#when I think some people forget HOW MANY people...even in otherwise liberal and urban areas...are antagonistic toward this progress

[repurposedmeatlocker]

Like, if I'm going to be honest, it admittedly feels like a lot of people online when talking about this stuff are kind of living in their own echo-chamber, without actually taking into account what the wider population will think or do.

[vivivacolors]

BEGINNERS GUIDE TO PAINTING OUTDOORS

Bring a Twist to Your Painting Skills by Painting on the Go!

Have you always had a hankering for painting outdoors? Do you think it's something only professional artists and painters can do? The truth is, art is subjective — anyone can do what they want in their own unique way and still end up creating amazing art. So whether you're a beginner or pro, there are zero boundaries when you're painting on the go.

Since every artist's source of inspiration is different, start with a setting that calls to you. Be it outdoors amidst nature or around people in a busy mall, if it inspires you, go for it! Make the world your canvas and stop at nothing. Here's how:

Get out of  Your Head — and out of Your House!

The first, most obvious step to painting outdoors — or as some call it, portable painting — is to get outdoors. Even though this may seem like an easy step, the starting point is often the most difficult to overcome. But once you do, it's all worth it. The liberating feeling you get when you finally pick up your art supplies and go out in the fresh air and sunlight to put it all down on your canvas is a feeling most artists live for.

If you want to enjoy portable painting, you must get our of your own head first and overcome all your doubts. The least relaxing thing when you're working on an artistic creation is worrying about getting all the details right. Painting outdoors, even for a beginner, is something to explore, not fear. Once you start doing it on a daily basis, you will see how freeing it is. Who knows, it might just turn out to be your favorite leisure activity!

Challenge Yourself and Your Abilities Daily

Once you start painting outdoors and are become comfortable with all types of surroundings, start experimenting and challenging your skills. To grow as an artist, you need to step out of your comfort zone every now and then.

Maybe you're great at certain angles and shadows, or maybe you are most comfortable painting in nature. Pick a day and try your hand at urban sketching, or discover a new technique such as plein air watercolor. Master that too, and you will have a skill set that is compatible with any type of outdoor setting.

Make sure you start working in different variations of light, shadow, and color. Use different color schemes every time you go out and play with varying shadows and objects.

Break the Monotony

The whole point of painting outdoors is to overcome an overwhelming block that many artists have: they're too much in their own head. It's easy to get bogged down thinking about how a painting would look, how to present it, and which perspective to use. But when you paint outside the studio and pick a landscape to sketch on paper, you overcome all these obstacles at once.

Here, all you have to do is portray your landscape in your own unique way without getting in the way of your instincts. Feel free to add or subtract certain elements, but keep your brush moving as you respond directly to what you see. As an added benefit, this is a great way to entertain yourself and find new places in your neighborhood that you might otherwise ignore.

But Where Do I Go to Paint?

Pick any place in your area where you can sit comfortably for long enough to paint. Parks, office buildings, and playgrounds are common spots. Some other spots could include painting in a café, mall, farmers market, local community gathering, or outdoor concert. The list is endless!

What Supplies Do I Need?

When it comes to painting outdoors, almost any basic supplies will do. A watercolor set, some brushes, a pencil for sketching, and a sheet of paper is all you need. Thanks to portable art supplies, you don't need fancy and expensive painting kits to get creative on the go. Remember, great artists have achieved a lot more with a lot less.

Get Started Today!

Painting outdoors is an experience every artist should get to try, whether you are a beginner or expert. You can use Viviva Colorsheets for easy, compact, and portable watercolor painting on the go. Our watercolor kits have everything you need to paint outdoor scenes in vivid colors. So don't overthink it. Pick out your portable art supplies, go outside, and paint away (but don’t forget to snag your promo code first!)

[shooktim-blog]

It’s hard to believe, but the end of August is nigh and, with it, the de facto end of summer. For many folks summer has already effectively ended since kids in some parts of the country have gone back to school. The calendar says otherwise though, and it’s still a great time to plan one last summer getaway, even if it’s just a weekend away. To help plan that last minute trip, I’ve put together some of my favorite spots around the country to enjoy a few days of downtime and to revel in the spirit of summer one final time. This year I’m working with Allianz Travel Insurance to share my thoughts about travel, what makes me happy when I explore the world and why I even travel in the first place. This post is done in partnership with them and I’m excited for the opportunity to share some amazing places to visit one last time this summer. Remember though, no matter where you go travel insurance is always a good idea, as I discuss in this post.

