Simon's Blog

Still working on this question. Still come up with a satisfactory answer.

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First stab at this – needs some work doing on it – practice makes perfect .

Sent from my iPad

Having messed around with Meryl Streep’s portrait I have decided to get serious and start to make really good drawing. As I am going to use pen and ink I need to get a really close examination of the face. This is the first preliminary sketch of the eyes. I suspect I will be making many more over the days.

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More pen and ink. This time a sort of portrait of Meryl Streep – the new Iron Lady. This shows one of the problems with pen and ink – once you have made a mark then it is very difficult to correct. In this case I have made her face too narrow and so you end with, at best, a caricature which is what I think this is. Nonetheless I like this drawing which, let’s be honest, is all that matters.

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So there I was last night watching TV and I suddenly felt the urge to make some pen and ink drawings. This, in part, was as a result of watching a programme about the illustration for Alice in Wonderland. So for the st of the evening I produced a number of sketches of people I saw on the box. They are not meant to be a likeness but just drawing for pleasure and on this basis I am really pleased with the way they have turned out.

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It has been almost a week since I upgraded to BT Infinity and started to get 40 mbit broadband. As with everything to do with the internet things aren’t exactly what they say on the tin. My actual speed is 32 mbit but this is still nearly six times quicker than before. Now the big question is – is it any better than before. Again the answer is yes and no. The yes part is that the BBC iPlayer is now really good with no freezing at all when used with Ethernet network. However, when I use the iPlayer on my iPad it still does freeze which might suggest that the WiFi may not be up to carrying the bandwidth. Apart from the greatly improved video services the normal internet is not that much quicker. This, I believe, is down to two things; Firstly the sites couldn’t load that much quicker anyway unless they had a lot of video content; The second is that some services have more demand placed on them than their infrastructure cope with and so it doesn’t matter how quick your internet connection is it still won’t make things any quicker as the server at the other end can’t provide you with the content. An example of the latter is Posterous which seems to have quite a lag.

So overall well worth the investment and really at no extra cost. Let’s hope the long term experience is as positive as the first impressions.

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This is not a particularly good drawing for a number of reasons but I am not too bothered about that at the moment. The main question I was trying to address was how do you make a drawing of a person with dark skin? I’m not sure I have answered that question yet but this is my first attempt. Clearly I have some thinking to do.

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