Spring walk!

Once again I've been out in the woods. Although technically March does count as spring, the weather won't get to what most people think of as warm until mid-April. But despite this there's already lots to see.  I've put all the photos on my Flickr page, but here are some of my favourites:

My first discovery of the day! These otherworldly little creatures are baby ferns. Aren't they brilliant!  They are born from their seeds like this, all curled up small, and then as they grow taller they slowly unroll themselves and spread out their fronds like little alien invaders.

At first glance everything still appears dry and brown, but look down, and you'll see hundreds of green shoots breaking out through last year's leaf litter. There are whole new plants down there; brambles, tree shoots, grasses, flowers and ferns.  Jubilee Wood is a bluebell wood so under the shadow of the oak trees I found the first of this years bluebells scattered in the new grass. The little white ones beneath are wood anenomes, very pretty to look at but poisonous to eat.

And these tiny blue pin-pricks in the forest floor turned out to be violets!  I think they are Early Dog-Violets but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Now look up! Buds are forming on twig-ends, catkins dangling down and blossoms of blackthorn twisting up, new green branches growing out of the junctions of old trees, reaching for the summer sunlight that is just around the corner.

There are also animals and birds up there. I managed to sneak up on a squirrel until I was only a few metres away, before it saw me and shot up the tree like lightening. I also bumped into a robin as I rounded a corner, in the perfect spot for a photograph. Slowly I lifted the camera, got it in my sights, moved my finger onto the button... and the battery died. Nooo!!

Mosses and lichens are everywhere, and in so many different colours! During my route I found everything from thick grassy green through to lime green, turquoise and even orange. I love the sculptures of the woods, the bleached bones of last years fallen trees and upturned roots that become the basis for the green growing things of this year.

Anti-Lent?

 That's right, it's update time again! Busy times, busy times. I have a job now, which I am enjoying very much, but amidst re-balancing my life I have had some time for a few other adventures:

Luxuries for Life

It's a little rough around the edges, since it was made for a friends weblog in rather a hurry.  But hey, now you know what I look like!

I'd also like to direct you to PostSecret Blog this week.  For those that don't know, PostSecret started as a way to anonymously get your burning secrets off your chest -whether trivial or serious, deeply personal or universal, by writing and decorating a postcard with your secret on it and posting it to a guy called Frank, who turns them into books and also updates this blog with the weekly arrivals. 

Some are heart-warming, some are heart-breaking.  There are happy secrets, sad ones, angry ones, funny ones and downright weird ones.  I love the idea of humans connecting with each other over the sharing of their most hidden thoughts -the things you've always wanted to say out loud but didn't know how to or didn't feel you could.

So, to mark a pretty significant date for me I decideed that I would mark it by sending in my own PostSecret.  Due to the time it takes to post anything to America it's only just appeared this week.  Yes, my secret is live on the internet, for one week only!  I hope it will encourage someone else with the knowledge that really we are all just as pecualiar as each other... but I'm not telling you which one is mine  :) 

Slightly irreverant... but in the good way!

Here's a neat little video my friend Amy and I made the other week.  The idea was to make reading a Bible passage a bit more interesting for our church, so we scripted it, she laid down the voiceover (very comical to listen to) and then we drew the objects out together before I scanned and animated them.  It was just a bit of fun, but it's always good to do stuff like this.

Quickfire drawings

When I'm at Club Mission, and a bit tired, and too stubborn to go home like a sensible person, and I happen to spy a pen a paper just lying there, I do a bit of drawing to pass the time :)  Mostly just the people in the room, sitting and chatting, so generally I only have a few minutes before they move

Just for comparison, my friend Nat's drawing of the same guy is on the right.  I love how she drew his nose.  And there below are two other friends of mine, Stacey and Joe.

Ideas I wish were mine

THIS song by the Kinks has been in my head all day long.  Which is fine 'cos it's a totally awesome track. But here's why... 

11/01/2011


Cop Show

A runaway train of thought.

Alan Day investigates the daylight world tag-teaming with Oliver Knight who gumshoes the sleazy after hours. No doubt each mystery climaxes at either dawn or dusk when the pair are united. Theme tune by The Kinks.

I'll get back to what I should be doing now.

Posted by WJC at 12:34

See the original post on WJC''s blog by clicking HERE  But seriously, someone HAS to make this show for real.

Hourly Comic Day!...

