"Artify": To make arty; To imbue and beautify with art. "Heart": The center or inner core of one's being from which a person's true nature eminates. Thus, to "ArtiphyTheHeart" is to imbue the inner core of one's existance with the beauty of art.
This evening was the final teleconference for the Creating Time Mega Event launching the book Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis. I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in.
In each of the three events, we've doodled clocks. Instructions were to take moments instead of taking notes. So I recorded the pregnant pauses as well as the salient points while I looked for the metaphors. I listened intently, watched a video, composed a group poem, and adjourned to small groups twice for discussions. All this over a period of an hour and a half, all the while doodling my clock and taking notes moments.
At the end of the webinar, I was surprised. I really hadn't looked at the paper I was doodling on in the process. I was on autopilot, expanding time by layering my activity, my attention heightened and present for listening, moment taking, doodling, and coloring, all at once and equally present, all happing at once within the same moment in time.
Who says time isn't pliable as putty? Here's what I discovered I had done by the end of the evening: Not a piece of art, but a cohesive collection of ideas, colors, pattern, and metaphor. A surprising outcome for someone who was present in so many places at the time the drawing was taking place.
Quite different from multi-tasking, this was a free act of letting the hand do it's work while the brain watched and listened. The words "Creating Time" and the date were added afterward. Everything else was done while participating in the event.
So I wanted to take the time to share this with you, and let you know that I highly recommend the book, Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. It's filled with insights, activities and wisdom from the more than 80 artists, creatives, authors and other luminaries who contributed to this effort. Yesterday was its release date on amazon.com and it hit #1 in sales in numerous categories. I'm not surprised.
If you're interested -- and who wouldn't be? -- in celebration of the book's overwhelming success on it's first day of release, the special offer I mentioned in yesterday's post has been extended until April 24. You can find out more by clicking HERE to read yesterday's blog post, or by clicking HERE to sign up for the offer itself. There are more than $125 worth of fabulous and absolutely free items and perks, just for buying a book you'd want to own anyway. I know, because I took advantage of it and spent hours downloading all the fabulous morsels and tidbits, which include e-books, online courses, audio recordings and more. Really. What are you waiting for? This isn't a sales pitch, it's my own personal opinion. As they say, you snooze, you loose, so go for it!
WOW! Marney Makridakis of Artella has put together a package of freebies worth more than $125!
This post is not an advertisment. It's a public service to creatives everywhere! I just hope I'm not too late in posting for you to take advantage of this amazing package of goodies!
To get the more than $125 worth of freebies, the book must be ordered on the release date--TODAY! I have been excited about this book since I first heard about it last December, and I have mentioned it in past blog posts. But call me skeptical, I wanted to see for myself what was in the free package of goodies before I urged you all to place your orders on the 17th of April -- Today -- so I decided to place my own order first, open my package of goodies, then decide whether or not to pass along the information. I've been saving an Amazon gift card just for this very purchase, so it was great to find out that in order to get the freebies, the order must be placed online with either Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
I'm not going to list everything that is in the package of goodies because I think it's meant to be a surprise, but suffice it to say that there are audio recordings, full length online classes, and more. If you're interested in art, writing, or otherwise engaged in right-brain creative activities, this is SO generous, and SO worth it! And all for the cost of a book you'd want to buy anyway. At least I couldn't wait to buy it!
I rarely tell you to go out and get something, so today is really special. Just don't wait. Offer ends at midnight!
P.S. I get nothing extra for passing along this information. As I said at the beginning of my post, this is a public service, not an advertisement. But if you do decide to order, please consider using the links to the books that I've provided within this post, because I do get credit from Amazon if you place your order directly from clicking the Amazon links in this blog post. Then go back to the link on this page to the form and type in your Amazon order number. Thanks! You won't be disappointed!
Monday marked the official start of Creating Time, a mega event that you can learn more about and even join for free by clicking the link on my right sidebar. Part of this event is the featured launch of a new book by Marney Makridakis of Artella: Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. I've been anxiously awaiting the release of this book for ages, and I can't wait till a copy is in my hands!
Every day throughout this event a new exercise in seeing, thinking about, and experiencing time in unique and potent ways is presented to each of the participants. Monday's activity focused on answering a list of questions about time specifically and in general, culminating with an art project to illustrate the essence gleaned through the process. You can see mine in a minute.