Virginia

Even though I’m originally from Virginia and I live about 10 minutes from the state border, it’s not a place I often explore – until this year. Over the course of two different trips I became reacquainted with the Commonwealth and found myself falling back in love. There’s a lot, I mean a lot, to see and do all around the state from the beaches to the mountains and everything in between. On my first trip I traveled down to Virginia Beach where I found, yes, a great beach community but also a city that is about so much more than its shoreline. From art to amazing food, there’s a lot to see and do in Virginia’s largest city and I immediately wished I had spent more time exploring it. Richmond, the capital of Virginia, also makes for the perfect weekend getaway. Thanks to a lot of changes in recent years, the downtown is as vibrant and lively as ever and there’s a lot to love, from its restaurants and museums to waterside walking trails. For a more adventurous getaway, then Virginia’s Blue Ridge is for you. Using Roanoke as a home base, this is the state’s de facto outdoor adventure capital from biking and hiking to kayaking and tubing. There’s also a vibrant foodie scene, making it a delicious place to spend the weekend as well.

Boston

A few months ago I found myself back in Boston after an absence of more than a decade. Since it had been so long, I tackled the city as a first time tourist and I’m so glad that I did. What I discovered was a fun city but I especially loved experiencing it by walking the entirety of the Freedom Trail. Sixteen different locations dot the Freedom Trail, all of which are integral to the history of the United States. Organized in the 1950s, the Trail is a very easy to follow and manage pedestrian trail that not only shares the history of the country, but offers a look into modern Boston as well. My hotel, The Ritz-Carlton, Boston, couldn’t have been better situated to take advantage of the Freedom Trail. Located next to Boston Common, as soon as I walked out the front door I had already and unwittingly began my exploration of the Trail. If you take advantage of the many museums and other spots of interest along the way, tackling the entirety of the Freedom Trail should ideally take the full day, giving visitors the opportunity to not be hurried and to appreciate the stories at each stop.

Denver

If you’ve never been to Denver before, absolutely spend some time visiting the well-known spots in and around the city. It’s a gorgeous place that’s popular for a reason. But then, try to delver a little deeper and get to know its neighborhoods as well. Denver has seen incredible population growth in recent years, thanks to the famously sunny weather, great natural escapes and a whole host of other factors. This means that the city I visited just a few years ago looks nothing like the Denver of today. Entirely new neighborhoods have popped up out of nowhere, reclaiming areas of town long neglected and forgotten. One of these in particular was a highlight of my visit, the River North Art District or RiNo. Driving around, the shops and cafes were quirky and eclectic; artisanal everything, record stores and taco trucks. It was hipster heaven, and the center of this reclamation is the market known simply as The Source. Housed in an iconic 1880s ironworks building, the goal of The Source was to create for residents of Denver what folks in Seattle or San Francisco enjoy; namely a world class food hall. One stop shopping for the best meats, cheeses, breads, coffees, beers and more was the idea, but the industrial RiNo location at first drew a lot of skepticism. No one knew if the concept would work, but visiting on a busy weekend afternoon I could tell immediately that not only was The Source succeeding, it was flourishing.

San Antonio

I’d long heard about San Antonio’s River Walk, but nothing quite prepared me for the actual experience of strolling alongside it. Created over time in what can only be called a brilliant act of urban planning, today it’s a 15-mile stretch of parks and walkways following the San Antonio River. Set a story below the rest of the city, as soon you as you climb the steps down to the River Walk, the change is immediate. Surrounded by blooming flowers, cooler temperatures and almost irrationally happy people, I soon found myself one of those oddly ebullient visitors, all mesmerized by the city almost instantly. It’s a great treasure for San Antonio, and I best enjoyed it while on a 35-minute cruise along it with the company Go Rio. With equally happy guides – I soon learned there’s no reason not to be happy in San Antonio – the cruise was informative but also relaxing, and a fun and easy way to see the best stretches of the River Walk. The city though is so much more than the river, and throughout my time in San Antonio I was constantly surprised by how laid back and easy everything was. It’s a large city, but downtown isn’t chaotic and thanks to a culture of preservation, the city has a lot more character than most. Art deco facades blend in seamlessly with newer buildings, creating a rich architectural tapestry that frankly is hard to find.

