Jubilee Woods

Not the best start to the day -woke up crying after a disturbing dream which pretty much messed up my morning, so to cheer myself up I decided to take myself off for a walk somewhere.  The good thing about Loughborough is that you can drive for 5 minutes and be in a field, or in this case a wood.  Jubilee Wood has a couple of walks and I took the Red Walk (1 hr).  I'd never been there before but it was all signposted and a really lovely place to be on a breezy end-of-summer day.  It will be spectacular in winter, when all the branches are stiff and bare with frost.

It's not a huge wood, about 10 hectares (25 acres), but a lot of it is native Oak, which just happens to be my favourite tree, so this is my ideal walk really :)  I love everything about oaks, I love their age, their strength, the thick rough grooves of the bark, the way their branches always resemble lightening forking skywards, and how good they are to climb.  They are very solid reliable trees, but also very dramatic.

Of course it's at this time of year that most of the fruits and berries are ripening.  I came across some elderberries, and the last of the blackberries, which are almost all ripe by now. 

This fine looking plant below I'd never seen before, but a passing walker informed me that is was the Rosebay Willowherb.  It grows in recently cleared areas and wasteland, has some traditional medicinal properties and many people consider it a weed, but, not willing to take the thing on face value, I decided I like it!  If I'm going to have weeds grow in my wasteland, they should all be as pretty as these.

I'm being forced to reconsider weeds a lot this week, since I've been trying to sort out the garden.  For some reason I really want to grow things but before I can do that I have to tidy it up, and most of it is weeds, or rather 'Plants that Grow in Annoying Places' which is all a weed is.  I've been pulling down ivy, which I like generally but it runs riot and it was blocking the sun from the smaller plants and stifling them.  A lot of it was dead.  Also I've been digging up brambles, since ours is small and weedy, with no blackberries, and I know if I let it stay it'll grow crazy fast and get out of control like the bush I had to battle with in my last house.  We now have a pretty impressive heap we're hoping to compost.

And finally, we have dandelions. 
Oh sweet dandelions, how I hate you, you WILL INSIST on growing through the patio slabs because you KNOW I can't fork you out from there.  I'm currently trying to kill ours with a mixture of boiled vinegar and salt, since I don't want to pour chemicals on the garden if I can possibly help it.

But now I'm wondering, because I passed a full-grown dandelion plant while I was walking, about a metre high, and actually I don't know why it's a weed.  Yes it's hard to get rid of, it's annoying, the leaves are ugly and you get syrup on your hands when you pull them up, but the flowers themselves are very beautiful.  They are thick with petals, a lovely sunny yellow, and they smell amazing, nicer than a lot of store-bought flowers.  You can use them in medicene, making drinks, salads, and cordials, and they look very pretty when you have a bunch of them altogether.
So why is it a weed, just because it likes to grow in inconvenient places?

Footwork experimentation

So I just finished decorating a pair of shoes I promised my sister for her birthday.  It's the second pair I've done but the first shoes I did in Permanent Marker and there were a couple of problems with it as a medium, so this time I tried painting it on in Indian Ink instead.  Here's the breakdown now that I've finished them:

Permanent marker
+ Lots of different sized pens means a lot of precision and detail, so you can do some really fine work.
+ Easy to apply crisp lines
+ Hard to spill, or get on other stuff accidentally
- Limited range of colours (unless you are rich and can afford posh ones)
- Comes off/fades if you wash them -as I discovered after some guy trod on mine and I had to give them a rinse.  Yes there are tutorials all over the internet on sealing permanent marker drawings into clothing, but most of them involve heat and it's very difficult to iron a shoe.

Ink
+ An absolute devil to get out of any kind of textile, which in this case is a good thing, providing it's good quality ink.  I'm hoping it will stand up to a few gentle hand washes,
+ Soaks into the fabric, meaning it won't sit on the surface and crack when the shoe bends.
- Needs to be applied with a brush, which makes it hard to do a lot of detail and fine lines.
- When it soaks in it can spread a little
- Reacts differently to different fabrics.  You'll see this on the shoes.  On the canvas the ink stays pretty much where you put it, but cotton, such as on the seams and hems round the ankle of the shoes, soaks it up so the colour will shoot round it or soak through to the inside.  This is not necessarly a problem but needs to be known about so you can plan your work.

Anyway, here are the shoes:

She chose the design, and I think she probably based them off the shoes I did for myself, which is why there's a Day shoe and a Night shoe.  I love having a mismatched pair like that.   As you can (hopefully) tell it's a group of little autumn hedgehogs, having some fun before going to curl up for the winter.  Because who doesn't love anthropomorphic forest critters!!

