Snowing

A few shots of the snow outside in the garden. The snow is only a couple of centimetres deep but is continuing to fall. I don’t think this weather will last long, but it does seem strange that it’s falling in November. Most years we don’t get anything even at Christmas. It sometimes snows in the new year and can last a couple of weeks but generally it’s been mild for most winters. What does worry me is the cost of heating our house. Gas and electricity bills are skyrocketing. Ah well, that’s life.

Spinning Top

Not feeling on top of the world today so just did a sketch from memory. Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was Top. I tried to remember what a toy top looks like. I did a sketch with a black ink fine line pen. This is from memory. I can see a bright top spinning in my mind. The top had some holes in so as it span it had a rising and then descending musical tone. Edited in Photodirector to give a slightly abstract effect.

Raydon

Seeing Pudsey bear 🐻 on children in need last night (a telethon to raise money for childrens charities) reminded me of this teddy bear. We went on holiday to a Youth Hostel in the Lake District of England one year. The hostel was old, small and friendly. It was at Thirlmere near the lake and consisted of a few simple wooden huts. The hostel warden was called Ray and he was really friendly. There were a wide range of old board games in the hostel so on a dark wet night, you were entertained without the need of a TV or radio, (this was before mobile phones). One thing Ray did to raise funds was to sell knitted Teddy bears that his mother made. I fell in love with this one, but Ray said that it had to have Ray in its name… Raymond, Ray-chel, perhaps? I’d heard of the gas Radon so my bear became Raydon, after all in that colour he virtually glows in the dark!

Fern leaves

I can’t remember how I got this image, I know it’s based on a photo of fern leaves and I must have used layout to mirror the patterns. But how I added the various colours and added the tiles? I can’t remember. And just how did I get the embossed effect…. It must have been an app I no longer have on my phone. A puzzle, which is what the image looks like.

Three years ago…

Walking around the world museum in Liverpool three years ago, I was so impressed by the travelling exhibition of the Chinese terracotta warriors. Obviously only a few if them were represented in the gallery, but it gave a strong example of the creative and military civilization behind these figures.

There were crowds at the gallery, people shuffled round and many of the exhibits were partially hidden by bodies that strangely mimicked the warriors remaining in China as they stand within the archaeological dig there, rows and columns lined up. Humans used to congregate. They group, they press against each other, travel together . That feeling of community has been lost to some degree because of Covid. Will they ever do the same again? Will we go forward in time to a freedom we do not enjoy now? I don’t know.

Pattern

A digital drawing, but done on an app I don’t use anymore. I can’t remember what it was called, but it was changed radically by the people that ran it and it became much less painterly and much more patterned filters. In the end I could not get on with it. I lost the enjoyment of it. When I manipulated images I could not create patterns like this anymore. Eventually I gave up and deleted the app about three or four years ago.

Full phone

Your phone is 85% full. Please transfer data to you SD card.

Trouble is that’s almost full too. Can I get an SD card with more memory? Can I get the data transferred over? Why have I filled this phone up? I love it. Its got lots and lots (thousands) of photos on it. And I look at them, using them for inspiration for my art. If I transferred them to the cloud would they stay available? Some companies are now withdrawing the use of free cloud storage. The world must be filling up with data too… Bring back photo albums.. Dusty memories….

1980’s views

Photos from an old album. They were taken forty years ago. They won’t mean anything to anyone except me. They are old memories. Of winter when snow fell deep. When I lived in a flat. When the underfloor heating woukd blow out in a strong wind and me and my friends would be very cold till it was fixed.

It also has memories of when the skyline of the city was simpler, when some of the houses still stood. The colours are strange because I always used 400 iso film. That and the misty murk makes it look very gloomy despite the snow. So much has changed since then. No tape recorders or cassette tapes. No black and white TV’s. Even videos seem to have come and gone. Computers were only just being introduced. Yes my memory goes back a long way.