Detroit

In recent years, Detroit has become famous around the world as the city that went bankrupt. The city where entire neighborhoods were left in ruin, neglected and teeming with blight. That’s honestly all I knew about the Motor City before my first visit, and that’s part of the problem. Almost everything we see on the news, in magazines or even on travel blogs is obsessed with Detroit’s so-called ruin porn. Sharing the photos of these houses and city blocks that have been left to rot has been all the rage. Because of that, not many people know the real story of Detroit. That no, the city is not a burning pile of rubble. That Detroit is actually a great place to visit and I imagine to live, and that fact more than anything else surprised me the most. Great museums, delicious food and other fun diversions all come together to make Detroit a fun and, I think, an important city to visit.

Seattle

Sandwiched between lakes and mountains, Seattle’s climate is famously temperate. With a moderate temperature and a vibrant atmosphere, Seattle is one of the best places in the country to escape the summer heat. The city is full of fun things to do like visiting the iconic Space Needle, towering over the city, and exploring the massive Pike Place Market where visitors and locals alike indulge their taste buds with delicious foods and shop for odd gifts. For those who would rather take advantage of the cooler temperatures of Seattle to venture into the great outdoors, the city is a good home base. Washington State has some of the most gorgeous and untouched forests in the country and are perfect for some light day hikes.

Santa Fe

Spending extra time in the idyllic community of Santa Fe was one of the best decisions I made long Route 66, and my time there was just as incredible as I had hoped. Staying at the incomparable La Posada de Santa Fe, the luxury hotel’s service and location in the city made exploration easy and fun. With a history that goes back more than 400 years, Santa Fe is totally unlike any other city I’ve visited. Every building seems to be made out of adobe and there’s a certain international flair that shines just out of sight. It’s a famously artistic and liberal enclave in the state, most of which is rural and somewhat disconnected. Santa Fe though felt more like an expat community in Mexico or elsewhere, its Spanish heritage also embraced and on full display. Walking through the center of town, the weather was perfect and the crowds of people out and about reflected that. A small stage was set up in the town square, and scores of people were camped out with picnic baskets enjoying the afternoon. This ease of living is what I remember most about Santa Fe, and I immediately saw it as a place where I could spend a lot more time and even live.

Myrtle Beach

This is another beach destination that is about much more than the water. I was surprised by almost everything I discovered about the city, but nothing more so than its food scene. There are few things I enjoy more than great Southern soul food, which is one reason why it was my first stop in Myrtle Beach. Pulling up a chair at the locally famous institution Big Mike’s Soul Food, it was just the kind of low-key restaurant I love. I was quickly overwhelmed by choice though, finally deciding on a new-to-me plate of chicken bog. Made with rice, sausage, chicken and special seasonings, it was the perfect foodie introduction to the Low-Country. As I alluded to though, there are plenty of chefs flexing their culinary muscles whether it’s with a unique cocktail at The Chemist, or a meal you’ll never forget at Hook & Barrel, I haven’t eaten so well in a very long time.

Any National Park

America’s best idea, I don’t think anyone would disagree that our National Parks are perhaps our greatest societal asset. I’m also proud to say that America started the modern conservation movement in the 19th century when it created the first National Park. Since then we have added 60 more and many other national monuments and sites forming a vast web of areas so important, that we have deemed they must be forever protected. The so-called North American model of conservation is now the norm around the world, but to really appreciate its importance a visit to a few American parks is in order. From Yellowstone to Yosemite and Volcanoes National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains, we have a lot of options and no one should ever miss the opportunity to visit a few.

What else would you add to this list?

The post 9 Last-Minute Summer Getaways Around the US appeared first on LandLopers.

[failtoplan]

The Generational Anomoly

The current generational model that many pop-sociologists, newspaper columnists and marketers cling to may be a convenient framework, but it is one that is not fit for purpose in an ever shrinking and ever fracturing and more complex world. The most robust academic work in the field, the grandly titled Strauss-Howe generational model is, even to its champions, an Anglo-American-centric tool for historical framing and to its critics, a vast generalization with little empirical evidence to support its core thesis. As appetizing as an academic deep-dive on this may be, I shall limit this to thinking about recent generations and their utility (or otherwise) as a tool for understanding people, cultures from a brand perspective