But first, before I share the journal page I did for this project, I'd like you to take a few seconds and watch this snippet of a video I put together with watches from various magazine ads. And I want you to notice. Notice what? Well, that's what you have to figure out. What do you see? Don't scroll down till you've watched or you'll spoil what may be a surprising fact.
Ok, now that you've watched, did you notice anything unique? Unusual? Different? Similar? Surprising? Or perhaps even suspicious?
Before I tell you what I noticed and what it means, let me share my journal page for Monday's Creating Time, Day 1, and tell you a little bit about it.
The first thing I did was to sketch my little drawing of someone (me, perhaps?) laid-out flat in her efforts to uphold time. She has to keep time balanced while the clock is ticking without letting it crush her in the process. Sound familiar? I'm sure we all feel this way at times.
Next, I found the clock image I wanted to use. I could have drawn it. It would have taken less time and effort, but I wanted the contrast and interplay that comes from using multiple types of images in collage. I found a few other parts of pages in magazines that caught my eye, so I ripped them out too. Then I decided which journal to use.
I keep several "open" (aka: ready for use) journals of different shapes and sizes available at any given time. One of the benefits of this is that there is always something on hand, ready to accomodate any size page that a combination of images will dictate. This way the artwork is king, not the size and shape of the page. I grabbed the journal that best suited the project, and started arranging and re-arranging the components until I came up with a pleasing composition, then I glued them down.
All the while, I kept my answers to the time questions in front of me so that my answers stayed in the back of my mind throughout the selection and arrangement process. When everything was on the page, I took a break, had a cup of tea, then came back and took a look. The page contained all my answers, and more. It showed me things I hadn't thought of while answering the questions. Things that were just as pertinent, perhaps even more. So I began to write. First a thought here, then a thought there, then another over in that corner, and also one right here at the side. My thoughts flowed onto the page, becoming commentary on my perceptions of time.
And now, back to the video. I was searching for clock face images when I happened across the watches I clipped for the video. I wanted a clock face or two to add to my little drawing. I kept finding images of diamond watches, artsy clock faces, and unusual artistic shapes when all I wanted was something clear and the proper size for my drawing, but I decided to cut them all out as I went through the magzines and sort them later.
As I clipped, I noticed that all the watches were set to the same time. 10:10. I looked through another magazine. Same thing. 10:10, regardless of brand. I started to Google "watches set to 10:10". The minute I typed-in "watches", the words "set at 10:10" automatically popped up in the search. Apparently lots of people know this. My husband knew it when I asked him about it. You probably already know it too. I would have thought that I would have known it, having worked in advertising, but then I never did a clock or watch ad, or worked for anyone who carried those accounts. Here's the deal: 10:10 is an industry standard. When watches and clocks are used in advertisments, setting them at 10:10 puts the hands in the best position to frame the name of the maufacturer. It's easiest to read "Timex" or "Rolex" when the hands are set at 10:10.
So there you have it. Now you can say: "I knew that!" Or, you can say, "Wow! I never knew that." Or you can get your friends to watch my little video and ask them what they see. If you have the time, of course.
When I work in paint, collage, or any other fine art medium, I'm very aware of the stages I go through from concept to finished product. Personally, I usually start with a vision of the composition of a whole, even if I'm working section by section and letting the piece develop into itself without a fixed concept. That way, I can work out the lights and darks, and the placement of shapes and their relationships to one another. Here are a couple of examples of collage where I did just that.
Both this piece and the piece of collage below were created for Revel In The Moment. In this first piece, I was more concerned with the placement of the shapes of the paper pieces, the balance of lights and darks, and they way the colors harmonized more than the theme. When I started out, I knew I wanted to combine a black and white image or two and a variety of some interesting textures in an analogous color scheme. I chose to work with green/blue/purple and purple's compliment of yellow. Mostly this was done without thinking about it, or consciously considering more than what was pleasing when placed side by side or juxtaposed.
