Project LV One – Day 193 – Drawings

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Guthlac

Dancer

No great plan or thought has gone into these just drawings…only drawings.

Male Head Ingres

 

 

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 192 – Mushrooms

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Guthlac

Mushrooms No 01

…Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you…

That is how I feel about these drawings I made of mushrooms I made at my art class this morning.  The quick sketch I made seemed to have more life than the drawing I made during the session.  I guess there are many reasons for this but ultimately I guess the truth is I don’t really get any real pleasure out of still life…hay ho.

Mushrooms No 02

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 191 – Lines

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Guthlac

John Singer Sargeant Sketch

Sunday afternoon and what to do?  I know what I’ll make a sketch of a John Singer Sargent portrait painting.  The intention was to make the sketch using only straight lines.  I just about managed that.

 

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Project LV One – Day 190 – The First of November

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Guthlac

20141101-IMG_001671 20141101-IMG_001672 20141101-IMG_001673 20141101-IMG_001677 20141101-IMG_001678

I don’t want come all over ‘we’re doomed’ but it is the 1st of November and so very very mild outside – currently the temperature is a balmy 19 degrees C (66 degrees f in old money).  We still have roses blooming and leaves still on the trees, although most are starting to fall now – at least a month late.  We haven’t even had a frost yet.

Whilst this means we are having a wonderful autumn it does mean that places further south are struggling for the basics such as water!  Is this a sign of global warming?  Well you can argue about that but I suspect it really is – after all the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere haven’t been this high in millions of years.  Only time will tell.

 

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some observations about Yosemite Sam or OS X 10.10

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Guthlac

Well I’ve been running OS X 10.10 (Much prefer this to the naff – in my opinion – practice of calling upgrades by a name) and it is getting more and more annoying.  As with the way of these things it is the little details that are driving me insane.  They have moved things around compared to how they were before which means I have to root around the OS to find out where these things have now been hidden.

So for the record these are the niggles and not so niggles I have discovered running 10.10:

Safari now runs very slowly and sometimes just stops and the toolbar, which I used to use a lot was not shown as a the default – I had to go and find it;

The moved Disk Utility from from where I used to find it in About this Mac;

Dropbox stopped working and the icon which sat on the tool bar disappeared.  Now I suspect this is to stop people using DropBox and move over to iCloud, that well known super secure system.

None of these are that serious, apart from the problems I seem to be having with Safari, but given that Apple like to think they are so user friendly you would have thought they could have ensured that the user experience hasn’t changed any when moving upgrades – it is, after all, a closed system compared to the crazy world of Windows and their infinite variations.

Here endth the moan

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 189 – When things go wrong they go wrong…

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Guthlac

When things go wrong

The title sounds far more dramatic than things actually were but as you can see I somewhat screwed up the proportions of this life drawing I was making this morning.  I have written before about internal contradictions in any drawing or painting.  Sometimes you are able to get away with things and then others it just becomes too much.  This is a case in point – I just didn’t get the proportions correct and then the more I tried to correct it the more they got away from me.  Ce la vie.

Face of Leicester No 2

The one good thing about the first drawing is that when I abandoned it I decided to try a new technique and I think it worked.  This is the second in the series Faces of Leicester.

 

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 188 – Faces of Leicester No. 1

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Guthlac

PN 004

So this is the finished drawing – quite pleased with it.  It is also the end of another book in the Project LV One series.  It is all down hill from here as there is less than 6 months to go before the project ends…what will I do then?

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 188 – Faces, Sharpie and Pierre Noir

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Guthlac

Sharpie Girl

There are number of reasons why I have decided to make a series of portrait drawings which I’m still coming to terms with.  So here are the first in the series which I’m thinking of calling The Faces of Leicester.

PN 001

 

 

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 186 – Confused…

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Guthlac

Quick Nude Sketch

So one day into the new Yosemite Sam upgrade little things are starting to annoy.  The first thing is that one of the little functions I used to use on Safari has disappeared.  I suspect that it is still there but in another place but did they move it?  Another annoyance is that the OS now assumes that when I put my SD card into the reader I want to import the images to Pictures and an annoying pop up window appears.  I don’t and it didn’t used to – again I am sure there is a simple fix but why not keep the settings I had from the previous installation.

None of these things will make me want to stop using my iMac it is just that they are annoying  – such as grit in your show – they don’t stop you doing what your were doing but make things just a little bit more distracting.  Such is the pedantry in my life!

PS – I have now found the missing Safari function but I had to go and look for the silly little thing.

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Project LV One – Day 186 – Welcome to Yosemite Sam

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Guthlac

Yosemite Sam

 

So I’ve gone and done – I’ve updated to Yosemite.  So far so good the only problem I’ve encountered was with the Blurb Book program but I just had to down load the Javascript update (not sure why this wasn’t included in the upgrade) and everything seems very much as normal.  The interface is very clean and clear and the icons appear to be so much brighter.

Talking of brighter I had a chance to have a look at the new iMacs today with the much vaunted Retina displays and I have to say I was underwhelmed.  Whilst the images did look very impressive I did notice that the computer I was using had a bit of a problem refreshing properly so there was a noticeable lag in the image becoming pin sharp.  It wasn’t off putting but it was clearly there which makes you wonder why that is?  The most obvious answer is the the video card/chip/support isn’t unto the task of supporting the high pixel count of the screen.  If this is the case then it really does undermine the whole point of having a super sharp screen.

Apart from this it was just another iMac – which is actually a compliment.

Posted in Project LV One | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment