Imagine Ten

Ten Things to Stir Your Imagination

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

1. French photographer Olivier de Chappedelaine has two very cool photo sites I just discovered: Photoblog, where he posts his full-color and experimental work, and La Galerie Virtuelle Photolog, which features all black and white photos.

2. For those times when you need a red shirt or two, Serendipity has a new Detailed Character Generator that produces random characters with physical descriptions and background info.

3. I accidentally stumbled across artist Denise Lombardozzi's most excellent weblog, Firstborn Studio, which features nonstop inspiring posts like this one. Then from her blogroll I found tartx's way cool Down the Rabbit Hole blog, where she's doing some amazing stuff, and then I had to stop because these art women were sucking the brains out of my writer skull.*

4. Landscape images like this one can inspire even me to describe setting better. Stop in at Landscapes 2.0 to see more.

5. The Name Generator promises to deliver 463 million first and last names, and can be customized as to length of the name, what each name starts with, ends with, and sounds like.

6. Olga's Art Gallery features over 10,000 works of art to browse online, indexed by artist, country, movement and name (quite helpful when I had to explain to my daughter the difference between Matisse and Picasso.)

7. If you'd rather play with word processor freeware, OpenOffice.org has released their 3.0 beta version and needs some testers.

8. Who was it that said I'd never ever ever find an online Plant Generator or a Science Fiction Medical Tool Generator? Ha.

9. And yes, Virginia, there is even a Plot Point Generator.

10. For practice using the right side of your brain to describe different types of characters, try challenging yourself with a spin through the three-part Serendipitous Character Descriptions Generator.

*Then I ditched my WIP anyway so I could go and paint for a few hours (it's not finished, but for once I liked how the colors turned out, so I'm flaunting it.)

Added: Finished the watercolor. Not entirely happy with it, but it's a study, so I'll take what I learned from painting it and use it for the final painting of oKia.