 The idea of these 20-year monocultural blocks in human time was born out of the post war baby-boom, particularly in the united states and were the beneficiaries of the post-war American high, rapid growth of mass culture and mass consumerism as well as a marked increase in living standards and leisure time. They were also the first group to be dissected from the outside by marketers, and in many respects it the reinforcing messages made the idea of a ‘generation’ and its particular spirit and outlook a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 That the ‘boomers’ and then after, the Gen-Xer, in the US were the two most convincingly coherent cohorts and that may be no coincidence, not just because they were researched, written about and sold to in a way that molded them into a coherent whole, but also, economically speaking, in the west, they were more ‘whole’. On the ‘soft side’ you have a golden age of mass broadcast media and on the hard side you have, what is in the long history of pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial capitalism an anomaly – a decrease in inequality. Now, not to get all Piketty about it, but with good working class wages and earnings doing better than assets, there was a chance for people of the same age across a broadly similar cultural backdrop to have similar experiences, and similar possibilities open to them, socially, professionally, educationally. Historically, this is a aberration, as the young country squire and the young peasant would have never felt part of a similar generational identity, but with decreasingly inequality, relative prosperity, mass media and a world that still felt big and un-PC enough to forget about those defined as the ‘other’ – non-capitalist, non-white, non-EU/US, we could lull ourselves into thinking that this was a world where neat 20-year blocks of people could be in it together.

 Of course if we had of take a global view in the 70s when the idea of the ‘boomer’ the first marketable generation was being popularized we may have seen the fallacy of that, but we didn’t, it stuck and now in an ever shrinking world we can somehow post-rationalize the theory because we all have smartphones. Of course, we cant, and in fact, everyone doesn’t have a smartphone at all. The world is smaller for those who can afford to shrink it, which is a self-selecting and self-confirming sample. The reality is, birth year is a very poor proxy. A 24 year old urban Jakartan vs. a 24 year old in an agricultural area of Sumatra will be very different. The Jakartan may have a lot in common with a 24 year old in downtown Sao Paulo, but likewise he may have with a digitally saavy 53 year old in Berlin. Likewise the our son or daughter of the soil in Sumatra might have more in common with a middle aged Bavarian farmer.

 An age based- monocultural theory works in a monoculture, as the post-war US was to a large extent ( god forbid anyone do anything as pluralistic as declare themselves a socialist, or be black and ask for rights, for that matter) but so the what was age acting as a proxy for in that self-selecting blinkered process. What are some of the key axes, the indicators that can allow us to start forming some useful cohorts, that we can map against populations?

 Urban vs Rural

A key indicator, which has a huge bearing on your views, outlook and interaction with the world – shapes the kind of influences that you are expose to, the amount of risk and reward available to you and the kind of stimulus you have to shape your view. A rapidly urbanizing world offers us a dangerous confirmation bias to the idea of homogenous aged-based international cohorts…

 Education Level

Which itself acts as a proxy for many things, including affluence and even more strongly, political inclination – the higher your educational attainment, generally the more liberal you lean, at least within the normative framework for your cultures political spectrum

 Key Life stage Markers

Another where Age was a useful proxy, but longer, less linear lives and changes in aspiration (when it comes to kids and settling down) and hard headed reality, especially when it comes to urban housing mean that it is not an accurate or useful global proxy any more)

Marriage, parenthood and Home/property ownership are all massive deciding factors shaping someone outlook and view. Where many of the western-centric generalizations about Millennials fall down in Asia is that it fails to remember how much younger people still have children and that, particularly in less equal, more patriarchal skewed set-ups, as 24 year old without a child is more different to a 24 year old with than she is to a 40 year old without

 Digital engagement

One that,, if Google and many over tech utopians have their way, will eventually disappear as a discerning factor, but the reality is that globally we are not yet at a stage when this can be disregarded. Access is uneven, can be patchy and often for many as a proportion of income (another key factor) too expensive to be ‘always on’

 Optimistics vs. pessimistic

How do you see our future? How do you see the world? Naturally this will be influenced by any number of things, but it is important to take into account. There are many with huge advantages in developed nations who are negative in their worldview, and the converse is true in many more difficult to live in cultures and situations. The importance of outlook should not be overlooked

 Of course, taking a mapping based on these, you would expect to see age, driving certain clusters in certain countries, but interesting to see is how that matched up against other groups else way. A Vietnamese urban 20-something might really tally with an affluent, upbeat suburban boomer on America’s east coast…!

 Of course the danger here is veering in the opposite direction, but the point is we must realize that time and age are a poor proxy and no guarantee of some kind of universal human generational experience