£10 treasure from a charity shop

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It’s not often that you find a cycling scalextric set for sale for a tenner, and it works. From a local charity shop. After a bit of messing about with the pickups underneath the model cyclists, we were flying round the velodrome, racing round the backed curves and barging each other in the little built in narrow sections. I flew off into the crowd and hubby fell off sideways onto the blue track around the base of the racing surface. It was fun, I actually smiled! Plus the cat found it interesting, her head was going side to side as she watched the toy cyclists.

It bought back memories of Sir Chris Hoy at the London Olympics, and all the different sorts of races cyclists do, devil take the hind most,  different numbers of laps, pursuit and other races, (OK I cant remember the names). They race fixed gear bikes with no brakes on banked track. I had a go once. I could not get onto the banking on my old steel bike. I was much happier watching the races!

Horse

horse woodcut style painter

I’ve just downloaded a trial of Corel Painter Essentials 7

In English I mean I have downloaded a drawing package onto my computer. I hope it will be easy to use, I have got to explore it. What I ended up with after five minutes of playing is like a cave painting! so I guess that’s appropriate as I’m learning.

There are lots of things you can set on it, various AI things (artificial intelligence) like an AI Van Gogh. But I haven’t sussed out how to use them, I clicked on the buttons but wouldn’t say that I could  see any difference to the mark making.

Later I’m going to read “Where the Wild Things are” by Maurice Sendak (if that’s how its spelled). Its a book I read in my childhood and I am interested in using it as part of a case study for my course, what fun!

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Releasing my mind

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I tried to draw a ‘real’ shibui. I’m not sure I’ve actually got the right idea, but anyway I started with an ink pen held lightly between thumb and forefinger. As I breathed I let the lines wander across the page. These are the purple marks. I even rested he pen on my hand and let it slide down in a wide, slightly jerky, motion…. Then I found ideas coming into my mind, faces, eyes, animals, a skull. Icecream, figures standing and crouching. I decided to add colour. I hope the drawing expresses emotion, and thought. I realised this morning that I had drawn environmental themes. These include a polar bear on cracking ice and a tree dying in the heat. A possible wolf skull and a blazing sun setting fire to the world… Its called Releasing my mind.
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Shibui

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I’ve just been invited to join a page on Facebook about Shibui. A Japanese word that seems to mean calm and understated. The art there is ‘found’ with things like paint splatters or blown watercolour paint used to create images. Maybe trees, maybe flowers.

I  had a go at creating something. I used my finger to draw on my the screen and created a digital image. Using a few apps to make something interesting. I want to find out more about the art form.

Old drawings 2005

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I was mooching about my PC looking for old pictures that had been saved onto it before I had to have it fixed. Well after ages of searching I found the old drive they are on. It comes with a timeline, so I can find when they were posted. These are a few of my drawings from Youdraw in 2005. I also helped moderate the site. Apparently its been upgraded. When I’ve got my new drawing tablet I might draw some more.

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Be the moon…

Turn yourself into the moon! With a toilet roll. My friends in Australia are doing this. Third one I added some dots for stars and sprayed black around the third on in a sketcher app.

Funny how you can create things so simply. I found the most difficult thing was to line it up, I took a few photos and on a lot of them I could see the blue paintwork in our bathroom. Plus it’s exposing my face to the world! Don’t laugh too much!

Dragon in my sketchbook?

The dragon flew into my sketchpad from my imagination tonight. I was watching a series called Merlin on TV and it just sort of happened. The purple ink pen went a bit splodgy.

The world is still in lockdown. People want to escape but its not safe. So playing with glitter glue, ink pen and felt pens is just taking my mind off it. Then edited it to a negative image to be a bit different. 

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