2010 Total Lunar Eclipse

This eclipse occurred last week; I posted a couple of photos to Facebook until I could finish this up. I hope you enjoy this mosaic it was a lot of fun to photograph and watch and it was a lot of fun to put this poster together. The first part of the eclipse was clear all the way to totality; I went inside during totality to re-charge camera batteries and download some photos then came back out as totality was ending for the second half of the eclipse. It remained clear most of the time but a few high clouds and some haze passed by during the last half of the eclipse but it was still visible.

A New Beginning...

On Thursday, August 19, 2010 I began a new chapter in my career and life, I am a victim of the horrible economy and am now joining the nearly half million others on the unemployment line. I along with several others at my former employer where part of an effort to keep more than 100 others employed during this tough time, this is a tough time for all. The design and construction industry is being hit hard by this recession and there are a lot of good people who are affected by this, either they are like me and unemployed or they are like lots of others who are taking pay cuts or working fewer hours to try and ride this out.


I will do fine, I am lucky, my family and my friends are being super supportive and everyone is looking out for me. Over the last several days I have received so many emails and phone calls that it is hard to be upset and sad with so many people sending me kind thoughts and prayers I know things will work out and something far better will come of all of this.

For the next couple weeks I am going to think of this as a vacation, it has been a very long time since I have had a long vacation so I am going to try and do some of the things that I have been saying “when I have some free time” because I now do. I am also going to work very hard at completing my AREs, those are the licensing exams that I must take in order to become an architect and I only have three of them left, so wish me luck. If all goes well I will be able to change my resume to say Robert A. Williams, Architect and that will be a huge deal for me. This is something that I have wanted for quite some time, since the 4th grade (let’s just say it is a long time).

I am proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to work at Dekker/Perich/Sabatini and I hope that in the near future I will have the chance to go back, but if that does not happen I also know that I will succeed and thrive wherever I end up. The economy will rebound and we will all be much stronger and happier because of all that we have learned over the past year and a half.

Thank you to all who have expressed your concern and support, please know that I appreciate it all and I will be OK, I will make it through this and I will be a better person for it.

Work in Progress...

I am back in the creative mode again and am now working on another watercolor for a friend. She saw the self portrait I did of myself (posted in May) and she actually liked it, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so she asked me to do a painting of her daughter.


I began the painting and decided to document the process along the way so over the next few weeks I will be posting the painting as it is being worked on. When I am all done with it I will post the picture I am using to do the painting and I look forward to your comments and suggestions along the way. I am working on becoming a better painter and I am going to have some fun while doing it.

Keep an eye out for future posts and for the final work when it is done.

The Moon, A long time coming...

Ok so I have been away for a while, I am not sure where I have been but I have not been posting very regular. It has also been some time since I have been out taking photographs or doing any artwork of any kind. I think I have been a little lazy and a little busy studying for exams (even though I have not been very good about taking them). I am going to try and do a little more photography and will be working on a watercolor of some friends little girl.


They were impressed (I think) by my self portrait watercolor, imagine that, and asked me to do one of their daughter. So what the heck, I need the practice and she is supper cute so I will start on that soon. This will be some more practice for when I do the watercolor of my nephew next (he is supper cute too).

This is a photo of the Moon I took with my point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my telescope at Oak Flat last weekend. I am having a lot of fun doing this and the photos are getting a little better each time. This one is actually like 6 photos that were put together in the panorama software I have been using for some time now and you can see quite a bit of detail of the lunar features. I would have done some more photos but the battery in my camera died so it kind of ended the photo session.

Until next time, keep drawing, painting, photographing or just doing whatever it is you want to do.

Sketch and Paint

OK, do not laugh...or at least too hard. This is one of my first attempts at doing a watercolor of an actual person (in this case me). I did a sketch of my nephew a few weeks ago, I had been trying to do this for some time but have never been happy with what I have done in the past. I was motivated by a good friend of mine Sy, she does some wonderful paintings and I was talking to her about it and she convinced me to try again so I did. While they may not be perfect yet they are getting better. I really like the way my nephews pencil sketch came out so I decided to try and do a watercolor and I used a photo I had of my (it was a photo that Sy had taken). I am to some extent happy with it, I still need some more practice and will continue to try and then hopefully be able to do one of my nephew that I will be happy with. I like the hair in this painting better than my own hair, but the nose and mouth definitely need some work.

A Mess of Messier...

Here are a couple of sketches of Messier objects I did a couple of weekends ago from my front yard. Leo is high in the sky now so I decided to set up my telescope and to do some sketches of some of the messier objects that were visible in the Lion. I am working to try and sketch all 110 of the Messier objects and I am asking people in TAAS to help out by sketching them as well. I will continue to sketch what I see in my eyepiece whenever I am out observing even if they are not Messier objects because I find it a lot of fun to sketch.

Sketch, Draw, Scribble...

I did some career workshops this morning at CNM for a very interesting group of young women who were participating in the “Expanding Your Horizons” conference put on by the New Mexico Network of Women in Science and Engineering. I was there along with three of the women at our office to talk to them about architecture and engineering and to let them know why architecture is the best job in the world (because it is).

It was a lot of fun and we had the opportunity to talk to the girls about what they felt the classroom of the future might look like and the kinds of things it might have in it to help them learn. I have had the opportunity in our office to work on the NexGen Academy, I have posted some of the construction photos here and will continue to post more in the future, and this is a school of the future. NexGen is a new way of learning, they are using a different model of education that has not been done in Albuquerque before and it is exciting to be a part of the design team that is doing some new.

I think that one of the things that may to some extent turn people away from architecture as a career is their fear that they have to know how to draw, you do not need to know how to draw. It is a good skill to have because it is a good way to express ideas and thoughts to others but it is a skill that you can learn, it can be developed and you just need to not be afraid to try, just do it. I always recommend to keep a sketch book and use it, it doesn’t matter what you are drawing just draw and draw and draw and then when you think you have drawn enough DRAW SOME MORE!

When I was in school, undergrad, we went to New York for one of my studios during spring break, we spent a week there and it was the first time I had ever been to New York. I knew that I would be doing a lot of sketching and photographing while I was there but on the way out there I decided I was going to draw people, until then I had always avoided putting people in my sketches, so almost every sketch I made this trip I drew scenes with people in them. I drew my classmates standing on the corner waiting for walk signals, I drew them sitting around fountains or on steps into museums or in the museum galleries, anywhere and everywhere there were people and I wanted to draw them so I did. My drawings of people may not be portraits, in fact you will probably not recognize anyone in them, that is not what I was after (maybe in the future) but you can tell they are people and they really do add to a scene in a sketch.

These are a couple of sketches we used in our presentation today and I wanted to share them here because I really do like the way each of them came out and what they helped to teach me.

The one at the fair was done while I waited for my nephew and my sisters who were on some of the rides at the time, I was sitting with my dad at a table just watching all the people when I took out my sketchbook (it is always with me) and did some quick sketches. The other one is something I did at home while watching TV, my mind was a little busy thinking of what I wanted for a house and it is just some quick sketches I made to jot down some ideas so I would not forget them.