This piece was begun with two thoughts in mind: The use of two moons, and the layering of pattern and color. My eye was drawn to another analogous set of colors, yellow/orange/green/blue, all with similar values, so the black and white provided the high contrast necessary to deliniate the moons as focal images as opposed to just another set of items stuck onto the page. In this piece more than the one on top, imagination needed to be moved from its abstract mental image to an image of an imaginative reality before I could translate it to the page. The two moons are a central theme in Haruki Murakami's book1Q84 which I am currently reading, and I created an abstract thought of using them creatively in collage. Because two moons do not exist in the reality of our world, I could not go out and draw them from life, or re-create them from a memory of real life. I had to create a reality for them in my imagination, visualize that reality and really see it in my mind's eye, before I could begin to work to translate my imagined reality to the page. In the end, I chose to use dual stamped images of the moon rather than drawing new moons, as a contrast to the drawn look of the handwritten script already on the page.
It occurred to me that the way I filter what I see in an imagined image is very similar to the way the eye filters an image in reality. Some things are brought to the forefront while others recede to the background or blur in the periphery. And it got me thinking about relationships between the way I work with collage and the way I work with digital images.
I'm really interested in the way other artists photograph their work and the way websites in general display photos. Personally, although au courant web consultants will tell you to pull a thousand and one arty tricks from your sleeve and display them all in the same six ways, I still prefer the straight forward gallery approach to photographing and displaying my work on the web, with clear, reality based color and content. But I'm a fad-hater. And I've noticed that from one generation to the next, what becomes very popular today, even if it's lovely and in good taste, will often be picked up by so many copycats that it loses its appeal, and often its meaning, as well. Much like worn out records overplayed by disc jockeys from playlists limited to the 15 top rated songs.
I've also spent a lot of years observing consultants and advisors run companies into the ground by forcing the latest and the greatest out of the box trends and techniques on management in order to get the desired response from the paranoid stockholders who hire them, and who know and care very little about anything other than nervously holding on to their purses. And I've watched this backfire, over and over and over and over again. So while I prefer a realistic gallery of portraits of my work on the web, keep in mind that my work on the web is often far from a collection of portraits of realism. I like portray the items from my imagination as I've created them, in realistic pics on the web.
I am in no way an ace photographer and I ask for help quite often from my professional photographer friends. But I have acquired a pretty awesome set of Photoshop skills over the years. I've written some powerful Photoshop actions, and I've developed some special brushes, blends, and filters of my own. I thank lynda.com tutorials for some of this knowledge, but when it comes right down to it, a few pieces of sage advice, some drawing skill, and a working knowledge of vector drawing programs like Adobe illustrator have been the key combination for my sucess with photo edits. Sometimes these skills are used to make a poorly shot photo look more like the real article being photographed. Other times, they're used for digital imaging and digital collage. In either case, there is an indespensable skill set to be acquired.
Topping the list of skills that are worth taking the time to master, first and foremost, is gaining a working knowledge of the host of selection tools, pracitce, and mastering the art of selection in as short a time as possible. The truth of truths is: The more acucrate your selections, the better everything turns out, every time.
Also on the success list is mastery of:
A good sense of color identification and color matching
A good sense of light and value
Seeing accurately, and developing your eye so that you are able to see what's really there, by overriding the eye's natural filters. Being able to quickly tell the difference between what your eye tells you--what it wants you to think you see--as opposed to what's really there, is key
Reality matching
If good selections top the list, then achieving reality by matching reality is the skill that combines and unites them all. If you have this skill, then you'll always be able to move into an artistic direction with filters and color changes, and also with collage, painting, and fine art and photography in general.
You may think that reality and imagination are at opposite ends of the pole, but paradoxically, you can't use the images that your imagination wants to create until you've mastered reality. Imagination and reality are not polar opposites, they are two sides of the same coin, and the coin doesn't exist with only one side. If imagination is a vision of the destination, then reality is the vehicle that gets you there. Reality takes you to the place your imagination envisions, because once you have a vision, you have to execute that vision from the reality of the material your imagination has conjured. You can do this only if you have mastered reality matching. You need to be able to visualize the dream of your imagination, capture the reality of that imaginary image, match it in your consciousness, and then replicate it. Whether your canvas is digital or on your easel, the reality of your imagination must be captured and translated onto your chosen substrate to move from concept to artistic reality.
