentown neighborhood of Freetown Sierra Leone's capital. He enlisted in the Republic of Sierra Leone military forces, RSLMF, at the age of 18 after graduating from secondary school. Thank you for joining us on Africa Reloaded. Today, we will delve into the life of Valentine Esagradbo Melvine Strasser, the world's youngest Sierra Leonean president. Take a seat and relax as we make this unexpected discovery. Valentine Esagradbo's early life Valentine Esagradbo is a musician from Nigeria. Melvine Strasser was born on April 26, 1967 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Creole parents. At the time of Strasser's birth, Sir Albert Margai was the prime minister of Sierra Leone, which was governed by a parliamentary government. Strasser grew up in Freetown's extreme east ends Allentown neighborhood. Strasser completed his secondary education at the Sierra Leone Grammar School in Freetown in 1985 at the age of 18. During his secondary school years, Strasser excelled in math and chemistry. His military career, after graduating from secondary school in 1985, he enlisted in the Republic of Sierra Leone military forces at the age of 18 and was assigned to the Bingma Military Training Academy in Bingma, a town just outside of Freetown, for military training as a cadet officer. After completing his training, he was commissioned into the Sierra Leone Army at the age of 19. He was assigned to a military barracks in Daru, Kailahan District, eastern Sierra Leone. The Revolutionary United Front, rough, led by Fade Senko, launched their first attack in Kailahan District's Beudew Villages on March 25, 1991. Strasser and other troops were brought there from a military base in Kailahan. Valentine Strasser fought in Sierra Leone against the Liberian invasion, primarily in the east and south, before President Mammo was deposed by his successor. In his fight, Strasser had to deal with domestic rebels, also known as sobles. President Mammo's reign was brief because he refused to listen to Sierra Leoneans at the time, who desired a more cooperative political system and believed Mammo delivered no more than his predecessor. The 1992 coup and head of state of Sierra Leone. During Strasser's time fighting the RUF in Kailahan District, the Sierra Leone government, and by President Joseph Ceddo Mammo, lacked adequate boots and military equipment to help Strasser and his fellow soldiers in the conflict. The soldiers were never paid on time, and their well-being was far down the government's priority list. Despite several appeals, warnings, and threats, the young soldiers decided to march down from Kailahan to the state house in Freetown on April 29, 1992, in protest of their setbacks in pursuing the war and demanding their outstanding salaries. Strasser led the squad of soldiers, along with his two best friends and fellow soldiers, Surgeon Solomon Nusa and Captain Sar Sandy. As military appeared in the capital city, President Mammo was forced to flee the country and went into exile in Kanakri, Guinea. Strasser and his troops seized control, establishing the National People's Revolutionary Committee, with Strasser as its commander and the country's head of state. Strasser became the world's youngest head of state at the age of 25. The 1996 coup d'état Strasser was deposed in a military coup in January 1996, after nearly four years in power, but this time by members of his own NPRC, who were unhappy with his handling of the peace process. Brigadier General Julius Montabayo, his deputy Colonel Tom Numa and Captain Comba Monde were in charge of the coup. With the help of Numa and Monde, Bio rose quickly to become the coup's leader and was elected president of Sierra Leone. Post-head of state After his overthrow, Strasser was offered a UN fellowship to study law at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, but he dropped out after 18 months. Strasser's asylum application was denied in England in 2000, so he fled to Gambia, only to be denied entry. He eventually returned to Sierra Leone, where he lived in poverty on a meager pension in Grafton, east of Freetown, and taught computer skills to teenagers at the ICT Institute. In January 2019, he became critically ill and was flown to Ghana for treatment. His left leg was partially amputated due to peripheral artery disease. After undergoing rehabilitation and receiving an apartment from President Bio, he returned to Sierra Leone in July 2021. Later, and Madhu Makalokweda of the opposition, all people's Congress claimed that the government had placed Strasser under house arrest. If you enjoyed the discovery, stay connected to our channel by clicking on the notification button for more upcoming videos. Please do not forget to like, share, and comment on this video.