This time round I made the design a lot simpler and less cluttered.  Like I said, I love my own shoes, but they really only work in close-up, since I put a LOT of stuff on them.  And surely you want other people to be able to admire your fine footwear without the aid of a maginifying glass, right? 

I was a bit worried that they'd look empty, but when you're standing up looking down at them, the balance is just about right.

I've stuck to black ink so far for reasons of time, money and... I just think it looks good. It can be easy to get carried away with elaborate colour schemes (especially when you're me) and just make a jumble of it.  I saw some painted shoes at a market that didn't look good at all, partly because people use bottle-colours rather than mixing their own, or they just haven't got a tone or colour palette worked out beforehand.  Also the trouble of controlling wet media on fabric pops up again, and the more colours you have going on, the easier is is to make mistakes you can't fix. That said, I'd love to start introducing some colour on the theoretical 'next pair' now I've had a couple of goes.

They took an evening to do, 2-3 hours per shoe.

And, for comparison, here are the first pair I did, the ones in permanent pen.  I de-saturated it to make up for the horrible tint my old digital camera put on it, but they are just black and white too.

See what I mean?  They are more 'me' (by which I mean weirder and with no unifying theme so a big jumble), and have more fine detail, but from far away it's all a bit busy, and as I said, the ink faded when I washed them.  See the mud mark on the toe?  Some guy stepped on my foot, on their first outing too!  Not that I care, I did those shoes for ME and I still love them.  They don't even fit any more and I can't bring myself to throw them away.  I love the way the monster is split across the two shoes, and the little lizards on the toe of the Day shoe.

I see positives and negatives on both ink and pen, but the positive for both is that the canvas soaks it up, stopping it from cracking as the shoe bends and flexes.  I want to try acrylic paint, for the colour more than anything else, but my worry is that as the shoe bends (especially as fabric shoes are so soft), the dried acrylic will crack and split so I may have to look into some kind of medium to get round that

Special doggy is special

I love our dog.  One of the nicest things about being at home is having a dog around to fuss over.  He's friendly, furry, and loves cuddles, but he does have this weird sleeping position I've never seen any other dog do.  I was doodling him with my Wacom tablet while he was dozing in front of the telly and he stayed that way just long enough for my to draw it.  I'm calling it The 'Seal' position.

SIlver lining

It was my parents 25th wedding anniversary about a month ago which, for those not in the know, is silver.  Now, I have nowhere near the finances to even think of getting them something really silver, so I tried to think of other things that come in silver and ended up making a (slightly last minute) little book that kind of documents their life so far.  It's just some line doodles and I printed and bound it myself but it came out quite nicely and they were really pleased with it.

Here are a couple of my favourites:

(Tin Foil refers to the star we put on the tree, which us kids made when we were really little. It's a pretty terrible star, just cardboard and foil, but we still have it and we still hang it on the tree)

Dawdle down memory lane

Feels like summer's coming to an end, although the last few days have been insanely hot, and worse, humid.  That sticky heat you can't escape from, that wraps you up like a damp duvet 24-7.  The cloud cover even meant I missed the Peseid Meteor shower, which I loved watching last year.

But tonight we had rain.

You can see it coming for a few days, and then it finally hit around midnight tonight when I was walking the dog.  I didn't even wear a raincoat, just enjoyed the coolness of it.  I'm really looking forward to autumn, and then the bare starkness of winter.  I always get a touch of 'Swallow syndrome' near the end of summer, when I just want to GO places and DO things, but by late September I've settled down to the cozy prospects of winter hibernation.  Woolley jumpers, apple and cinnamon crumble, frosty walks and slippers.  Oh yes :)

That said, it's been a fun and relaxing summer, despite the hectic-ness of entering the Real World.  There's still been time for drinks with friends (photo: The Wheatsheaf, Woodhouse Eaves), picnics in the country, and just laying in the shade enjoying the warmth.

Doodly roadtrip

Man, I never mean to draw fanart... maybe becayse I associate it with scary teenage girls making character pairings that border on the terrifying and squealing a lot (disclaimer: Out There does not mean to offend any genuine Fangirls... mostly in case you attack me and squeal at me) but if there's anything out there worth fan-arting, The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal is it.  I plug this thoroughly awesome webcomic far too much, but it has made my Tuesday  :)

Not inked anything in ages, since one of my tutors told me I sucked at it, but drawing this was a lot of fun, and I DON'T THINK IT SUCKS!!   *sits down firmly*

So... is it a real book or just an imaginary one?

Picked up Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah from the second hand book stall in the market for tuppence, and if you're like me and enjoy having your brain stretched then I would highly recommend it. 