And vise-versa. While I employ reality matching from imagination to collage, I employ the same principals in reverse when I shoot a photo of my work that doesn't look like the piece in reality. I take the photo backwards from its unreality, photoshopping it back into what it looks like in real life so that I can display as accurate an image as possible on the web. And indespensable skill when you shoot with a cheap camera, lack basic photography skills, or both.
Most of my time is taken up with painting. I work around a painting in layers, section by section. While one section dries I work on another, then I go back and add more layers, fleshing it out. This is slow, satisfying work. I spend a lot of time thinking about it while I paint, and I take breaks often. I love this slow work that takes a days, weeks, or months to complete. But I also have a real need to finish something in a day for the pat-on-the-back that a sense of completion brings.
This isn't the reason I work in a tiny collaged book that will morph into an art journal. I do it because I love it, and because it provides a home for some very luscious snippets that really shouldn't end up in the dust bin. But working in a tiny book does have the added benefit of quick accomplishment, especially when it's broken up into tasks, such as collage and paint today, embellish and journal on another day.
Here are a couple of 2 page spreads from my tiny collage book. They have a very unfinished look partly because they are unfinished, and partly because they haven't yet been sewn into book form. Working this small, it's much easier for me to collage and embellish the pages, then sew and journal later. If you click HERE, you can see a post that puts the size of these tiny pages into perspective. The pages are 3" X 4-1/2". The book is the one I'm holding in my hand in the first photo when you click the link, and also in the last photo when you scroll down.
I've also been spending a lot of time reading. I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami, and I'm finding that his book1Q84 is unputdownable. I work more smoothly when I'm in the middle of really good fiction.
And last but not least, there's a new post up on ArtiPhybers. Click HERE and take a look.
Here's another first book for those who are learning bookbinding. Once again, even though I've made these in the past, I'm so glad to have the refresher course because there's so much I'd forgotten. I had to ask for clarification that my page-turning was in the correct order, but it turns out that I got it right.
This is another book constructed from a single sheet of paper. I used 98# Canson mixed-media paper, a heavier weight for this book than the last because there were fewer folds, and I didn't want the watercolor and ink to bleed through the pages. It worked. I prepared the paper by spraying a light solution of gouache over a few of stencils on both sides. I ground some ink and used the wet side of a sheet of sumi-é paper to make a few brush sketches. When I realized that I had done nine cats, I got the idea for Nine Lives.
The cats were randomly sketched all over the paper, so I tore them out and added some gouache to the edges. Pages three and four open up and down. There are four folds and two sides, so eight pages in all. I decided to use these up and down pages to add the ninth cat.
The chop I used says "long life". It's a traditional chop carved from soap stone and I inked it with the traditional toxic red chop ink that takes forever to dry. I zapped it with a hairdryer to speed things up, but I think it will take the full few weeks before it sets, regardless. In the meantime, I blotted it a bit, then separated the pages with waxed paper.
If you'd like to see all posts of the books I'm making for this project, scroll up to the top of this page, click on "Archives", then click on "Making Handmade Books Workshop" from the category menu.
One of the first books you make when you study bookbinding is the X-Book. It's simple, but its folding has a purpose that repeats with other more complicated bindings. It's what I used to call a root book, since its construction is the basis for so many books.
Some of us in Artists Of the Round Table are working our way through Alicia Golden's bookMaking Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms. We'll be making 100 books beginning with the X-Book. Here are some pictures of mine:
It's made from a single sheet of paper that is cut and folded so that the middle puffs out.
It's easier to get the picture from the top. Each fold is a page, and when the two end pages are pushed together toward the middle, it forms an X, which gives the book its name.
Then the outside folds of the X wrap around the inside folds to create the cover and the back.
Even if you made a gazillion of these in grade school, you make them still when you learn to bind books. And it's amazing how easy it is to forget the simple stuff!
India ink and a Rapidograph coordinate perfectly with black VersaFine ink. I added some of my own lines and quirks to the some of the stamped images, and it was impossible to tell where their lines left off and mine began.
Still drawing, still glad that Traci challenged us with her 30 Days of Drawing. But I must admit that while I'd love to post daily, even more than once a day, it doesn't always happen that way. But drawing always happens.
