Camera – the winning

6°C, it’s snowing now!

Painting: The SubSveins picture is now complete and posted in the "Oil paintings finished" section. It’s the second one( or at least until I finishe another one) – press the square to restart the slideshow.
 
Won: I got the older camera of the two Sonys. See the bigger picture in the previous post.
I hope I made the right decision with that. The one I got is more versatile, but the one I didn’t feels more natual to use. Oh well… 
On the subject of photography, below are some photos of dramatic skies taken with  my current 2 mp camera. 


Aviation Art: interesting website(Robin Smith). It seems that the best painters of this gentre began as landscape painters.
And another one, Wade Meyer– an especially interesting page, he describes the technique. Drawings of aeroplanes with the slightest errors of geometry can look hideously wrong.

Cameras, the bidding

5°C, Hail


Cycling: 51 miles, got home just as the first hailstorms started.

Camera shopping: bidding on eBay for a Sony digital camera.
There are two that really appeal. The lower one, which is the newer model looked perfect in the shop I visited yesterday. The only thing is- it can’t record video clips. In most other respects, it’s a better camera. On eBay generally selling for £100 more.
 
The two cameras are compared here:
 
 
 
There’s a really detailed review on this american website of the other camera high up on my wish-list. Thus
<>

Eeeé

8°C, less wind, fewer showers, still sun.


Linseed: Used a No.2 brush- eeek! the picture has earings, eyes etc. the cheek needs another glaze, something odd has happend with the gradients there. Nevertheless, it’s going in the right direction.

It’s good to be over that "purple-patch " that stopped me painting in the middle of term. We break up for Easter tomorrow.

Banshee

4 to 9°C, clear & bright. But there’s a long streak of mustard brown coming over from Rugely power station.


00.40am. Woken by the most chilling, piercing screaming from an almost unnatural sounding source. It echoed around the brownfield site back there in the icy air, in a complex mix of baby-crying, injured animal sound  with wolf-howl urgency. I suspect foxes. Not  fox, there were two sounds intermingling. Perhaps a pair of foxes intermingling .
It echoed for real around the yards and still does in my head. A sticking thought.

 
Linseed: SubCutaniuous has hair now. It’s ginger, which is more complex than it seems. It took some working up- with cadmium orange (obviously) B.Umber, T white and chrome yellow. And, since I was on, I put another glaze on skin tones, just to work up the lustre. What fun seeing it develop each day- I like this one.
 
As before, I will pass on the photograph today, you’ll have to wait.

Glass drop

7°C


Laurie anderson:

  Langue D’Amour
Let’s see. Uh, it was on an island. And there was this snake.
And the snake had legs. And he could walk all around the island.
Yes. That’s true. A snake with legs.
And the man and the woman were on the island too.
And they were not very smart.
But they were happy as clams. Yes.
Let’s see. Uh…then one evening the snake was walking about
in the garden and he was talking to himself and he saw the woman
and they started to talk. And they became friends.
Very good friends.
And the woman liked the snake very much. Because when he
talked, he make little noises with his tongue, and his long tongue
was lightly licking about his lips.
Like there was a fire inside his mouth and the flame
would come dancing out of his mouth.
And this woman liked this very much.
And after that, she was bored with the man.
Because no matter what happened,
he was always as happy as a clam.
What did the snake say? Yes! What was he saying?
OK. I will tell you.
The snake told her things about the world. He told her about
the time there was a big typhoon on the island
and all the sharks came out of the water. Yes.
They came out of the water and they walked right into your house
with their big white teeth.
And the woman heard these things. And she was in love.
And the man came out and said: We have to go now!
And the woman did not want to go. Because she was a hothead.
Because she was a woman in love.
Anyway, we got into their boat and left the island.
But they never stayed anywhere very long.
Because the woman was restless. She was a hothead.
She was a woman in love.
And this is not a story people tell.
It is something I know myself.
And when I do my job, I am thinking about these things.
Because when I do my job, that is what I think about

 
Photo: The whole view from the back of the house is visible in this little blob of glass. something odd is happening in msn spaces. Often when I try to upload a picture to a post, no picture appears, instead I get two blank "drafts".

click clack

10°C, strong wind & heavy showers


Cycling: those cables did the job. Nice clean gearshifts at last.
66 miles.

Linseed: Wasn’t going to post a picture today, but having put in another hour, it’s clearer where this picture is going. The blue veins will be pulled right back, the colour needs to be quite strong for now so it’s ready for the next frotte. Also, I plan to change the profile around the chin.
I’ve noticed that pictures at this stage don’t show changes as obviously in photos posted online. Perhaps tomorrow a close-up then?

cabling

15°C +heavy showers


Bike: A day of fixing and tuning bicycles. Bad gearchanges have been irritating for months, even after adding new cables, rear-derraileur mechanism, new cassette & chain- still no luck. Today I added cable sheaths, they can make a huge difference. The amout of cable-pull for one gear change is very small, as well as return springs being light these days. They are therefore very sensitive, much more than they used to be.
Tomorrow will reveal the effect..
 
Fingers crossed.
 
 

It’s a zebra officer

10°C


Zebra :: crossings are a place that cars stop at so that people can cross life-threatenting roads. The cars stop when they can see a person standing waiting to get across. Most of them do it in response to a law that insists. Some don’t and I’ve ranted about this practice in the past, but today was quite astonishing. The car was all stripey, but not black & white like a zebra- more that police car way. The police driver wasn’t in a hurry to either get anywhere, nor in a hurry to stop.
 
Astonishing.

Unison

12°C, sun then rain

Strike: that closed many schools, not ours though. It looks like a dispite that has valid points on both sides if reporting is to be believed. On the strikers hand- they are angry that in effect the promise that they will bea able to retire at 60 years if they have worked long enough is being withdrawn. On the other- as many parts of industry are rasing their retirement age to 70, there seems to be some resentment that the puplic sector is sustainting an early age in an era where people are living much longer. Private sector workers have even included that they, in effect produce the wealth that public sector workers earn through taxes.
Our school is barely affected by this action.


Orange night: interesting evening; quite a stormy day, heavy rain and strong-ish winds but all is still now. Out with the dogs the sky is like a roof. Or at least like a ceiling, a very high one like a Cathederal. Clouds are clearly visible- lit up by sodium streetlights. There are dark lanes up there, where the clouds overlay the surrounding farmland. Then there are islands of light in the cloudbase, one above Burntwood town, another Whittington and Sutton Coldfield is there in the inverted map in the clouds.

Action- look down.

Rain @ 11°C


Flash: Drawn a bloke’s head and animated some short movie-clips- one looking down, the other to look up.
the idea is to play the clips when the mouse rolls over defined areas of the stage. It should look as if the head is following the mouse. It’s possible to use actionshcript to make the head follow the mouse, but that doesn’t give controll over sub-animations as it moves.
If I can get this wqorking, then I can make the sub-animations in Poser. How neat would it be to have a poser character oin on-screen presentations. Eventually, I want to phase out PowerPoint in favour of Flash.
 
Wait! I never use Powerpoint anyway.