Looking at glass

I was talking to a fellow artist about drawing and painting glass. We discussed whether it has a blue tinge like water but I disagreed. I suggested he looked at the reflection on glass. Sometimes glass is tinted slightly, uranium glass for instance is yellowish, I said I thought it depended on what is added to it when it’s manufactured. I think if you were to put a glass and a plastic bottle next to each other as an exercise and draw what you see you would probably notice stronger reflections on the glass. Also look at shadows, glass, though usually transparent, throws a shadow…instead of using blue to define it I said try using a bit of grey. Observation is very important.

Wheels

White walls or black walls, old fashioned bike wheels are getting hard to find. Everything has gone over to metric and the 27 inch and 26 inch tyres of yesteryear are hard to find now. That’s a problem for people like me with little legs. I had 26 inch wheels and when I had my bike rebuilt they put in 700c’s which are ever so slightly larger. That resulted in my saddle being slightly too high. I always used to lay my bike on the floor to get over the frame, but once I stand it up I can’t get on the saddle. I want to lower that, but the bolt had seized… Might try finding a shopper bike!

Hard work!

Yes that is an exercise bike!

The gap where the Russian vine used to be a few hours hard work helping the builder. Talk about building upper arm strength. We are having some fence replaced tomorrow. Then various other jobs done. I ache all over but I’ve agreed to go for another walk in a few hours. I’m hoping it’s doing me good.

First World countries are mostly too sedentary. Say in front of our screens, forgetting that we are essentially all still cavemen and not really built to be sitting down all the time. I’m almost too old to learn that. But I have. I hope I can keep it up.

Removing Russian vine

Tangles

Our telephone cable and the neighbours has been tangled up in the Russian vine. They came round yesterday and asked us to remove it as it was affecting their phone line. Luckily we had booked a builder to do some work, so he very kindly got up on the neighbours garage roof to cut it back. Now the question is where to ut the stuff! Three huge loads went into our councils brown bin to be collected next Tuesday. We will have to fill it a few more times before we get rid of it all. What I was worried about was the number of wasps around the vine because its in flower. Off out again in a minute to help clear the mess!

Rabbit or Hare?

Sketchfu was another site I drew at. More sophisticated than Youdraw. It closed when the owners decided to send more time on another website. Lots of artists drew there. I made many friends and we did various challenges like copying photos of objects, but I also liked the freedom. You could also add to other people’s drawings. So it was almost like a joint animation. Like everything else in the world, things change, they never stay the same.

Proserpine

Youdraw image

Youdraw is a website that used to rely on Java script but after a while of being down its started up again. The area you draw on is only an inch by two inches in portrait orientation. You have a thick and thin black pen and a thick and thin eraser. But despite the limitations if you played with it you could thin the black lines or reduce the eraser marks. I did thousands of drawings there as Christine M-B. I’ve done just a few since it’s started back up. They are trying to collect 500,000 drawings. I copied a lot of my drawings and added colour to them.

Another youdraw I did.

June sketch

June, before all the leaves had grown on the trees. View out the kitchen window over the main garden. Usually there is a cat in the way but not on this day. The bird feeder on the window didn’t get used. I guess being stared at by an interested looking cat isn’t a good thing when all you want to do is peacefully eat some sunflower seed kernels. This view showed the ripening cherries on the tree, gone and eaten a month later. X