...was actually on Feb 1st, but being me I did mine on the 3rd and didn't even post it until today :).  The idea is that every hour you are awake on that day, on the hour, you must draw/comic what has been going on in that hour.  Check out loads of far better ones by other artists here
Including my old classmate, Luke Pearson who also did one which you can see here

Anyway, I had a go too, and it was a good challenge to do.  It's no Vetruvian Man, the doodles are quick and sketchy, very inconsistent in quality and you can definitely tell the hours where I was tired or fed up with it, but that's the point.  It's honest.  You can't tinker with it later or add bits in.  It is what it is, messy patches and all.

I had to split it into sections to post because it's so long, so do excuse the disjointedness if there is any and we'll see if this works...

(Note: The computer wasn't actually rendering for the entire day, just whenever I sat down to draw!  There was actual work inbetween)

Aspiring

I think this is beautiful



It's done using rotoscoping -tracing live film to produce very accurate animations- the same technique used for parts of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but they've added in all these extra swoops, and the constructions lines, taking the existing movements and then breaking the laws of physics.

The Artist as a Young Lady

(Click image to view full size) 

Realised I never put this little doodle up here.  Just something I was wondering.

I was such an awkward teenager -or at least I felt like I was.  But hang in there all you teenage nerds!  One day you'll suddenly look down and realise that you have finally grown into your knobbly knees and are, in fact, shaped like a real person!

It's COOKIE TIME!!!

Since having to make more of my own food (plus trying to buy less snacks) I have become majorly attached to making my own cookies.  They take about 20mins to make in total, are HUGE and GORGEOUS and I can stash them away for the next week or so.  Each batch I make gets better and I would even say that quite often they're better than a lot of shop-bought cookies I have tried ...not to mention much cheaper!

Wow, I sound like the quite the home-maker and I'm only twenty-two!

(I actually made about eight, but I'd eaten most of them by this point!)

Michelle goes all arts and crafts

...Well kind of.  Happy 2011 by the way!  This is my first post of the new year, what with being at home for Christmas and still working on this animation project (we're in the final stages of the first video now.  It's all getting exciting!) but I thought I'd spare a few minutes for my poor neglected blog.

Speaking of Christmas, I've not had huge amounts of money to spend on presents this year so my siblings and brother-in-law decided we were going to do a Secret Santa instead.  That way we would all get one or two more personal presents for just one person each rather than engaging in the less-than-festive scrum of struggling to buy many cheap presents for absolutely everyone.  It worked really well, and my present to my brother was a T-shirt I drew up and had printed for him.  Trust me when I tell you that the design made perfect sense to him, however it's still quite a fun image even if you don't understand the joke, so I thought I'd put it up here for you guys to see.

Also on the topic of hand-made presents, I made one for my Mum's birthday a few months back.  We knew she wanted to go in a hot air balloon sometime -but it's one of those things you always mean to do for yourself but never quite get round to, so we thought we'd help get her started.  The others all put a little money into the pot and I ... well I made the pot!

Okay I admit, I bought the jar from a homeware shop but that's my parents flying on that balloon jar and I put them there!  I still wish I'd been able to think of a way to put a real 3D balloon on the jar lid, but since I had to post it home my options were pretty limited.  Either way, it went down really well (although all parents are biologically disposed to adore any artwork from one of their kids) and it was lovely to tailor-make something for them.  I think I'll do this more often!  My sister's twenty-first is a few weeks away, that warrants a hand-made present, surely :)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

A very merry Christmas to you!  And I hope you haven't been too put off by the snow being bothersome.  I certainly haven't been.

Christmas is meaning something different to me this year than in previous years.  I'm trying hard to dodge the bustle of shoppers, and the sugar coating of the nativity story.  I'm not even that fond of some of the carols, 'Away in a Manger' among them, it's just to pretty, too unrealistic in comparison to what actually happens in the Christmas story. 

Each year it seems to get more and more watered down, described more like a fairy tale.  I almost want to duck out of it altogether, and back into past years before there was a red-cloaked Santa.  I enjoy the family-orientated side of things as much as the next person, but I just want to take it back to how it was years ago, when there was a little less consumerism, and a little more awareness of good and evil, light and darkness.

I see why we layered the celebration of Christmas over the old yule festivals, and the winter solstice too, since they do have some strong thematic similarities between them.  The idea of hope entering the world during it's darkest time, the promise of a new future, a milestone of change.  The act of deliberately celebrating winter's end during the darkest, iciest days of the year is one of definace, of planting light amidst darkness, knowing it will shine out.  The Bible describes Jesus this way, as the 'Light of the World' that the darkness cannot overcome (John 1:4-5)

For me this time of year, when the cold sets in and we abandon exploration in favour of bundling up indoors, is a time for retreat, introspection, and looking back into the past -rather nostalgically I'll admit.  Folk songs and traditional tunes start to take over my playlists -many of my Christmas songs have a darker edge to them. 

