Personal Blogs

Still having fun exploring vector illustration and I'm beginning to get a sense of how they can be used in a swift, loose way. Here's a self-portrait.

I've been playing around with vector illustrations recently, with the particular object of trying to make something that looks less, well, 'vectory'. My innate drawing style tends towards the freer end of the spectrum and I like to incorporate happy accidents when they crop up - smudges, blobs, smears, mishaps in general. I think it adds something. The problem with vector drawing is that it tends to be very precise and it's not easy creating something 'sketchy'.

Anyway, here's drawing I did that shows the effect that I'm after - it's all vectors and no post-production handmade mixed media. You might notice, if you look closely, some blotchy bits (white blobs on shirt and 'ink blob' on hair line. The stark truth is that these too are carefully constructed vectors and as such are a rather dishonest artifice.

Question is, are there any means by which a vector based illustration package could be made to create random effects during drawing, like blobs and slips and so forth so that there is a genuine element of randomness, instead of having to contrive it?

One of the activities we did at yesterday's day school was a visual version of Chinese whispers (which we also did last year). I made the point that no man-made mechanism for copying any object had yet been devised that could reproduce something without introducing change - even if only at the tiniest level. Eventually, I argued, though individual iterations of change would be insignificant, the accumulated change would lead eventually lead to versions that are radically different from their origins.

In a stroke of serendipity, I came across this fascinating example today:

The original key, (at right) was copied and then copies were made of subsequent copies. Eventually, this led to the disappearence of the original  profile in the key at far left. Full article here:

http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/

You know how it is, one topic on a forum begins to take on a life of its own. Anyway, here was such a one. The preamble needn't bore you, but this is where it led to...

In about 1996ish - when I was still in my late thirties and long before I had hair growing on my shoulders like a grizzly bear pelt (unlike now, though the upside is that it's cheaper than buying winter woolies) - I was delivering a lecture on post-war [WW2] design in the UK  (Utility furniture and all that) to design students. Mid-way through, one student interrupted to ask me what my own memories of the war were like!

Now I can accept that in the eyes of an early-twenty-something student, anyone over the age of twenty-nine should be euthanised out of plain aesthetic decency, but I still found it tricky to come to terms with the idea that either a) this student thought WW2 ended some time in the 1960s, or b) that the student knew the dates of WW2 but decided that I looked old enough to have not only lived through it but to have been sufficiently old to actually remember any of it.

I had no choice but to run him through with a bayonette.

It was all hushed up.

I'm hardly bringing anything new to the table with the hackneyed observation that time does indeed appear to speed up with advancing years. With more than half-a-century of my days now little more than a rapidly diminishing dot in the metaphorical rear view mirror, I'm nevertheless still continuously stunned at how fast time is rocketing by.

Notwithstanding that, I've got a nagging feeling that someone's been quietly nicking some of my time while I haven't been looking. Just a bit here, a bit there. Nothing that you'd notice at any given moment, but all of which, I reckon, has added up to about two months.

It was in January last year that I was interviewed for my current AL post. A couple of weeks later I was attending the inaugral tutor's meeting for the then new U101 course. Comes October and that's it - first year done and dusted. And on Satuday 22nd Jan I shall be attending the second tutor's course induction day. I can intellectualise and rationalise it all day long, but nothing is really going to convice me that somewhere along the line, chronologically at least, I've been pick-pocketed.

I just don't know when.

I once heard the phrase that money is like manure; it's of no use when it's all piled up in one place so it has to be spread around to do any good; - and it's stuck in my mind ever since. At some childishly simply level it resonates in my mind and I can identify with it on principle. I can't help but wonder, for example, if, instead of the government shelling out literally unimaginable sums of cash to prop up banks and the financial system, it had distributed that money to the wider populace at large. I'd have used my share to pay of the mortgage (or at least, some of it) and at a stroke that would leave me with a significant disposable monthly income that I could then choose to spend and by so doing, would help, along with millions of others, to rebuild the economy, purchase by purchase. I wouldn't even want any bonuses for taking the government money either.

There's another very direct reason why manure - or poo - shouldn't be allowed to build up in one place and that's because it stinks and is very difficult to deal with. That's as true of real poo as it is of metaphorical poo. And over the last three weeks or so, I found myself having to deal with an awful lot of unexpected metaphorical poo, all clustered in one place.

