New paintings and regular art updates.
That was Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt. Well I need a new fridge freezer. Mines been beeping since 2.30 this morning. We think it’s because it’s too frozen and not defrosting properly. It’s done it a few times but not for this long before. Can’t sleep as we are in a small house and it’s very loud so watching the news to drown it out a bit. My ears hurt!
No photos of last night’s fireworks! This was from two years ago, January 1st 2021. It was far too noisy last night. The cats were frantic as what seemed like hundreds of fireworks went off in about ten minutes around where we live. Bang, Boom, Crash, Flash. I had the curtains closed but could still see flashes of light through them. I just talked calmly to the cats and turned the sound up on the television to drown out the noise. After about twenty minutes it calmed down and the cats relaxed. The amount of money spent on fireworks last night must have been huge. I wish they would only sell quiet fireworks. I think you can get them.
Because the world is a globe some people on the international date line will have celebrated New Years day about ten hours ago. It also makes sense that the world is round because it gives Santa twenty four hours of night to get round the world instead of twelve if the Earth was flat (think about it!)….
I want to wish you all a Very Happy New Year. May 2023 be better for you, better for your family and friends and better for the planet too. X
Stay safe and well. X
For as long as I can remember I have drawn eyes. Sometimes I’ve even just painted them. I have always drawn faces, my Mom would ask why I drew nostrils when I was about nine or ten, and I said it was because people had them! I’ve never stopped drawing eyes, but I have a definite way I learnt when I was a child and its hard to get out of the habit, they just don’t look realistic. It’s something to do with the shading of the eyeballs, and the eyelids and flesh around them. Hence doodling to play with my technique and used photodirector to change the texture on the drawings.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was pets. This is one of our black and white cats, his eyes are very dark gold so when he’s in shadow they are hard to see. He’s the biggest of our rescue cats, he used to be the outside cat but has migrated in and now lives happily with our other two.
Vision changes with age. If you have shortsightedness it can sometimes get better because your eyeballs can shrink with age, that means the image hitting the retina at the back of the eye comes back into better focus. On the other hand the lens in your eye can start to stiffen and the muscles around it don’t pull on it as well as when you are younger. So the lens does not focus as it used to. This is called presbyopia and tends to affect people over forty (if I remember). Hence vision can change with time. Worth getting an eye test?
A glow in the sky
Memory of an evening walk
Across grassy fields
And over stony stiles
Only a few days
By the sea
But I remember
The hues and colours
The sights and river sounds
Blousy hedgerows
Full of blossoms
Fruits and seedheads
Mild and breezy
Candyfloss clouds
Cornwall, County of coastlines
Beautiful beaches
High cliffs and moors
I want to return.
#bandofsketchers prompt today is Integrity. To me that is also part of my identity. I had fun trying to recreate fingerprints (not mine) after watching the royal institution Christmas lectures about crime scene investigation. Having Integrity is also somehow about honesty.
There’s something called the Drake equation that hypothesises whether there is other intelligent life out in the universe. I don’t know it and can’t quote it, but I looked it up (see above). The fact that the scientists have even found amino acids in space (the building blocks of life) means that there are possibilities of finding other beings.
The equation looks at how many possible inhabitable planets are out there, whether life could evolve, and whether intelligent life might come about. Then you have to think about time. If an intelligent life form was to exist somewhere else they might send out signals, but it could take millions or billions of years to travel across space before we detected it, and by then they could be long gone. So it would only be possible to communicate if they were closer, tens of years away? But then a conversation with someone even twenty light years away (the distance of a possible habitable planet) would be very boring. One question every forty years, one reply eafter another forty years. And space travel would only be possible at a small percentage of the speed of light, according to the laws of physics. So we might be able to talk but not visit.
It might be great to get a signal, but even if there are other civilisations it doesn’t mean we will ever find out.
#bandofsketchers prompt for Christmas day was Joy. I decided to sketch a sort of nativity scene. I wasn’t totally happy with it so added texture using the photodirector app on my phone. Merry Christmas x
Mallaband-Brown