Hi everyone and welcome back, it's Vicky here and today we are going to create a really colorful and fun art journal as you can see here, but first we are going to take a close-up look on a new art journal collection by Art by Marlene, now before I start I need to let you all know that this is not a sponsored video, I wasn't paid to do this, Marlene is a friend of mine however and she sent me the whole collection, so you will take a close-up look on all the products in this video and hopefully you will decide which art must have for you, you will find links to everything down below in the description area, so first let's start with a new art journal book, this is quite big, for my European friends this is an A4 journal and for the US friends it is about a letter-sized journal, the cover is a faux leather, it is quite thick but flexible and as you can see it has an airing binding system which is going to allow you to take out any page you like to work with and it also comes with a zip lock bag as you can see here where you can place inside your stencils, your collage papers, little elements that probably you want to use on your pages and so on, now the airing binding system gives you the freedom of working on a page outside of this book so you can place it on your stamping platform to get a good stamping impression, you can of course use it with so many different techniques such as on your jelly plate there are actually 50 different pages in this book which are a lot and it is watercolor paper, it's not very thick but it is designed to work with lots of water on top of it, of course with acrylic paints, with your rings, anything you really like and you will find that just because it is of this great quality is going to stay flat and of course there is a lovely elastic band on the outside to put everything together, now let's take a close-up look on some of the stamps so these are four stamps from the same range as you can see they are quite big they are about four inches in diameter, you can use them for your backgrounds but of course you can use them as your focal points, I am going to take one of those out of the packet so you can see how big it is the grit on my mat is actually inches and I am actually going to use one of those stamps as a background element on the page that I will be creating in a bit and I have to say that this flower is just gorgeous, probably my favorite from all four of these stamps, however I will be using the one on the left on your screen here in the page that I will be creating later on, now let's take a close-up look on some of the background stamps, these are big they are about five and a half by five and a half inches which means that they are easy to use to cover up your backgrounds no matter how big of a page you are working on, now there is the one with the circles this is one with the scribbles and again you will find links to everything I'm showing you down below if you like something and I will make sure to leave links to both UK and US shops so you can easily find everything this one with a geometric design and the last one is the one with the leaves which is slightly smaller than the rest of them you can always use parts of them only on the edges to create lovely borders so many different ways to use those now let's move on to something really unique yeah I'm sure you will love those these are the chubby cheeks there are four stamps of them and I'm sure you will find all four of these ladies adorable they have that quick design of Marlene this one is has her hands up which means that you can play around a lot with that you can give her things to hold and of course you don't have to use her as she is with her swimming suit you can dress her up if you like give her clothes with beautiful pattern papers and collage there are four of these ladies and this one is wearing a dress and she is also holding a bunch of flowers he has her hair up but again if you just buy one of those ladies only one be creative you can use her in so many different ways you can dress her up with a longer skirt you can turn her hair by coloring without your acrylic markers into long hair now this one is swimming and this is a great idea that if you buy one of the other ladies remember you can do that as well just chop her off and put her inside the water so many different ways to use those and here is the last one of the four ladies this is actually the one that I will be using today on my Argerna I love her hair and I love the fact that she has wings and again you can be creative with this lady as well you can place here inside water you can make her fly along your page and at the back you can see all four of these ladies all colored so you can get inspired and now let's move on to something else now Maril has come up with two blocks of collage papers there are ten different designs in each one of those blocks all colorful all beautiful and you get two of those designs in each block now I'm going to browse through all of them so you can see all the designs the paper is very thin which means that it is great to stick on top of your Argenal pages with mat medium I will be using actually this beautiful background paper for my page today now of course remember that you don't have to use the collage paper as it is just cut out elements from the papers that you like most and put everything together on your page now this is a black and white one you can color it with your favorite colors and turn it your own and this is a great example on how you can use these stamps just place them all together for a beautiful background here's another colorful one and again you can cut out just the flower and place it as a focal point on one of your pages so many different