Birdie

Just a quick update - it's Mother's Day today so I painted mum a card, as I've been doing since the watercolour painting class I took! Instead of botanicals, I thought I'd try something different and went for a robin.

I've not painted a bird in watercolours before - in fact, the only time I can remember painting a bird was in acrylics and it wasn't realistic - so this is pretty different. I had no idea what techniques I should be using so I just treated it like a drawing, but less scribbly than my actual drawings!

The biggest challenge were the pale colours. The robin in the reference photo I used had white feathers and was standing in snow. I don't even own white watercolour paint because it is bad and wrong - I was taught to use the white of the paper to represent the purest white shades. I mixed up a light grey and used that to suggest the shape a bit better on the robin itself, and diluted it to use for the snow as a wash. The textured paper works well with this technique.

I think this turned out quite nicely, but I'd definitely like to practice drawing birds more before I try painting them again. That way I can experiment more with different ways of shading to get a better idea of what works for feathers.

Uni stuff & doodley cards

Hihi,

Been pretty busy with uni lately, hence the lack of updates. This term we're doing TV instead of radio, and I've discovered that this is a lot harder. I've been working with Nicole and Verity, and I think it's been really good to have three of us on a team as there are so many things to think about when recording footage for a television package. The last time I did video work was at school with a little consumer Sony Handycam, which was easy to use. The kit we have here is a professional Sony Handycam, with a gun mic. Heavier and more awkward to use! Each week we've completed a shooting assignment, which has progressed from a simple five-shot sequence to getting material for a 1-2 min package. This week, we covered the M Shed museum winning an award. It was half term, so there was plenty of fodder for vox pops.

Here's the package I edited together on Friday:


Yes, it is Verity reporting at the start with my voice on the voice-over at the end, but we were all practising using the editing software so I didn't want to drag her away from her work to record the VO!

I think the effort expended in creating a TV package is incredibly challenging, and I'm definitely more at home with the editing process (yay, computers).

Cards

Right, on a totally different note, I've been to a few birthday parties over the last month or so and I enjoy making cards for people, so here are a few doodles I did:

Bunny for Sara

Link for Jamie

Totoro for Rachel

I never really enjoyed colouring when I was younger, because I found colouring pencils didn't suit my scribbly style of drawing, which you can see in the picture of the bunny. I tried a different way of shading with the other two, which I think has worked a lot better, as the shading looks smoother.

Ok, now I have a small mountain of reading to do so I'm going to tackle that today!

CSS3 Patterns

Disclaimer: These work best in Firefox 26.0 or Internet Explorer 11.0 - they should work in Chrome 32.0 but I've noticed the rendering unfortunately isn't quite as good as Firefox's, so the flowers look jagged. So, yeah, you might be seeing a bunch of words and no pretty pictures, but fear not, I've screencapped a couple if you don't happen to use one of these browsers.

Right, I got a bit distracted from coursework and started playing around with some CSS to make a new website design...I quickly got bored of that and decided to have a go at making some patterns using CSS3 gradients. I came across Lea Verou's page on gradient patterns when I was looking into CSS3 while working at Nokia a couple of years ago. I didn't really have a good reason to use them back then, so I filed the page away for later.

One and a half years later, here I am, fiddling about with gradient styles. At first I just didn't get what what going on, but trial and error led me to this:

Nice enough, but kind of plain. Further messing around, and I made something a bit more exciting:

And eventually, I made some flowers and leaves:

I'm quite pleased with how they turned out - not sure if I'll end up using these for anything, but I'll stick the code up on GitHub once I've tidied it up and added the backwards compatible tags.

Write Blog, Not Homework

Trying to make up a word limit is hard sometimes, especially when people you telephone are not forthcoming with information ): I keep being told to look online for answers to questions, when what I really want is a statement from a person of authority.

I've been busy busy with uni work and other things, so it's been a while since I last blogged. I also managed to sprain my ankle on Thursday - it just gave way while I was walking along the pavement, so I'm hobbling about and housebound (at least until lectures tomorrow) since stairs are very difficult to go down, and I live up three flights of them.

There was a 0 hour game jam on Sunday, because of the clocks going back an hour for Daylight Saving Time, so I thought I'd give it a go since I haven't coded anything for a while. It turns out it's not really enough time to do anything, especially given that I didn't have any idea what I was going to make when I started. I made a sort-of-but-not-really RPG, kindly hosted by Mark, who also took part in the jam. I spent far too long fiddling with pixels instead of checking everything worked as intended, so there's a fun "feature" if you try to take a particular action near the end.

