back to my art

Finally the anniversary picture is finished and I can get back to finishing my digital paintings of the countryside near where I live. I find I am more busy in the summer, shopping to do, hospital appointments,  and rhurbarb crumbles to make (making the most of that summer fruit), spring cleaning that has been put off until now because I didnt have time, I dont know how I found the time to do all these things when I was at college.
It seems theres not much time,
but anyway, the jobs are done so its time to crack on with the pics cant wait until I'm finished.

im going back

Im going back to the place I was drawing yesterday afternoon, up near warren hills road to take some pictures, I'm making the most of this sunny afternoon, Sketching is fine but I cant remember the colour of things from a mere sketch even notes dont help much, maybe ill do some paint overs, A photograph is also good to help you get the proportions right.
ill just make a quick drink, I think ill take the children too, they like it up there.

I managed to take some good pictures, here is my favourite one of the lot, and this is the one I want to work on, I like how everything is in proportion in this shot. The weather was not so miserable this time round, so the lighting was different. It would be good to see if I could capture that in a digital painting.

Watch this space

Ive been sketching today in the countryside nr coalville, ill post up thefinal artwork when its done, but unfortunatley ive been asked to compose a digital portrait for someones wedding anniversary which I cant afford to say no to, my only worry is that my deadline is mid week, even I know my limits.

Anyway.... when thats out the way I can get back to my landscape paintings.

Digital painting- Its time to get good.

Preparing for uni this summer I have decided to go out and sketch parts of the north west leicestershire landscape to improve my drawing skills before september when i start my degree.
After seeing some of the existing work that current students at the uni have done, I knew that it was time to get good and fast, the last thing I want is to be a laughing stock in september.
I went out into the countryside and produced a few random sketches of the landscape, I have never done a landscape using a graphics tablet before, and i knew that thats what they did at uni, and they were amazing.

This is my first attempt at a landscape, using digital media. It was based on a very rough sketch,

My gaming history

I thought I'd write a piece about my own life experience with games. I was born in 1982 so it was near the beginning for video games, I remember that my dad had a computer in our house is was a commodore 16 which had 16 KB ram, which if you don't know isn't enough memory to store a jpeg (not that it could be displayed anyway). My dad wrote a naughts and crosses game for me and my brothers and sisters, it was really basic there was a face next to the naughts and crosses section that smiled if you won, was sad if you lost and had a straight expression if you drew. My dad was always into computers he tried to explain them to me but i just wanted to play the games, he had a book which would show you the code in BASIC that let you write some games such as a maze game. I tried doing this as a young child and made a game called "dumper" it was really boring as I recall, I chose it because it was only 2 pages long, but the problem was you had to copy the code exactly else it wouldnt work. My dad had to go through the whole code trying to find what I had missed/added by mistake, id like to say the outcome was well worth it, it wasnt it sucked.
There were some good games on the commodore 16 though, video meanies, jet bricks, one man and his droid, to name but a few, these games had colour depending on what TV you played them on (which was often the spare black and white tv we had, mum only brought the big TV upstairs when Minder was on.)

I JUST FOUND AN ONLINE C16 EMULATOR - I about cried when the music came on for jetbrix
online c16 emulator

Interactive food chains for kids

I was helping my son with his science homework today. The task set was for him to create a food chain. I thought it would be cool to look online and find some interactive foodchains to assist him with his learning.
This is not a top 10 list.... I have just put my two favourites out of the ones that I found on the web.

This one was particularly good and was animated to show what happened in the food chain after the child had put the animals/plants in the correct order, It was also fuuny to see that nothing happened if you put the animals and plants in the wrong order.
Try it here

This is also a good one, It may not be as humourous as the last one but it is more realistic in many ways particularly its style.Try it here 
There is less writing in this one, but it is smaller than the bold text in the previous example.

My child particularly enjoyed learning interactively and it took him less time to learn than it would if I had gone through a diagram with him.

A long journey

One of my projects in the first year of college was to go on a journey, here are the images.