ideas this is a lovely one for underwater scenes just beautiful I think I will be using this next another black and white one that you can color with your favorite colors another beautiful colorful background these are great for beginners also because you can just stick one of those down and you have already something on your paper and this collage paper gives you another inspiration on how you can use these beautiful flower stamps just stamp them all over the place and color them with beautiful bright colors to get the similar look and here is the last one of the designs again you can just cut out the leaves and use them as your focal points on your paper you don't have to use them as they are just think more creative with those collage papers and here's the second block now again you get two designs from each and I'm just going to browse it quickly for you so you can see all the ten designs close up and to tell you the truth these look as really finished beautiful original pages without you having to do anything on top of them so that was a close-up on all the designs and you will see later how I'm going to use one of those collage papers now let's move on to some fun products these are actually elements that you can pop out of these pages and stick them on your layouts these are called die-cut blocks and again you will find those quirky lovely designs by Marlene and you get flowers wings little shapes ladies when you pop out all of these elements they have a white border around them but you can always use them as they are or you can use your scissors to cut out the white border if you want to incorporate them on your page better I am going to do both techniques on the page later today so you will see how I put everything together you can see that you get faces glasses eyes trees birds so many different designs here they have there are actually two different books with these elements and each one of those books has 20 different pages in it which means that you will end up having tons of these elements to use on your pages again these are great for beginners because you can just use elements from here and there and collage them on your pages to create beautiful designs in minutes and also notice that you get quotes for your pages as well and these were all the products that came in my box lots of fun so now I'm going to put some of them together just to inspire you and show you how I can create something unique now I'm going to start with a collage paper and one of my favorites is this one so I'm going to use my mat medium and stick it on top of my page by the way I'm not using the art by Marlene journal to work with just because I'm trying to finish an 8x8 art journal now so I decided to go with that I applied a thin coat of mat medium on my page then stuck my tissue paper on top and then I'm going to completely cover it up with mat medium just to make sure that everything is nice and stuck there now I'm also going to use my scissors when everything is dry to chop off the excess now I'm going to use the punch to put back those holes on my page since this is actually a page from my disc bound journal and you see I ended up having a beautiful background in no time now I'm going to do some stamping I will use one of the chubby chick ladies and I'm going to stamp here on mixed media paper I'm using my stamping platform to get a great impression and as you can see I will not bother to stamp her all together for what I have in my mind I just want to use the top part of her and just because I am planning to use my watercolors to add color I will stamp everything with my black archive valing which turns permanent and it's not going to smudge for coloring here I'm going to use my watercolor pens just in colors that match pretty much the colors of the background and just because I have there a look and feel of watercoloring I want to keep this look so everything looks nice and consistent on my finished page the pens that I'm using are actually the aquaflow pens by Novo by tonic studios they have a real brush and they are really easy to work with these are actually watercolor pens but of course you can use your favorite coloring medium to color in your chubby cheeks after coloring here I am going to use my scissors to fuzzy cut her so I can pop her on my page now I'm going to put on some music so you can see how I colored her and I will cut you back when everything is ready okay now I have my lady done she's ready and colored now I'm going to use one of those big stamps and I'm going to stamp with black ink on top of my page so for getting a good impression I am using again my stamping platform and I'm going to stamp with black archival ink and the idea behind of what I'm doing is that I want to have this chubby cheek lady to pick the focal point on my page and I'm trying to create a little window there where I can pop her in now I'm going to use my craft knife to create an opening there and then with my scissors I'm going to go all around and create a little window I don't want this to be perfect nothing in this page is perfect it is it has that watercolor vibe to it and I deliberately didn't color my girl to be super perfect as well with all those perfect shadows and such so everything pretty much is goes nicely together so I didn't use my die to cut it out completely and perfectly so I don't have the perfect circle there just like the rest of my stamp now I'm going to use a black marker I'm going to go all around that circle that opening just to get rid of that white edge now my girl is supposed to go inside that window and coming out from it and I want to find a contrasting background for her so I will go with that yellow tulip there which I think goes nicely there