The story is narrated by a man who lives by travelling from town to town giving plane rides for a living, and Donald Shimoda, who is doing the exact same thing, having quit his two previous occupations; one as a mechanic, and one as a messiah.  Yes, you heard me -miracles and all.  During the time the two men spend travelling together, Shimoda attempts to explain to Richard why he quit, and how he can learn to see past the world presented to us as reality.

It's really a fascinating book, one of the ones that suddenly makes you aware of things that you had probably known, or secretly suspected, about life for a long time, but perhaps had forgotten or put to the side.  One or two parts are a little contrived, but the idea behind the story, the two main characters, and the setting more than cover for those moments, so I didn't really mind.  It'll probably be a tad hippyish for some people, but then I guess you only get out of these things what you're willing to put in.  If you don't want to consider anything new, you won't.  Personally I spent a couple of hours after I had finished it just thinking it all over.
My only real negative would be that, as with most books on the metaphysical, you shouldn't take it as gospel without questioning it, as some of the reviews on it seem to do.  It's engaging, thought-provoking, and inspiring, but not infallible.  But nevertheless, definitely worth a read.  It's one of those books that, although not lengthy, makes you wish that the world could be better than it is, and to question the simplest of the things you do from day to day without thinking.

Mailable art

Did a little design for a card, to be sent out by my church, Open Heaven, to the students who have gone home for the summer, just letting them know we're still thinking of them and also to update them on what's going on when they return.

As my tutor Jemma said "Don't try to draw things that are invisible!"

Well if you've got to pick anything like that to draw, anything to do with God is probably the worst.  The classic fallbacks are all in Christian symbolism - crosses, doves, rays of light, and while all these things are good and communicate their purpose, I think it's better to not jump to use them automatically. 

So here's me trying to think of something a little different : )

I don't mind the font; it's good, but not great.  I know typography is one of those things I need to keep working on -maybe I should try drawing my own.  If nothing else it'll teach me patience!

Steady there, chuckles

"I love you, not only because you are deformed; but because you are low. I love monsters, and I love mountebanks. A lover despised, mocked, grotesque, hideous, exposed to laughter on that pillory called a theatre, has for me an extraordinary attraction. It is tasting the fruit of hell. An infamous lover, how exquisite! To taste the apple, not of Paradise, but of hell; such is my temptation. It is for that I hunger and thirst. I am that Eve, the Eve of the depths. Probably you are, unknown to yourself, a devil. I am in love with a nightmare. You are a moving puppet, of which the strings are pulled by a spectre. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth. You are the master I require. I wanted a lover such as those of Medea and Canidia. I felt sure that some night would bring me such a one. You are all that I want. I am talking of a heap of things of which you probably know nothing. Gwynplaine, hitherto I have remained untouched; I give myself to you, pure as a burning ember. You evidently do not believe me; but if you only knew how little I care!"

Victor Hugo ~ 'The Man Who Laughs'  p195:
 
I don't know about you, but I read that and get the shudders.  Literature is amazing :)  That said, you think this is bad, try reading his Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It's a good deal different from the Disney movie and rather depressing.  Hugo was, if I have it correctly, living in a time when more people were starting to believe that there was nothing more to the world than the immediately reality we see around us (this was when most people in Europe were still Christian by rote so this was quite shocking stuff).  No spiritual element, no God, no nothing, just cold hard math.  To be fair, some of them found some wonder in that, but a lot of them set out out to show everyone else how the world could function without a God -and others how they couldn't- and that this was the way they should live.  So they wrote this idea into stories. 
 
Unfortunately for those that reckoned mankind could function without God, in these books everyone usually ends up either dead, about to die, or horribly depressed. 
Kinda shot yourselves in the foot there, didn't you guys :)

Archiving Night Walks

I'm officially closing down my pre-grad blog, so this post is basically stocking up on all those knick-knacks I can't quite bear to part with.

The Tale of How:


Making Of video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlZNIIjLU8



Little Dragon - 'Twice' music video



This silhouette based music video is ridiculously simple, yet somehow very charming.
The way the cloth moves to imitate wind, and how they make the rain fall, little details like that, are just a joy to watch, but it's the soundtrack that really makes it. A strong sense of narrative too
 
 
Tyger
 

 

 
This Is Limbo's Flickr Photostream
 
 
 
It's tree that looks like a rug!! No, wait, I mean a rug that looks like a tree. Oh bother *bangs head on desk* I meant to announce that so triumphantly and I screwed it up.
Anyway; rug, tree, you understand.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  And finally, from the incomparable XKCD:

You have to admit, he makes a fair point.