I love the bare brittle nature of winter too.  The beauty in the stark bleakness that falls over everything.  The natural end of the year, and the harmony that still exists in the death of the world.  So naturally I've been out with my camera. 

With all this snow my usual routes were transformed and some photos came out more like Christmas cards.  You can view them all on my Flickr page, but theose up here are one or two of my favourites:

Projected imagination

Check out this wicked example of video mapping, used on the 600 yr old Astronomical Clock in Prague's Old Town (I've been there! but I wish I'd been able to see this)  It was a pretty amazing clock to begin with, but this animation technique takes it to a whole new level


The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.


Quoting from the Makula website (translated from Czech):
Video mapping using current technology available in the entertainment industry, a whole new way. The main contents are the projections to cooperate with the selected object and try to break the perception perspective of the viewer. With the projector can fold and stress any shape, line or space. Evocative play of light on the physical object creates a new dimension and changing the view of the seemingly "normal thing". Everything becomes an illusion.

Good hair day

A candle-lit dinner

We had a powercut the other day, only for an hour or two but it took out over 850 houses.  The whole estate went dark, the streetlights went out, all the way up the main road almost to the university.  Fortunately I'm a hoarder so I had 2 large candles my Dad gave me and a box of long thin ones that I use for wax resist drawings, which I snapped in half and set in glasses.

Of course I realised I couldn't heat any food since our oven is electric (I knew there was a reason I preferred gas hobs!) so took my torch and walked into town towards the lights where their grid was still on.  It's literally a 1min walk or I wouldn't have chanced it, but it was lovely walking down the street without the street lights on.  Of course everyone else was out too, wandering round outside their houses trying to work out if all the streets were down.  Amusingly everyone's first respnse was to phone everybody else and tell them about it!

I bought myself some crusty bread for sandwiches, juice and a whole lot of biscuits.  I enjoyed a very uncomplicated dinner, lit by a cluster of tiny lights.  A nice surreal break from the usual.

Jumpers and... and...

I love autumn.  I mean, who doesn't, but I really do.  There's something about the crispness of the air, the mist, the biting chill, the golden light that you just don't get at any other time of year, early in the morning or when the sun's coming down, that makes everything glow against the sky.  And everything's dying but man is it beautiful.

Maybe it's that whole Death is a Part of Life mentality that just clicks everything about our place in the world back into it's proper perspective, or just nature being phenomenal, but even though we all moan about cold it is how can you not love it?

Still jobless, curled up on the sofa in my favoruite jumper -it's a kind of ruddy orange knitted thing I found in a charity shop and took the sleeves in on.  A proper cold-weather jumper.  I'm watching 'Into the Wild', which I've wanted to see/read for a while now.  It's not done yet but so far I'm loving it, enjoying the vaguely sad feeling that if I went into the wild like that I'd just die (much as I still want to take a road trip someday), but that there are other people out there too whose skin crawls at the idea of a life rules by work and objects where everyone has everything they want and it's still not enough, they still don't treat each other right.  It's something I worry I'll lose once I get a job, once I have money and the temptation is really there.

Looking for work is weird.  I can get by on JobSeekers Allowance but I only get that if I'm looking for a job.  I'm more concerned about what I'll do once I get one than whether or not I'll find one, how it will change my life, my time, what I do with myself, what I care about, even the way the contents of my wardrobe will change.  But in the meantime applying for work and not getting it can be just as bad.  It's hard to stay motivated sometimes, harder to keep a routine going (especially given my preference of late nights over early mornings but it's pretty necessary if you want to avoid a serious case of apathy) and to be on time for things.  The last 2 weeks in particular I've been late for almost everything, despite having nowhere else to be.  You forget what you are capable of when you try, of working hard, of drawing well, of drawing at all in my case. 

But then sometimes it's fine.  I enjoy all the time I have, the fact that I can go see people and spend time with them, that I can drop everything and do something else if I want to.  And then I wonder if I even want a job.

Loving the Non-Dairy Diary   It's charming and lovely and makes me smile.  And there are pictures like this to the right :

See?  Doesn't that just make you want to have a nice day?