and you can see how I mix and match different tissue papers and you don't really need to use the whole paper as it is just cut out parts of it and make them your own be creative so all I'm going to do is to just cut out a piece of that I'm going to stick it on top of my back there this is just a circle that I have cut out which is larger than the opening on my actual page so it is going to cover up the back and it's going to look nice and sturdy and also notice that I can stick this tissue paper with white glue this is nouveau del luxe and it works great and of course you can use your mat medium as I did on the main page so lots of ways to work with this tissue paper now I'm going to place this at the back and I don't know if you noticed but the glue is all the way at the outside of my backing so I will be able to still nest inside this little lady without any problems at the bottom of my lady I have glue but at the top I have some foam squares which is going to help her pop on my page so I get a little bit of dimension and I'm going to curl up her wings it is really difficult to catch the dimension that I have on my page right now but it looks awesome in real life and I just love all the colorful background now I'm going to use the same stamp again I'm going to stamp out two more times around my paper and notice that this time I'm not using my stamping platform because I really don't care for the perfect impression these are not going to be my focal points and now I am browsing through my die-cut blocks and I'm just picking out different elements mainly little circles since I do have kind of a circle theme on my page right now so I'm going to take out some of them I'm not going to use all of them though on my page just need to have a bunch on hand to work with and I have also took out a little heart and a crown which I am going to collage later on on my chubby chick lady now before I stick all those little elements down the die-cuts I mean I'm going to use my acrylic markers and I'm going to do some coloring on my stamped images I am using my deco markers by Pebio I like those because they are acrylic markers and they are opaque which means that they are going to cover up completely the underneath color and the color that I am adding now is going to pop at the same time this is going to cover up the black line so you need to be quite careful I am working with a 1.2 nib here but these markers come in all different sizes of nibs that you might want to now my kids are on a school break since it's summer and leaving in Greece means that we are heading at the beach later today but for now I did have to finish off this voiceover and hopefully they are not very distracting as they play at the background and again notice that I'm not being very neat I just move quickly I don't care if I go outside of the lines or if I don't cover completely an area there with my marker just keep everything look loose so that everything binds together with a beautiful loose background the exact colors of the markers that I'm using are pollen which is the yellow one the bright green and Caribbean blue but you will find links down below to everything I'm using as well as the exact colors of these markers I'm also using a white postcard marker here and there which is going to brighten up my page now I'm going to do some shading for that I'm using the marine scribble stick from the second set of the scribble sticks this is a product by Ranger and these are actually water soluble pigments so I'm going around my stamped image with this stick and then with a wet brush I'm going to dilute it a little bit which is going to create a lovely soft shadow and it's going to help this stamped image pop against my background and I will repeat the same process for the other two stamped images and now it's time to play with my cutouts now as you can see the cutouts come with a white border but you can also use your scissors to cut out the border just like I did with this heart and I'm also going to do that with the crown I'm going to fuzzy cut it making sure that I don't have any white border so just because my lady doesn't have a white border I want to incorporate those elements and everything is going to blend nicely together if they don't have a white border however you will see that later on as I'm going to play with all those little circles I'm going to spread them out and try to decide where everything is going to go but this time I'm not going to cut out the white border actually this white border works great for me since it's going to help all those elements stand out against the background so you can mix and match the looks and just to go quickly with this process I'm just using my white glue at the back but of course you can use your matte medium your glue sticks everything works here now I'm going to call this a layout finished and all I'm going to do is to stick a quote I always like to add quote motivational ones on my original pages so again I'm going with one from the quote chips by team Holtz that says choose to shine now I'm going to use a fan brush this is Jesho diluted with water and I'm going to add my white splashes that I cannot stay away from and then I'm going to call this page done so this is the page for today I hope you had fun as we went through the whole collection of my friend Marlene and hopefully I have inspired you on how you can put all these wonderful products together to create beautiful layouts here are some close-up photos on today's layout thank you all so much for joining me today and have a lovely day


