….I might be getting good at this photography lark, I come across something like Marc Bradshaw’s site. OK, to be fair, he’s been a professional photographer, trained and everything. And he has all the equipment (instead of a cheapo little digi, like me). But you can have the most expensive gear in the world plus years of training, and still produce rubbish pictures. Marc, however, has real talent and it shows. Give his site a look.
Meanwhile, I have a magazine to produce…. (sigh…)
I’ve had a LiveJournal account for ages, but only ever used it for reading friends’ LJs. However, yesterday, while looking at a link from one of their Journals, I discovered the .
Impressed by the quality and range of the work displayed, I joined; I shall henceforth be displaying my art work on my LiveJournal.
….on the A75 to Dumfries:
A pub sign saying “LIVE PIANIST ON SUNDAYS!” Good job too – a dead one would pong up the place something awful.
A tank (the military kind) sitting on a layby, covered in tarps and camo netting. With a couple of totally uncamoflaged military-issue chemical bogs standing alongside it.
Went out this morning and shot off a few photos of natural textures – closeups of grass, bark, moss, stone etc. Rather too many of them came out like this:
Looks like a bad case of camera shake. But, visually interesting…..
…is one of my perpetual problems. The work will be piling up, people will be shouting at me on the phone that they need it NOW. And I’ll be wasting hours – no, days – surfing the internet, telling myself tht I’ll buckle down and do it – sometime. I’ll get it done, eventually, but it will be late, poorly organised and full of mistakes.
So, I was gratified to learn that I’m not alone. Dean Hunt is a fellow procrastinator, and has written a blog post about it. He’s offered a couple of tips which he says have proved useful. I’ll be trying them out!
Because now, I have another stretch of can’t-be-put-off-anymore work coming up. There’s the July edition of Transit to get ready. Plus, I want to convert one of my other sites to WordPress, which will entail a fair bit of customising. And I have to put together a new version of the Elfin Diaries site.
This year, I’m giving it a complete overhaul. I have to keep on using that dreadfully buggy, JS-heavy ecommerce software but it’s only needed for the shopping area, which can be shoved into a sub-directory. For the rest of the site, I intend to use standards-compliant PHP pages, so that I can make use of includes and other dynamic content. And, of course, if somebody accesses the site with a non-JS-enabled browser, the whole thing won’t fall over.
Well, I’d better start using Dean’s tips, and get to work….
…I shall carry on with my present artwork-in-progress. It’s a pencil drawing on A3 cartridge paper, using just three colours (vermillion, Spectrum Blue and indigo). I’ve been working on it on and off for a couple of months, just picking it up now and then and doing 10 minutes or so. This is the way I like to work – I can’t imagine shutting myself in some studio and doing nothing else for five or six hours at a time.
It started off as a drawing of B on the sofa; almost straightaway, it started taking on a life of it’s own. I like it when a drawing does that – it takes off in unexpected directions and leads you to surprising conclusions. It’s a bit messy and I’m not at all sure it’s going to be worth the effort. But I’ll carry on with it. Heck, it’s my drawing and I can do it how I like!
In case you think I can’t, I can draw “properly”. I can spend hours on a careful representation drawing of a piece of crockery or glassware, say, getting all the reflections and bumps and curves and shadows and tones and proportions and details. And I’m pleased with the result. But when a work comes to life and decides what it wants to be – that’s the exciting bit!
An author writing an SF story wants some facts about space physics, so that he can get everything right. So he uses his Live Journal blog to broadcast an appeal……
…Sue & Bob moved in to Grahm’s old house, a day earlier than I’d expected. Had made plans to bake them a loaf and carry it ceremonially into the house as a good-luck sign. But I had to make do with a bottle of my home-made wine. Sure that will have much the same effect!
Gave Son most of my old computer bits, plus my trusty PC Upgrading & Repair book – he was complaining that he’s bored, so now he can get busy building a working computer. By the time he’s done that, I should have enough cash to buy him a wireless networking card and glom him into my broadband network. Then he’ll be kept busy downloading music and IMing his mates!
I might find out if Bob and Sue want to share my broadband network as well – they can pay a third of the costs and we’ll all save money.
I’ve started doing more drawing, and run out of sketchbooks! I’ll get a good sketchbook at the end of the month; I’ve plenty of loose A3 drawing paper to fill, but a sketchbook is useful. I might get a porper drawing board as well.
The photo shows my artbox, where I keep all my drawing and watercolour stuff (I keep my oils and acrylics in a another box). I cleaned and sorted it out today, discovering that I have an inordinate number of watercolour pencils and pastels – I hardly ever use watercolours. I mainly use coloured drawing pencils, and I’m short of several shades in those. So that’s more to add to my art shopping list.
Just got one of those forwarded emails. You know the sort – multiple headers with every sender’s complete address book in each one. And a message body that consists of a few “uplifting” homilies (“Because we cram so much into our lives, we tend to schedule our headaches.. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when all the conditions are perfect!”) followed by an instruction to send it on to everyone. The excuse for this particular forward was:
It’s Friendship and FAMILY WEEK Show your friends how much you care. Send
this to everyone you consider a FRIEND. If it comes back to you, then you’ll know you have a circle of friends.
To those I have sent this to… I cherish our friendsh! ip and appreciate all you do.
So. Let me get this right. To show somebody that you consider them a valuable friend, you send them this load of email dreck? The identical email dreck that you have just sent out to everyone in your address book?
As it happens, I don’t even know the person who sent it to me – we share an email list, but, as far as I can remember, we’ve never met. I’ve certainly never had a personal email from him/her and I don’t consider them a friend.
For me, a friend is somebody you can share things with, call up and at time to grouse or weep with, go round to their house to be fed, share jokes and good times and bad times with. In other words, not somebody you would send this stuff to!
Ron Ferguson, the religious correspondent of the Glasgow Herald, usually writes something that is worth reading. True to form, his latest column poses some pithy questions:
Religion is part of the problem in the Middle East. Madeleine Albright is right: it needs to be dealt with openly, rather than denied – because religion also has to be part of the solution. While each of the three monotheistic traditions has some toxic texts, each also carries within it a radical critique of the actions of political or religious leaders claiming to act in its name.