Of Tents and Cathedrals

So I was at a friends wedding, turned up early for the reception so drew this to pass the time

It came out really well and Al (the groom at the back there) stood up at just the right time.  One of the kids at the wedding managed to identify three people in there, so that's got to be a good sign!

Something else I'm liking right now is 'The Pillars of the Earth' they're showing on Channel 4 at the moment.  I read the sequel book, 'World Without End', without realising it was a sequel, but I enjoyed the way all the characters lives twist together, and the long period of time it covers.  Both the book and the series cover at least 30 years, something you don't see a lot of, and I liked it.

Plus the title sequence is pretty cool.

Pillars of the Earth - Tv-series Intro (title-sequence) - The Pillars of the Earth

That warm fuzzy feeling...

Well I've been a busy little body lately, partly because I've finally made the official start on my first 'proper' project, by which I mean one where it actually matters that I perform to a professional standard, and also one where I will recieve money at the end.  So hoorah for that!  Maybe once it's all done I'll put a few things up here, along with some links to the final video which will be viewable online, but until then I'm going to have to sit on it.

Also a busy weekend because two of my friends got married on Sat 23rd (to each other!) so a little flotilla of cars made it's way down the M5 to Oxford for the wedding.  I managed to get a little drawing done too, but more on that in the next post.

Rather ironically, or at least dichotomously, I found out that my Grandad has suffered a heart-attack while at the reception party.  Obviously everyone was a bit scared but he's doing fine.  It does kind of throw up the dualistic nature of life on planet earth -these two drastically contrasting events can happen right next to each other.  When I told my friend she said (meaning well, bless her) "Wow, it's almost like Four Weddings and a Funeral" to which I rather wryly replied "Sure, except there was only one wedding, and no funeral at all."  But I know what she meant.

In addition to all that excitement, I've managed to carve out a little time for some reading and also some arts and craft time!  Yeah!

Based roughly on these instructions from the {NewNew} blog I felted a jumper I bought from a charity shop by putting it in the hot wash (and accidentally shrinking it because I forgot to take it out before the spin-dry started), and after some cutting, sewing and generally seamsressing, I produced this:

My hot water bottle fits neatly through the turtleneck and once I tie it closed it is a lovely fuzzy bundle of warmth to rest on during those specially chilly nights -which has been pretty much every night for the past week, so good timing there!

My friend Anna Purver is going to make me a little bird to sew onto it since my own sewing is actually not that pretty.  Sturdy, but not pretty, and I can't use a sewing machine either :)  

You can see examples of her lovely creations over at her blog, Needles and Buttons, and I think a little fabric bird will make a great finishing touch and add a splash of colour.





A man who knew where his towel was

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

~Hokusai

Wearing the Clever Trousers

I seem to be interested in prodigies of late. Geniuses, savants, people of unusual intelligence. I always like to see characters with a brain being appreciated and explored since a lot of attention is usually given to the more athletic and therefore more physically attractive characters.  My current favourites are Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds and the boys from The Big Bang Theory but I seem to have picked up a pattern in the films I've been watching lately, and discovering more in them than just admirable intellects.

My favourites seem to deal with the dichotomy of genius, which is that a mental ability in one area can be accompanied by a deficiency in another. Sometimes it's a simple lack in social skills from too long spent outcast from the popular kids, or a mental illness that counterweights their genius, and sometimes is what makes it possible at all (e.g. Reid shows mild signs of Asperger syndrome, and Rain Man's Raymond is autistic)

So here's this week's playlist:
(Titles link to trailers)

Good Will Hunting
When I read the summary I assumed it would be the classic case of 'Lonely Nobody discovers he has Supernatural Abilities. He is now a Hero!' Almost like a superhero, Spiderman maybe. But instead it focussed on something I hadn't considered before- unfulfilled potential.

Will, the protagonist, is incredibly gifted. He can work out problems overnight that took his professors years to solve, he understands mathematics the way Mozart understood music, and can recall hundreds of facts at a moments notice, yet he spends his time working as a janitor in MIT and getting into pointless fights.

When one professor discovers Will's talents he decides that such a great mind cannot be wasted and bails Will out of jail with great ambitions for him, including formal lessons and therapy. However as Will slowly begins to speak with Sean, the only therapist to survive his vicious repartee, we see that it isn't that he is unaware of his own intelligence -on the contrary, he is so aware of it that he deliberately and antagonistically runs mental rings around anyone he meets just because he can- but that he has been so emotionally damaged by his life so far that he refuses to attempt anything he really wants, for fear of losing it.