On one day alone, the two most important and formally utterly reliable computers in our small agency failed catastrophically. Sure, the data was backed-up, no probs there, but both machines were functionally dead and despite the best efforts of the techies, there was no option but to purchase replacements -  no big deal in the scheme of things as they were due for renewal later this year anyway. But to have to do so at short notice with all of the implications for the reinstallation of software (some of legacy versions of which won't run under Windows 7) together with all of the associated license activation hassle (and it was, and remains, hassle) and synchronisation issues and trying to keep our business running and work delivered meant only one thing. Pain.

Had we been able to do the hardware upgrade at a pace as originally planned, we would have had the scenario of a small bit of metaphorical manure (the aggro of the upgrade process) reaping its rewards as the new machines provided for greater productivity. As it was, we just had a lot of poo and are still in the process of clearing up the poo. The benefits will come, for sure, but given all the other pressures on time and the knock-on effects, in no time soon.

Over the coming days more unexpected poo piled up - personnel on holiday, sudden childcare let downs - elderly parent suddenly falling very ill,  TMA marking, car trouble, overflowing water tank, BT broadband failure at local exchange for several days - again - which for a design company is decidedly not good news... and heaven knows, seemingly endless minor niggles that just kept on coming.

Yes, no doubt about it, over recent days, my conviction that too much poo clustered all in one place is most definitely of no use whatsoever has been well and truly cemented in place.

A few posts ago I  wrote about the sad tale of a dead blackbird. Well, there is a follow-up.

The male blackbird who was so clearly absorbed by the corpse of the other blackbird has, since then, stuck around and become very tame. I don't feed it or pay it any particular attention, but it does come very close to me while I'm about my potterings in the garden and I see it  practically every day. A few weeks back I noticed that it was gathering a great deal of food - largely bundles of caterpillars that it seemed to be gathering from the mature trees at the end of the garden. I suspected that it had young to feed.

Well, this last week, my hunch was proved to be true. There, on the lawn, was the male blackbird in the company of two full-sized, but still clearly young, fledglings. The youngsters were calling to be fed and didn't seem entirely sure what to do while the adult male was doing his best to show them how to look for and peck out an assortment of grubs among the grass. On only a couple of occasions have I seen the adult female in attendance with the youngsters, presumably while the male is off somewhere having a bit of me time.

Over recent days the sightings have become fewer and I would guess that the fledglings are now close to independence and so presumably life for our blackbirds moves on to whatever the next phase is.

While pottering around the garden I came across a sad sight. A young male blackbird had, at some prior time, somehow caught its leg in the mesh of a fence and had, it would appear, spent some time stuggling by the time I found it, dead.

Sad in itself. But what made the discovery more intriguing was that there was another, second, young male blackbird - perfectly alive - in absorbed attendance beside the body of the dead bird. It seemed to be almost magnetically attracted to the corpse. In what appeared to be a considered manner, it would hop up to the dead bird and gently touched its beak with its own before moving away a few feet and repeating the gesture time after time.

Over the course of the day - from early morning to late afternoon - the bird never strayed far from the dead bird. I was only when I removed the dead bird and buried it that the other bird moved away any distance. Over the course of the following days and weeks I've seen the second blackbird in the garden almost every day and rarely far from the spot where the dead bird met its untimely end.

I took my son and his friend fly fishing at the weekend. My son is a veteran of three previous outings, me similarly, and young Jim had never done any fly fishing before. My first introduction to fly fishing was as part of a 'dads and sons learn to fly fish day out' organised by my son's school. It was a wonderful day, the height of summer, glorious weather and the boys and the dads were segregated so that there could be no competitive dad syndrome at work. While the boys were being given their instruction, us dads were being coached in the finer arts of casting. Lots of casting. And yet more casting. And a bit more. And all this in a field quite some way off any sign of water. While we were becoming Olympic casters I could see the boys fishing and, more importantly, catching fish.

The instructor was extremely knowledgeable and gave us the full benefit of his experience, including lots of technical background knowledge about the difference between line weights, line types, rod flex characteristics, the effects of humidity, the technical niceties that make a shooting head so much better than a weightforward fast taper, and god knows what else. We were even given a grounding in the life cycle of some of the insects that the trout might be feeding on. At the end of four hours I felt confident that I had I been about to appear on Mastermind then I'd be completely at home in my chosen subject of 'Everything there is to know about the theory of fly casting as practised in a field but not actually on water or anywhere near a trout'. Mind you, I don't remember much of it now.

Four hours later, we were deemed to be ready to actually start fishing, by which time we were well into the peak heat of a hot summer's day and by then all the trout had gone off for a snooze. It was only as the temperatures began to cool in the early evening that the fish began to show any interest again. So, while the dads had been flailing about in a field, the boys - who'd had a much shorter training period - had been having fun catching fish. Unlike the dads. Some eight hours after we'd started our training I caught my first trout, but just as the fishes interest in feeding began to awaken, it was time to go home.