Across the video game industry, we've been seeing a number of layoffs, really dating all the way back to the COVID days, but especially since then as the market re-corrects itself and people are not staying at home as often and back to their full-time positions, working in office or working, you know, various different positions, people just don't have the same amount of free time. Even those that still work at home might be working more now than maybe they were back then. Reality is that the video game industry has been in a bit of a decline. Now it's not only just because of a declining market a little bit or at least a shifting market, it also has to do with, let's just be honest, a lot of overspending by a lot of these companies inflating AAA game budgets to insane places. Now for the most part, we haven't really talked about that at this channel because it hasn't necessarily impacted things directly with Nintendo, but a story is broke today and Nintendo has commented on it, admitting that there are some changes happening at Nintendo pretty much leading into Switch 2. These changes are happening currently, they're happening right now and obviously they impact a little bit of what Nintendo is planning or at least restructuring the company in some sort of way leading into this new system. Now it's going to obviously sound bad and for anyone who's losing their job today or has been informed they're going to be losing their job, I do feel for you, but I also want to note that not all of the news is necessarily bad and actually is a bit of a spin of a positive on an older Nintendo story. So we're going to go over and head to Kotaku who has the news on this and look they have the comments from Nintendo as well. So we see here that a big shake up at Nintendo testing center ahead of Nintendo Switch 2 just posted 48 minutes ago. When you come out here it says Nintendo of America is restructuring the small army of contractors that helps test its games and hardware at its Washington state headquarters. That's right this is their big QA group they have at Nintendo of America. Really it does most of the testing for their games. Anyways the result is a massive downsizing that comes amid layoffs across the rest of the video game industry after the Mario maker reportedly delayed the launch of Nintendo Switch 2 successor until 2025. Now one thing I want to note is when someone says massive that is a term that requires context that unfortunately we're not given. Let's say that they have 5,000 people that work in QA testing I'm not saying they do Nintendo doesn't even have that many employees across their entire company but I'm just saying let's say they did well a hundred people being laid off which is what we're gonna get into wouldn't necessarily be considered massive. So there's a little bit of lack of context here but let's dive into the rest of the story. So it says these changes will involve some contractor assignments ending as well as the creation of significant this is important significant number of new full-time positions a spokesperson for Nintendo told Kotaku in an email contractors at Nintendo of America who feel undervalued and underpaid which is a story we covered years ago have a long call on the company to make them full-time red badge employees instead of exploiting loopholes in the seasonal work requirements while some of them are now finally getting converted to direct hires others including testers with over 10 years experience are getting the boot though Nintendo says everyone impacted will receive severance packages now this is important because they don't necessarily always have to offer severance packages Nintendo is offering it and the positive here is Nintendo has decided that we're going to create more full-time positions to bring some of these testers in a full-time capacity what that means are they still going to be product testing that's obviously what we don't know this sounds like a restructuring of maybe Nintendo's entire product testing department I don't know obviously all the inner workings here but if you remember Doug Bowser when he addressed all the controversy that came up earlier about the poor work conditions for the QA testers he promised there would be changes and you know sometimes those changes might involve laying people off we obviously don't know all the particulars of why this decision was made but if it was made in wake of making people more full-time employees possibly there's actually a positive spin here but we have to wait and see how this plays out now Nintendo did drop an actual statement here because they were contacted and here's what Nintendo provided to kataku Nintendo of America has reorganized its product testing functions to drive greater global integration in game development efforts the changes will also better align Nintendo of America with inter regional testing procedures and operations these changes will involve some contractor assignments ending as well as the creation of a significant number of new full-time employee positions for all assignments that are ending the contractors agencies with Nintendo of America support will offer severance packages and provide assistance during their transition that means to a new job for those contractors associates who will be leaving us we are tremendously grateful for the important contributions they made to our business and we extend our heartfelt thanks to the hard work and service to Nintendo now kataku goes on to note that it's not immediately clear how many total employees will be let go or not have their contracts renewed according to for current and former employees the restructuring could affect over 100 contractors but again they're probably guessing of course it doesn't look like there's actually a real number here and most of those being converted to full-time status appear to be getting moved out of software testing