and why not…? If you’ve got a dragon, why not go all unicorn… I tend to draw dragon heads a bit like horses heads. Unlike the dragon in ‘how to train your dragon’ where toothless the dragon reminds me of a black cat.. I digress. The app I used to create this is called something like free sketch? The trouble is I use so many of them that I don’t always remember which one I’ve used!
On this sketch I tried using a fountain pen, but for some reason it won’t make marks? This is why I say experimenting is so important. Learning how to use a tool in an app so that you can understand what it does.
You know you are bored when you start doodling dragons. Not very good ones at that. I was watching a film, the desolation of Smaug and this came out of my head. My only problem was I drew it on my tablet, which isn’t synced to my phone and some of the apps on one are not on the other, so I have drawings on one device I cant access with the other one unless I take a screenshot for instance. Also wordpress is presented differently on each device. I guess because they have different manufacturers. So this was going to be a lot more complex and layered. I might do more……
He was stern, bearded, he was a patriarch and knew it. He had always been strict with the women and girls in the village. They could come and go, but were not allowed to go to lessons, while the boys had schooling, and of course the best food and clothes.
Nothing would change his mind, that was how things were and that was how it would always be.
His daughter, turning ten years old, looked up to him. But she was clever. Too bright for washing clothes till her hands went red, too clever for feeding the chickens or wringing their necks and plucking them when the time came. She could do everything girls five years older than her were capable of. She stitched and sewed, she span wool. She was useful and her father knew it.
‘father’ she would ask. ‘Why is the sky blue? How old is the world?’ Or ‘why are the clouds that shape?’ One day she even asked why the moon waxed and wained. Her father would just say ‘none of your nonsense my girl’ or ‘get back to your laundering’. The daughter turned round sadly and carried on with her chores.
For two years this carried on, until one day the father became ill, he took to his bed, and despite his wife’s care he only grew worse. His eyes were closed when his daughter bought his supper to him one evening. She spooned some broth into his mouth, he retched, but she persevered. Little by little he supped the food. Later she came to check on him and he seemed a little better.
A week later he was sitting up in bed. His daughter came into the room and he held her hand as she gave him more broth. ‘what’s in this food’ he asked ‘it tastes strange, bitter’ ‘just herbs’ she said.
When he had fully recovered the father asked his wife what she had used to make the broth, ‘it wasn’t me’ she said. ‘Daughter talked to the old women, she made the broth after speaking to them’.
Later he talked to his daughter ‘how did you know how to cure me?’ ‘I asked questions like I always do’ she said.
Finally his mind changed. ‘you will go to school my girl, if you can learn such things off old women, I want to know what you can learn in class’.
The daughter started school and after four years she was taken into college. Finally she was trained as an apothecary. From then on the father insisted all the children, girls as well as boys, should be taught.
Turn a photo into an abstract by mirroring it in the Layout app run through Instagram and Facebook. If you take a photo that is a bit lopsided then when you multiply the image you get interesting patterns. You can rotate the pictures so you can get a variety of different patterns.
Experiment and see what suits you. If you see odd patterns that can be interesting. Branches enclosing a flower. In this case mirrored handles on the pot makes for an unusual ceramic object when all it is, is a jug. Ariel roots and leaves from my orchid plants frame the resulting pattern.
Have to say I’m still irritated with WordPress, everything seems so slow. Pages take ages to load, but I’m going through the same process over and over again to find a path through the new editor. I keep taking wrong turns, looking for tags that don’t seem to exist once I’ve posted them. How are you all doing? Am I getting on your nerves?
I decided to type my work in PowerPoint because I struggled with word documents jumping around and the text ending up half way on one page and half on another.
PowerPoint relies on slides, so you have to fit your text into a space which is of limited size.
I’d created a new one and went to start typing, and bam! A page of text just disappeared. What? Where? For some reason I couldn’t see the back icon, I couldn’t restore the page! Panic!
Then I remembered that I had copied the text into a word document because I couldn’t find a word count on PowerPoint!
Phew. Restored slide. Lesson learnt. Now all I need to do is stop the cat jumping on the keyboard!
I decided to place some text in my writing while I actually decide what I want to put in my college manifesto, (sometimes you see pieces of Latin put in a document so you can tell how much space your writing will take up) . It has to be about me, to explain what I should be doing to support myself as an artist and illustrator and also how I can support other artists. So I intend to look at things like a Universal income for all. I know some countries are trialling it.
I know some artists who are on very low incomes who have had a slight uprating of their benefits, which has helped slightly, but are still living a hand to mouth existence.
I want to look at what is happening to arts in schools. Perhaps I should be doing workshops with pupils? The lack of spending on equipment, especially in the poorer schools, must be having a detrimental affect on children’s lives.
Finally, I have to think about supporting more community arts groups. I’m determined to support the Arts in a more productive way. Perhaps using my skills as an illustrator. We will see…
When your cat decides it’s been ignored long enough, and you have to switch off the computer because she’s walked on the keyboard and jumbled your writing up. Then got in the way so you can’t see the letters on the keyboard too!
So, decaff coffee time, sandwich time. Listen to the radio for an hour. We all need a break, otherwise you turn into something like Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. A mad woman locked in a bedroom, tearing out her hair (while trying to cite and reference books about the artist Hokusai)!
Cat’s rule in this house. And I’m not complaining! Back to work in a bit.
Our discussion today was about Levi-Strauss the anthropologist and his discussion about how food can be an analogy for life.
I found it hard to follow, Raw was the raw ingredients, before things are transformed by cooking. Then he discusses how cooking by boiling is somehow female, while roasting is male? Then raw can go to cooking, then rotten or directly to rotten. We discussed the paths we are taking as artists on this course. Have we gone from raw and unformed to cooked, and do failures in ideas indicate rotten. We also had to read from Richard Sennett’s book ‘The Craftsman’ which helped to explain the ideas.
Someone suggested pickling or fermentation as other outcomes. I have been an artist for so long I don’t know if I’ve changed that much? Possibly, as they say practice makes perfect.
Mallaband-Brown 