It was mum's birthday last week, so I painted some leaves for her. First time I've got out the watercolours since I did the course earlier this year...

Leaves were what I really struggled with during the classes, so I might do some more practice at some point - if I get any free time! Journalism is about to get more full-on next week, as we'll be starting the project unit and doing newsdays on Fridays. I did manage to relax this weekend and play some games - I've got a 3DS XL now and Pokémon X, early Christmas present - so who knows, maybe I can sit around painting all weekend in the near future. I hope.

Various Drawings

Don't worry, I haven't given up on the 30-day challenge yet...just struggling to find a photo to work from. In the meantime, have some other drawings:

This is a zebra. I have some calligraphy pens that I use very rarely; turns out they are good for zebra stripes.

I was discussing opticians with some friends and someone came up with Optic Ian. Two things to note from the these photos: 1) I really must work on getting limbs in proportion 2) My figures would probably look better with shadows under their feet, rather than floating in mid-air.

Here is a rolly man. He is rolling off this page and telling you to come too, because it contains disaster dragons and a lame llama.

I met up with a friend in Boston Tea Party just now and I took my sketchbook along. After the aforementioned fail page of creatures, I decided to draw something I could actually see, so this is a little teapot that had Darjeeling tea in. Drawn only in 5B pencil, because changing pencils is too much effort, or something.

Finally, a creative-technical-type friend of mine discovered an interesting website that allows you to earn skill patches for real-life skills. While some of the challenges seem restrictive, I am tempted to try out a couple so I have a starting point to work from, but I really should finish the 30-day challenge first.

30-Day Art Challenge - Day #2: Draw a figure from a reference

Challenge details

After about an hour crowdsourcing ideas for who to draw (no thanks to you, BUNCS - Spongebob Squarepants is NOT a person), I settled on Gendry from Game of Thrones, but I couldn't find a suitable photo. I ended up with this but he was doing something funny with his eyes and I was sick of looking for pictures so I decided to draw Arya Stark instead.

The figure itself wasn't too difficult, aside from the heavy jacket, but it was a real challenge making the face look like Arya. First it looked like some kind of teenage version of her, so I scrapped that and redrew it. I still don't think it's quite right, but it'll have to do. I think it was just difficult to draw a face so small, since I am used to drawing portraits of people that only include the face. In addition, I usually draw men so transitioning to drawing a girl was a bit odd. Anyway, here she is:



Looking at it now, the shoulder is also a bit wonky, but her clothing pretty much covers her figure up so much that it is hard to distinguish what is going on.

30-Day Art Challenge - Day #1: Self-portrait

Challenge details
First day, and I did this at silly am because who needs to go to bed early when you haven't got anything to get up for? I drew this from a photograph. Max is a giant cat that belongs to my cousins. I went for this mainly because I like kitties, so an actual cat in my self-portrait is perfect :D I got a bit bored after drawing the face and went scribbly, which has led to an inconsistency in detail - not the intended effect.

I'm not entirely sure how to approach this challenge. I mainly draw with pencil or a fine felt-tip pen, but the styles I use for each method of working are quite different. If I want to improve, I feel that I should use the same medium for all the challenges, but but but I want to draw with a pen as well! I could do both, but I'm far too lazy for that, so I think I'll stick with pencil for now and perhaps find a different challenge to do with pen at a later date.

Drawing

I need more inspiration, so I've decided to do a 30-day art challenge.

Watercolours

Right, I've been suffering from some sort of dreaful lurgy on-and-off over the last month, hence the delay in updating. I am currently tucked up in bed reading the entire internet and feeling rubbishy, unfortunately.

A few weeks ago, I started a painting class at Bristol Folk House to fill up my time. The main focus is botanical watercolours, so we started off drawing flowers and went on to painting flowers and leaves. I've mainly used acrylics before, so this is fairly different, plus the delicate nature of watercolours is somewhat at odds with my scribble-madly-all-over-the-place style. That said, it's good fun and I am enjoying being in a classroom, makes a nice change from the impersonal lectures I've had for the last few years.

This is the first painting I did, of a closed-up rose. I took my rose home in the hope it would open up a bit so I could practise...it sort of did, but the centre remained steadfastly closed, which was a shame.

The second painting is of the same rose, after the outer petals fell away a bit. Posted it to mum for mothers' day; she was pleased with it!