Anyway, I was determined that Jim would not have to suffer the same frustration, so I set him up on a lawn next to the lake and we spent no more than fifteen minutes perfecting a basic cast technique that saw him safely, successfully and repeatedly cast a fly about forty feet (more than adequate for the water we were on). I declared him ready and we headed for the lake. His first cast shot out straight and true. He straightened his line like a pro and promptly hooked straight into his first trout. Total time - five seconds, max. A few minutes later, a gleaming 2lb trout lay in the landing next.

Jim's face was a picture, he was hopping up and down with excitment. My son soon hooked into his first fish and some time later I too joined the club. The rest of the day saw regular action for the two boys, who between them landed a dozen fish before they were reluctantly dragged off the water to go home in the gathering dusk. They were still buzzing a day later and there could be no doubt that they'd had a fabulous day.

It set me thinking about learning. I couldn't help concluding that my highly knowledgeable instructor - good intentions aside - had missed the whole point of the day. I suppose he felt that as adults we would benefit by being given a much more intensive training, backed up by lots of theory before we would be ready; we'd be given added value, I suppose. In contrast, the boys' trainer thought that the boys wouldn't need the theory and so the focus was on perfecting technique, then they would be ready. My own view with Jim was that all was needed was to just give enough instruction to get on with things in safety and with confidence, make a start and the rest would follow. And it did.

Sometimes, surface learning is all that is required. If Jim takes to fly fishing - as my son has - he's got the rest of his life to learn about the arcana.

Now I'm not averse to words. Quite the contrary, I love 'em; I like what they can do. I like the way that words can conjure up whole words in my mind. I like novels; I like dictionaries; I even like cereal packets in the mornings. I need my fix of words. I like the spoken word too, which is why I generally go for Radio 4 in the morning. I like to hear John Humphries when he goes off on one, all bristly and cantakerous. It sets me up for the day. Until we get to the weather forecast.

So what is it with me, words and weather forecasts? On telly, it would seem that most female weather operatives are surreptitiously auditioning for a part in a daytime soap opera and most of their male colleagues believe that what they are really delivering is a  monologue from Richard III.

Either way, instead of telling us what the weather is going to be for the day, I find myself having to absorb bits of meaningless guff along the lines that a particularly itinerant low front will be casually ambling up the Welsh Marches and probably making a bit of a nuisance of itself in the process before fizzling out over the Black Country to be replaced by a playfully hesitant high working its way in from the east before it too joins the spent ranks over Rockall. Uh?

Within 3-and-a-half seconds my mind has turned to mush and my eyes have glazed over in a sort of aural equivalent of the rabbit in the headlights phenomenon. When I've come to and pulled my face out of my cereal I find myself no wiser as to what the weather might be, so I revert to Plan B, which involves looking out of the window. Can it really be so difficult to say what the weather might actually be in terms not dreamt up by someone who writes get-outs in small print for a living?

As a matter of fact, it can be done, the delicious irony being that the Beeb did it rather well when they first put their mind to it about 300 years ago. As an example of GOOD DESIGN (LOLA! students, take note), ladies and gentlemen, I give you -

The shipping forecast.

If ever there was a better example of sublime economical word efficiency - maximum info, minimum fluff, maximum meaning - I've rarely come across it.

As Einstein had it, make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Just returned first real eTMAs for the new U101 course, or LOLA to it's friends.

Mild sense of relief gradually being pushed aside by desire to celebrate with a glass of, er, ice cold tap water.

Really.

What?...

On a beach that we visit on the south one can find endless numbers of chalk pebbles, varying in size and form, though typically they fall into the category of round ovoids that range in size from small eggs to large chocolate easter eggs. As it happens, there are also just as many flint lumps scattered in clusters. On a lazy summer's day my thoughts idly turned to the flint and how early man might have first tumbled across the discovery that shattered shards of flint could make first rate tools. In a spirit of empirical research I began bashing bits of flint together and very quickly had before me a selection of lethally sharp proto-tools. Seeing the chalk lumps around me triggered the idea that it might be interesting to see what my new tools could do. So, I put flint to chalk, sat on my haunches and began carving. To my great thrill and satisfaction the flint sliced into the chalk with ease. Some happy hours later I had several assorted carvings. As I got used to the materials I got a better sense of what they were capable of. Here's a couple of the heads that I created.

And here's a typical flint lump from which the flint shards were knapped. Some of the shards were thinner than razor blades and sharper too.