There's a lot in this movie; the desire for success versus the perceived shame of failure, what happens when the need for recognition takes over, the assumptions we make about other people's lives, how fear can paralyse and isolate us, the effect cruelty and rejection has on people, the cost of abandoning troubled youths to the judicial system, the merits of intelligence versus empathy, and why we need to know ourselves and examine our actions carefully. It's a very moving film in places, funny too, and surprisingly profound in the aftermath. I highly recommend it.


Proof
Catherine Bryggman struggles to make sense of her life following the death of her father Robert, a great mathematician. When a proof is found in her father's study that may resolve an important theory in the mathematical world, and which Catherine claims to have written, she has to come to terms with the fact that as well as inheriting her father's brilliant mind, she may also be carrying the mental illness that haunted him until his death.

The cast is small which makes it very intimate to watch -the play it is based on only has four parts and they mostly keep to that- and the relationships very tangible. I like the quiet of it, the long pauses, the silences it leaves, and the math joke (I'm a sucker for a nerdy pun). While Proof deals with the same topic as A Beautiful Mind, that of fearing your own mind, I think I prefer Proof for keeping it small-scale and personal rather than going for the career-spanning grandiose air that A Beautiful Mind has, although each is justified in it's filming style for the story it tells, it's just a matter of taste.



A Beautiful Mind
John Forbes Nash Jr. is one of those guys whose ideas and discoveries are behind a lot of the processes we take for granted today. His work as a mathematician focussed on using maths to describe and analyse human behaviour and strategies, and the patterns and effects caused by variations in the environment (please excuse my Laymen's, all those with better understanding of it). He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Many people get schizophrenia confused with multiple personality disorder (I did until I looked it up), where the sufferer switched between personalities, but schizophrenia is more like switching between versions of reality. The sufferer experiences things that simply are not there, hallucinations and delusions, while often appearing perfectly normal in all other ways.

For most of his career Nash struggled against the advance of the illness, and the film (based on the book of the same title) shows him trying to reconcile with the fact that his most treasured possession, his mind, is also the source of his greatest suffering.  It's a window, albeit a decorated and slightly Hollywood-ised one, into the fascinating life of one remarkable man, and just how resilient humans can be.


Rain Man
This is supposed to be one of those films that 'Everyone Has To See', so I gave it a go. For the impossible few that haven't heard of it the story revolves around Charlie Babbit, a young man very bitter towards his estranged and recently deceased father, who discovers that he has an older brother, Raymond, who is autistic and living in a care home. Their father bequeathed three million dollars to Raymond in his will, only leaving Charlie his old car, so in an effort to claim 'his share' Charlie hits the road with Raymond, hoping to use him as leverage. However the more time he spends with his brother, the more his attitude changes towards both Raymond and himself.

Rain Man doesn't really fit my genre since it's more about Charlie learning how to be loyal, compassionate and generally less of a selfish ass than he was before than it is about his brother's genius, Raymond is just the catalyst that begins that transformation and it is his disabilities that are the real focus.

In that sense Raymond's mind isn't really explored much, but the portrayal of autism has been highly praised and that's important because this is the other way of approaching the topic. The other movies (Proof and A Beautiful Mind in particular) show highly intellectual people holding the fort of cleverness against the onslaught of mental illness or emotional trauma and for the most part succeeding. Rain Man approaches it from the other end of the spectrum. Raymond has never fought as John and Catherine fought, because from the moment he was born he was already lost to autism, but rather than portray him as someone to whom mental illness represents a long fall into darkness Raymond is shown as a complete person, and not a lesser one for being autistic. He is eccentric and bound by the need for routine, but he is complete. Moreso than Charlie in many ways, and as he learns to recognise Raymond as a valuable human being he has a connection with, Charlie is humanised in turn.

Bowing and scraping

Hello hello, I'm still alive.  Apologies for the long absence, up here in the university town of Loughborough we have been having Freshers Week (fortnight!) so a hundred and one things have all been crying out for my attention. 

As a peace token I offer you this picture of a funny man.

I drew it as a commission for a friend, and she was very specific about what the style, colours, everything was going to look like, right down to the exact tone of red for the background.  It's just a straightforward portrait but I rather like it.  He changed a bit from the sketching stage when he was a lot more angular and stylised.  Billy Connolly is a very funny guy, but darn it when you break his face down into it's constituent parts he has got some scary features!

Here he is in sketch stage and a different style that got rejected for the final version, with his squinty little eyes, big black eyebrows and some pretty awesome hair.  I do like drawing longer hair, it's just more fun.