There isn't time to shoot and post pics of the last few days of drawing, but I do have time for one and I'll share what I did in case it might be helpful. I was out when I drew this, and I discovered that I had no plain paper of any kind with me at the time, so I used what I had. I cut a square of patterned cardstock, flipped it to the white side and drew on that.
My idea was to imagine what this young boy might be dreaming and quickly sketch it in ink. I know that if I was curled up on a comfy piece of fur (which looks like a flokati, only softer...) with a silky animal plushie for my pillow, asleep on top of my toy box, I'd be dreaming about riding through the skies on a mythical stuffed animal come to life.
So that's what I drew, and the paper worked wonderfully with my Rapidosketch. So did the watercolor. Even somewhat saturated, the paper fibers held their place. The water dried quickly without buckling, so puddling wasn't an issue, making it easy to apply layers of color quickly.
If you don't have what you need, use what you have. I'm so glad that I don't view patterned papers as precious or special. I still have stacks and stacks of them left over from design team days, sent by vendors to sample and demo. Even when they're beautiful, if you need the other side, use it!
Exhausted, exhausted, exhausted...so I'm taking it easy today. I decided to just draw what was in front of me, which happened to be my mug of tea and the insulated pot. It needed silver, so I used the duller side of aluminum kitchen foil, cut it to size and shape, glued it in place, and photographed it with my phone since a scan wouldn't caputre the shine.
One of the things I like best about working in my current art journal/sketchbook is how the pages interact with each other after they're finished. This isn't planned, and it often produces the most beautiful and unexpected combinations.
I particularly like how today's page is off-set by the layers of other pages peeking through. Sometimes it's difficult working with different page sizes, but in the end, it's always rewarding.
Nothing too complex today. I saw a bird ornament at Anthropologie, sketched it on plain notepaper, and glued it into my art journal. I'm thinking of creating a pattern from my sketch, so I added some notes on how I might like to stitch it. Ten days in, and so far I've sketched every day for Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing.
Yesterday I decided to remake a page. Actually, I do this almost every day. It isn't about whether or not I like what's on the page, it's about putting what I happen to want on the page today, and reconciling that with what's already there. I could start with a blank page. In fact, I do that all the time. I've heard people say that blank pages can be intimidating. I've also heard people say that pages with too much stuff on them can be confusing. Since I'm neither intimidated nor confused, it really doesn't matter to me whether the page is blank, or full. Either way, to me it's a just substrate.
Here's the semi-finished product--semi-finished, because it hasn't been written upon yet. The pages are really not wonderful until they've been written on, so this one still has a long way to go.
The page was remade primarily with paint, and a pine tree that I drew and carved into a stamp several years ago. "Road-tested" was clipped from a magazine and used as-is. "High Altitude" was constructed from white rub-on letters on top of a piece of black magazine paper cut to fit the top. The road and date were drawn onto the page with a Rapidograph and Inda ink.
For remade pages, much of the the beauty is simply that what's under the finished product lends so much to the final outcome, both texturally, and in meaning, that the page wouldn't at all have been the same if what's underneath hadn't been there in the first place.
Here's what was underneath the page above when I started:
If you look closely, and maybe squint, you can see some of the dots and part of that smilely face underneath the finshed page. I didn't remove a thing. Even the brown grid tape was laid on top of the pink tape that was already there, which added to the color of the tape layer on top.
I use art journals and sketchbooks to stretch my creative muscles. Sometimes that means sketching out plans. Sometimes it means glueing-in a lot of things that please me. Things which might contain elements I'll want to use in a finished piece later. Sometimes it's all about color, and making notes.
This particular book was made for Mary Ann Moss'sFull Tilt Boogie workshop, and I've been working in it since mid-summer. I'm using it to stretch my conscious creative decision making. I say conscious, because so many of the decisions we make are habitual and shortcut the thought process. This book is full of pages patched together alongside full blank pages, alongside pages with other elements added. If you'd like to see what the book looked like just after it was created and before I started working on the pages, there's a flip-through you can see by clicking HERE and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
Speaking of other elements, I drew some of those today to use later. I've used quite a few frames on other pages of this book, and really like how they can be used to confine and define select words and design elements, so I drew a couple of funky frames with a wide-tipped Sharpie to have on hand for future pages, one on plain paper, and one on patterned.
