Tag: Art

Anyone for a douche in the local creek?

Another sign from our trip – this one was in the Northern Territory, and was preceded with a sign 100 metres back which proclaimed “The maximum speed limit in the Northern Territory is 110km/hr, unless otherwise stated.”

During the week a few of my mates took me out to Little Creatures to celebrate/commiserate the finalisation of my divorce. Good times!

It seems that instead of me having to give back the BBQ they gave me as a wedding present, they pitched in and got me a divorce present. You really can’t go wrong with mates like that! So thanks to Az, Andy, Luke, Brooke and Alan for the fantastic gift, the first results of which can be seen below.

So what was the gift? A Wacom Intuous3 graphics tablet for making proper digital art. I’ve been eyeing one off for a long time but couldn’t justify the expense on a hobby. Below is the result of my first night of playing around and learning to use the tablet. So far I’ve found two things: it speeds up the existing work I could do with a mouse (mostly bezier curves in Inkscape) by at least double; and it allows freehand sketching and painting that was impossible before with a mouse.

I think I’m going to get a lot of use out of this!

This is an attempted self portrait, drawn using the tablet and Corel Painter. The (virtual) media used is a 2B pencil and a dry-brush watercolour. Click the image for a larger version.

In a moment of mental clarity I once vowed never to write a personal blog and have until this day remained true.

But I now feel the need to supply the good readers of this site with a respite from descriptions of fishing that only serve to remind us of how non-existent the fishing is wherever we are, and the ensuing recipes reminding us of the extortion we would have to face at the local shops to be able to eat fish on a regular basis.

So my contribution is a couple of pencil sketches that I’ve done recently.

The first is a sketch of my friend Brooke playing with a ‘curdled’ soy mocha at the great Yahava coffee works in Margaret River. The second is my girlfriend Joy being supported by a vintage car outside the metallic oasis that is the Colonial Brewery, also in Margs.

Click the thumbnails to see larger versions.

Both images were sketched with (mainly) a mechanical lead pencil.