now again these are according to for current and former employees we don't actually know this would be the first mass layoff at nintendo since even larger scale cuts across competitors in the console space like sony and microsoft earlier this year microsoft just cut 1900 jobs in the most recent news though it doesn't appear to impact any existing full-time employees the shift does come due in a recent lull in nintendo of america's testing department three contractors told kataku so adding some context from behind the scenes there has been no lull in the testing department so maybe a lack of games needing tested which would fall in line with the fact there hasn't really been a ton of games announced past june right so maybe there is a reason they just don't need as many people right now they said there have been no new major first-party games in the testing pipeline and none of them were aware of anyone having hands on time with the upcoming switch to despite previous hopes it would arrive as early as the second half of 2024 they also weren't sure how nintendo america could continue to test massive games like last year's the legend is on the tears of the kingdom which was praised for his technical performance and lack of bugs with the new cuts nintendo declined to comment on the status of its testing pipeline so we're gonna kind of end there because that's really the brux of the news and what we really learned from this is a few things one nintendo is restructuring their entire testing department which probably needed to be done in wake of some of the bad negative things we heard in the past and what's also come out of this is that nintendo it basically had a bunch of workers not doing anything because they didn't have any games coming to be tested i think some of the fears that oh how could we test a major game like tears of the kingdom if we do these layoffs might be a little premature because you self admitted or at least these certain employees did these sources that nintendo doesn't have anything for you to do right now in the first place it's pretty natural for a company if you have a bunch of employees without anything to do you're probably gonna lay some employees off because you're not gonna spend a bunch of money for you guys to sit around and do nothing so i think that this may be being overblown because we've seen so many massive layoffs across the industry and i know i'm a nintendo youtube channel so it's gonna come across like i'm defending the corporate greedy nintendo but if the employees own words from people still working there literally said we have no major games that we're working on well if that's the case then you probably aren't needed at the moment and that's just kind of what happens i'll put it another way i'm obviously a content creator who mostly works completely by myself but i do occasionally hire temporary employees temporary contractors to make thumbnails maybe help with editing videos or help with channel redesigns and all that stuff well let's say that instead i had a contract employee who was working with me let's say it was my best friend eric and eric was working with me as an editor but let's say something happens and now for a long period of time the next six months let's say my video pipeline is going to be cut in half and we're gonna have half as much content as we usually do along with no major big video projects chances are i don't need eric anymore at that point and to keep him employed with me would just be me giving away money that i'm not getting a return on that investment from now you might go well that makes you a greedy corporate shill and i get it eric would be my best friend and it would be a little complicated there but the entire point is that hey he's probably not gonna expect me to keep paying him to come in every day sit at this desk right here that you guys can't see right below me and just not work i don't think that would be a realistic expectation for him and if i can't find a way to relocate him to do other things that can help out i probably would have to let him go so from nintendo's perspective and the employees self-admitting they don't really even have work right now i kind of understand what nintendo is doing now the answer is well what happens when they do have major games that need some testing and all of that well what do you think is going to happen nintendo will just hire more people that's how these contract positions usually work what's left out of this of course is that these are contract positions and you only contract people when you need them it sounds like nintendo's maybe ending some of these contracts early hence the severance packages but they also converted a bunch of people to full time which is exactly what they were asking for so i don't honestly think that this is really as big of a deal as maybe the initial story is making it out to be or making it sound i think the full context looks like this is just normal business practice and hey some employees got exactly what they wanted which was promotions to full-time positions working directly for nintendo and no longer for these contract companies and who knows maybe nintendo's restructuring in general and they're gonna have product testing spread more throughout the whole company and not just here you know like they self-admitted that hey they're not aware of anyone that's been product testing switch two things for nintendo yeah because they probably have a team of qa testers maybe closer to their maybe just directly in japan who are the product testers on their switch two games why well because product testing in the united states is also shown that game leaks tend to come out of product testing in the us and when you have