That takes care of Days 8 and 9 of Traci Bunker's 30 Days of Drawing. A great incentive to keep pencil to paper, and to post about it. It's not too late to join the challenge.
For days six and seven of Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing, I've used the same inspiration piece. The short story is that every Thursday my friend Rita and I try to meet for coffee and drawing, and last Thursday, Rita was drawing an owl that I fell in love with. You can click HERE to see Rita's owl. Her inspiration was an artificial sweetener ad from a magazine. When she finished, and I continued to "Ooooh" and "Ahhhh" over her drawing, she handed me the ad and said, "Take it home with you and do it yourself. Just be sure to bring it back with you next week. It will be fun to see the differences in our drawings." It sounded like a great idea to me, so I started playing around with it on day six, and here's what I came up with:
Techinically, he isn't finished, but I might just leave him as is. I'm really happy with the way he's peeking out from the spine of my art journal/sketchbook.
I decided to take the process a little further today. You can click HERE to see my Day Seven drawing. Since it's a mandala, I posted it to ArtiphyTheSoul. Amazing what all can be done with variations on a theme, and I'm ready to take this even further and use it in other ways, as well. Maybe experiment with the general patterns using other colors, added textures and different subject matter.
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And for those of you who are interested, I posted a commentary on artistic productivity to ArtiPhacts today. You can read it by clicking HERE.
There are more components to making art than most people are aware of. Encapsulated within each component of the process is the entire process itself, in much the same way that the entire plant is contained within the seed.
Drawing is so much more than skill with pen on paper that the skill with pen on paper is often dwarfed in comparison to the rest of the process. The choices to be made are first and foremost. What paper: Plain? painted? patterned? photograph, etc.? What medium: Pencil? ink? paint/type of paint? crayon? pastel, etc.? What will the first mark be? Where will it be made? Will it be from the imagination? Or from a model? How much to add? When to stop? What to take away? Positve space? Negative space? Photorealisim? Realistic? Abstract? Whimsy? Serious? Color? Grayscale? Lighting? Collage/placement? ...the list goes on, and it is endless. Many of these decisions are automatic; some are consciously thought out, sometimes easily, sometimes in agony.
Today's drawing is illustrative of a movie I saw and loved. Nightwatch. It's a Russian horror film, and a youtube video of the trailer follows. If you are disturbed by horror movies, don't watch the video. But if you love great special effects and are a fan of well acted, well scripted, beautifully lit, and beautifully fimed intensity, then this may be for you. I won't tell you anything about it. One person's description is another person's spoiler, and I hate spoilers.
As for my drawing, it's in the art journal/sketchbook that will be finished at the close of 2011. Some of the decisions I made for this drawing were as follows:
grayscale
photographs
deep green background paper
Rapidograph and India ink
Bats as stylized "V"s and other marks drawn around the roof tops of the photo on the left
"Night Watch" as two words in all caps drawn by inking-in the negative space of a rectangle
I'm participating in Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing. There's room for everyone in this challenge, and I can guarantee that whatever you draw, you'll be better for it. Click the link and join us!
It's just a quick face today for Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing. Ink, charcoal, and a little white paint in the same art journal/sketchbook that I was using yesterday.
Day three of Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing. Rapidograph, sepia Micron, and gray Pitt pens on an ex-library page in my Hand Book. Just by coincidence, the last page in this book will be finished on the 31st of December, and I'll be starting a new book on January first. If that's not serendipity, nothing is!
I have three new books in various stages of binding. Two will be filled with white mixed-media paper, and the third with Full Tilt Boogie style signatures. I'll post pics of all three soon.
, and
.
which I am currently reading, and I created an abstract thought of using them creatively in collage. Because two moons do not exist in the reality of our world, I could not go out and draw them from life, or re-create them from a memory of real life. I had to create a reality for them in my imagination, visualize that reality and really see it in my mind's eye, before I could begin to work to translate my imagined reality to the page. In the end, I chose to use dual stamped images of the moon rather than drawing new moons, as a contrast to the drawn look of the handwritten script already on the page.
as our guide. 
