New paintings and regular art updates.
These little animals are by my friend Rie. She’s also made pumpkins, and they are for sale at the Waiting room gallery in Longport, Stoke-on-Trent. Some of them are based on Egyptian gods, others look like cats, dogs and foxes.
I’ve already got a few of Rie’s pieces and I bought an animal from this collection. I think she might be making a chess set soon.
They might not look like much yet, but I’ve just blocked in three small painting that I sketched out over the weekend. The middle one is of a cat curled up on an armchair. The chair will be covered in a holly pattern.the cat on the window ledge will have a blue and white vase next to it, and the pottery is an imagined view in the snow,
I’ve got a busy week so I might not be able to get online much. Also I’ve got toothache!
This isn’t the tablet but a drawing of the screen. I installed lots of software today. What a mess! I have different passwords for each app. It confused me! Had to reset some. I wanted to do lots of stuff today but I’ve spent four hours just learning how to use it.
Anyway the photo is for day 21 of the 1″ inch challenge for October.
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When you are learning to draw you can use a grid to help. If you are trying to copy an image you can draw a grid over the original, then draw the same sized squares on the paper you are drawing on. Finally copy the original onto the drawing by filling in each square. The grid helps you place lines more accurately. If you do the drawing in pen instead you can rub out the pencil lines. It’s really only a device to help learning to draw, or if you want to draw out the basis for a painting when you are using opaque paints like gouache, acrylics or oils. You can also use this for scaling up or down. If the squares are half size on the original the drawing will be twice the size (or vice versa), hope this makes sense.
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The Aurora borealis is something I’ve never seen but always wanted to. When I see photos of it I’m amazed that electrons from the suns solar wind can cause such beauty.
The electrons and other particles travel along the magnetic lines of force at the North Pole (and South – the Aurora Australis I think it’s called). As they interact with the magnetic field they glow. The different colours denote different elements. I think Green is Nitrogen and Pink is Oxygen.
The Aurora occur at the poles because they are where the magnetic field is at its weakest and drops down towards the pole. If you have seen iron filings round a bar magnet you can see how the field curves round and down.
So what is solar wind? It is the matter that pours out from the sun when there is a hole in the corona (upper atmosphere of the sun). There are coronal mass ejections where the sun spews out masses of ionised electrons which interact with Earth’s atmosphere.
There is a lot more about aurora’s but my knowledge is not good enough to explain more.
I was thinking about writing about Daylight saving time but this blog saves me having to research it. Very interesting.
As mentioned in my previous post, in the early hours of Sunday 27 October the clocks go back an hour throughout the European Union and daylight saving time comes to an end.
Although many Europeans will welcome the extra hour in bed on the night of 26/27 October, I suspect that a lot of people won’t like the darker evenings. In this post I’ll talk about daylight saving time (DST) : the practice of advancing the clock by an hour during the spring and summer months and why this is coming to an end in many countries.
The advent of DST
The first place in the world to practise DST was the town of Port Arthur, Ontario. In 1908, a local businessman, John Hewitson petitioned the town council to adjust the clocks one hour forward in the summer months so the locals could enjoy an extra hour of summer sun…
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Sketching designs for winter paintings that can still be good to have on the walls all year round. I’ve seen a painting with a pottery in the snow, so I’m going to do something similar with Holly and Ivy. The second idea is a cat on a windowledge with a blue and white vase next to it.
Will try and get them painted this week.
Coming up on 22nd October 2019 is the Orionid meteor shower. There have already been a few fireballs from the shower and they are due to peak at dawn on the 22nd so it might be worth setting an alarm.
Where do they come from? They are dusty remnants of the comet Halley. They are the dust cloud that came off the comet as it travelled through the solar system. Halley returns on a regular basis. It was identified as a recurring comet by the astronomer Edmund Halley when he realised it was the same comet that had been seen in the sky around the time of the battle of Hastings and then approximately every 100 years or so afterwards.
The meteors (or meteorites if they land) appear to radiate from the area around the star Orion which is why they are called the Orionids. There are other showers of meteors throughout the year. These include the Persids and the Geminids. Some showers are brighter than others. It depends on the debris cloud that the Earth moves through. The dust and debris for showers are in patches of space that the Earth moves through, hence their yearly appearance.
The Orionids apparently move faster than a lot of other meteors so they can create more of a show. The speed increases the friction and they burn up in the atmosphere faster.
You can find out more at a website called Spaceweather.com
I don’t remember it happening. It must have been long ago, before the sky fell, before the Mirohs arrived. When I was young?
The world had been burning, literally, fires everywhere. Ice melting. One day it was cold, the next boiling hot.
I don’t remember the day we reached 3..
Three degrees of global heating. They had said two was bad, but we got it even hotter. The seas won’t rise. My Mom told me that, it will never happen said Dad.
It’s all a blur. Running from the sea, trying to find homes in the hills. Millions crushed in the cities that were not on rivers…
They could have called it the great flood, but the papers said the sky was falling. What it meant was the rains and storms, so heavy they flattened towns in seconds, crops died. We started growing rice in paddy fields, it was the only way to get some sustenance in all the wet, dank weather.
Two years of hell passed. I was growing up and worked in the fields. All of the children worked. No schools, just back breaking work, bending and shoveling.
We hated it, but we were not polluting anymore. Life seemed to pause and take a breath…
Then the Mirohs came, an alien race. We saw their ship, huge, like a great storm cloud. They looked down at us. Like bugs we were to them. Then the killing started. The message, you didn’t care for your precious planet. So we will take it. Humanity is a pestilence. They put something in the water. Now no one can have children. In a hundred years or so…. We will be gone.
Will anyone remember us?
She was staring straight ahead.
Looking into the distance,
Into the past or the future?
No one knows.
Staring hard, vision blurred,
Tears forgotten.
Memory faded.
Staring at what?
Old hysteria?
New apathy?
Hidden thoughts,
Was it fate?
No one will ever know.
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