Today was a day that started out with teaching, learning, teaching and then doing necessary but not fun things at the paper. I photographed only one basketball game and I forgot to post a picture from that--really just sort of mediocre action shots anyway. But I got consumed today with this idea of taking a cartoon and seeing if I could use it as a jumping off point for a painting. Shepard Fairey took a photo ad made it a sort of cartoon and he became famous and infamous for this with the Obama Hope poster. The notion is--when do you do enough to a piece that someone else originally created that it becomes your own creation? Maybe never--but for some reason I found myself starting to draw into this cartoon and beginning to see if I can make it something that I feel I took to a new place. Mind you--I don't have time for this right now--but still I spent several hours thinking about this and the last hour working on it--and it isn't my own yet. Perhaps it never will be--perhaps tomorrow I'll wake up and won't remember this and it is done and out of my mind. The reason I'm telling you about this under a picture I took of Alysha last winter is that I didn't really think about posting a feature picture today until it was really late and I found this picture that is several months old. I thought about writing about portfolios and portraits again, but my mind is just so focussed on this ridiculous idea of the cartoon that--that is all I can write about. The picture of Alysha is 100 times better than what I've done so far to the cartoon and I'm guessing always will be--its at least something that was created 100% in my presence by Alysha and me and no one else. SayerMotter Photograph by Richard Sayer.