To make this bit of digital art, I started playing with a poor exposure, nighttime photo image for my 'canvas', adding ornamental color and shapes using digital 'paint' tools.

I rarely doctor photos except to adjust contrast and brightness. The few times I have, it's been to produce something that is obviously manipulated art, such as the above.

I was reading about James Whistler tonight (the painter of what's popularly known as Whistler's Mother) and learned he experienced art as music, and used terms such as 'nocturnes', 'harmony', and 'symphony' to describe his work.

I also ran into the artist Edouard Manet on Wiki, and stumbled upon his sketch of Edgar Allen Poe's poetic raven.

I read about compasses, both the magnetic kind to indicate direction and the mechanical kind (two-pronged tool with a point and an attached pencil) used for drawing circles, arcs and maps. The former points out actual direction, like a pocket compass for hikers. The latter may be used to indicate orientation in a map or drawing, and is popular as a symbol, perhaps most familiarly, the Freemason emblem.

I struggled as I have since a schoolgirl with the differences between the different kinds of 'north', including true north, magnetic north, and the celestial north. GPS north has been added to the fray. There should be a simple way to discriminate among them, but the comparisons always seem a little garbled to me, and I get fuzzy-brained.

Looking for photos to post, I came upon the one above that I played with some time back. I don't know why I wrote macadam on it, except that it's an interesting sounding word. I knew the word had something to do with paved surfaces, but nothing more than that and so I looked it up tonight. I was surprised to find it's pronounced Mac-Adam and not Mac-a-damn. It makes sense since a man named John Loudon McAdam invented this road-making process. For road-making, he insisted on the use of small rocks of relatively equal size, best achieved in his era (early 1800s) with hammer applied to stone. Finally, I learned that Tarmac is short for Tarmacadam which was coined when tar was added to the process and ingredients for creating macadam. Both are sometimes used inaccurately out of custom to describe more modern asphalt paved surfaces.