a switch two in a brand new system maybe you keep most of those game testing internal over in japan so that's just one of those things that could be happening as well but whatever the case maybe uh i do feel for any of the people that go i know i produce this at 100 and that was just a guess they don't really know it could be less than 100 people because you got to know the exact number of people being promoted how many people are being let go how many people might be shifting to other projects so this just seems like something in my opinion that's a little minor but still noteworthy just because nintendo hasn't had um a round of layoffs really at all and the fact that they're offering severance and everything lets you know that yeah this is obviously a bigger number than you know just like one employee or like a couple employees choosing to leave nintendo uh and it's also notable that again none of their full-time employees are affected so they're not going after like hey nintendo hey we're doing bad financially we need to completely downsize our company and just let go of a bunch of full-time employees this is affecting a specific area of nintendo where you're already a temporary employee some of you might have been you're getting your contract renewed for 10 years and i can understand some frustration there but that is why they created more full-time positions and unfortunately you're probably not going to have enough full-time positions for everyone that was probably an unrealistic ask so i don't know i think that this is probably okay i'm glad nintendo is at least offering severance and whatever services they plan to offer to help them get new jobs i don't really know too much i've been offered severance once and then it was yanked for me i don't want to get into that situation because it was pretty bad and hopefully that's not what happens here anyways guys thank you so much for tuning in let me know your thoughts in the story down below maybe you think this is a bigger deal than i do i think it's a big enough deal for this video i just don't know that it's the biggest of big deals but maybe i've just been bouncing around different jobs most of my adult life enough to kind of move on when situations come up that maybe lead to you being laid off thank you guys so much for tuning in and i'll catch you in the next video


Hello everyone, I'm Alicia Woodruff and welcome to the Fort Report. So this week I'm at the Will Rogers Memorial Center at the brand new Equestrian Multi-Purpose Building to talk with David Reeves about the new facility and all that it entails. So David, tell us about this building, what it is and what's so exciting about it. Thanks Alicia. This is our Equestrian Multi-Purpose Building and it is, it expands our capacity here at Will Rogers. We've always had a very good, very competitive Equestrian Center. The competition has gotten greater, coming from other cities they've expanded their facilities. So it was important for us to also expand our facilities. And this building offers to indoor exercise arenas. We've added 740 horse stalls on the lower level and then it also has access to our tunnel system which interconnects all of our showrooms. The tunnel system is something that's unique for our facility. I don't know of any other facility that actually offers that. So if it's hot, if it's raining, it gives the competitors the ability to get from their stalls in one building to a show ring that's maybe two or three buildings away all underground. So how has this added facility become important to the Will Rogers business? Well it gives us the ability to go after larger shows that in the past we were not able to accommodate, as well as have maybe two major shows at the same time. And we just booked the Apollosa National Show and their Youth World Show for next year starting in June. And they're actually going to have it the same time as the horse show that's currently in house, which is the Paint Horse Youth World Show. So how does the Will Rogers Memorial Center compare to other Equestrian Centers? They're kind of unique in the respect that we're fortunate to be in a cultural district. We're surrounded by world famous museums. Because of that we have to build fairly architecturally significant buildings, brick, public art, things like that that really set our facility apart from a lot of the competition which builds essentially metal barns. And this building, because we really wanted it to be a significant building in the equestrian world, we dedicated the public art to equestrians. David, thank you so much for your time. This facility is really cool and very city of the arts. Thank you. You're welcome. So for more information about events happening at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, you can visit the website on the screen or you can follow them on Facebook.


Ukraine undertaking major offensive operations on three main axes. In recent days, Ukrainian forces have reset and have again been undertaking major offensive operations on three main axes in southern and eastern Ukraine. UK Defence Intelligence reported it. According to Defence Intelligence, Ukrainian forces are using the experiences from the first two weeks of the counter-offensive to refine tactics for assaulting the deep. Well-prepared Russian Defence's Ukrainian units are making gradual but steady tactical progress in key areas. There has been little evidence that Russia maintains any significant ground forces operational level reserves which could be used to reinforce against the multiple threats it is now facing in widely separated sectors from Bagmot to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River over 200 km away. UK Defence Intelligence said.