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Sometimes the line gets crossed… by that I mean that sometimes I cross the line… from client to friend. And then to supporter.

Our latest client is 91-year-old Fan Benno-Caris. You may have seen her on CNN or major local TV and radio news programs, as well as the Dallas Morning News and its website. Fan is running "the biggest race of my life," she says. That race is for a place on the Addison City Council.

PentaGRAFX has created the website and all the campaign collateral material for the Addison For Fan campaign.

But Fan isn't new to competition. She's a world-record-holding, world champion racewalker. More importantly, Fan is a person who knows what she wants in life and goes after it. She has a vision for herself, sets goals, and sets her shoulder to the wheel and does the work to achieve those goals.

Fan Benno-Caris is my hero. And although I cannot vote for her because I live in Dallas (we should talk to Addison Mayor Joe Chow about that) I heartily support her in her Addison For Fan campaign for a place on the city council.

While small and petite, Fan's stature and sweet demeanor might lead one to be dismissive. But one does so at one's peril. She has some strong views on a variety of issues facing Addison — and all cities — as the global financial crisis becomes more and more localized. And she will be heard.

Keep an eye on Fan Benno-Caris. She's the leading edge of a movement in this country, a movement by folks with experience in a wide variety of areas who are not content simply to rock away their sunset years on the front porch while sipping on a lemonade. They've seen the mistakes of the past and want to step forward to help us avoid repeating those blunders. Or, at least, to help us prepare to weather the storm.

If you live in Addison, Texas, I enthusiastically encourage you to seek out Fan Benno-Caris, learn more about the issues, and vote for her on May 9th.

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Our client, Candice White, a brilliant portrait photographer, is expanding her business to include boudoir photography. After receiving over 100,000 hits on her portraiture website, we discovered that her boudoir pages were receiving more hits than any other category. Since her main business is family and child portraiture, we thought this was information worth acting on.

Turns out that even after factoring out undesirable traffic, the number of hits on her boudoir photography page was substantial. We began by discussing a theme for the site. Ms. White has a strong love of theatricality in her photography, so we decided to use a theater-look as a springboard for designing the site.

What does a theater have? Curtains. Great big, sensual, velvety curtains. What didn’t we have at our disposal? You got it. But the next best thing was using lots of imagination and a bit of Photoshop to create our own curtains.

Fortunately, Candice happened to have a red dress made of a very “red curtainy” material. We steamed it a bit to remove some wrinkles and hung it on a garment rack as you can see below. We locked down the camera and shot several frames in succession, each time moving the dress down a bit and rotating it so that the folds fell differently for each shot. This gave us a natural-looking lighting setup — slightly hot on one side and falling off to the right.

It took some manipulation in Photoshop to get the “curtain” to be reasonably even at the bottom from stage right to stage left. Once completed, we copied the curtain’s several layers into a new single layer and made a layer mask out of its shape, then unlinked the mask. We used Motion Blur to get rid of all the wrinkles, once and for all, and blended the new, blurred curtain with the curtain layers below using Overlay. This gave a sheen and a snap to the curtain that the original lacked.

Touching up a few minor flaws, we then had our curtain. We added a valance and a stage and we were in “show bidness!”

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PentaGRAFX just launched a new website for the Fort Worth Art Show supporting their inaugural show on Sept. 20th in Fort Worth. It includes bios of the founders, a blog of their activities and thoughts on creativity, and gallieries of a small portion of their work.

Also planned are an e-store to buy art online and resources for custom framing.

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We just finished a new website for our client, Southland Safety. They’re an industrial safety company with clients in Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Chemical Manufacturing, Construction, & DOT Operator Qualification.

The site was three times larger than originally planned and we accomplished everything we set out to do at the start; improvising, adapting, and overcoming all the obstacles we met along the way.