Another day another experiment. I have been trying out my water colouring skills and it has been a very mixed bag of results. The first thing I tried was a simple landscape and I very quickly discovered that there was no such thing as a ‘simple’ landscape – especially when you have never done anything like that before. This morning I tried again and had a similar result. I then tried to work on something I was more familiar with, portraiture and suddenly things started to work out a bit better. This is not surprising for two reasons. Firstly, I have been practicing drawing faces for a few weeks and secondly, I discovered new techniques to help control of the paint. I am rather pleased with what I have discovered so far but there is long, long way to go before I would even admit that I knew what i was doing let alone any good. Still you have start somewhere.
I have spent the morning doing some pencil drawings, a sketch of the Notre Dame. Not bad for a first attempt but could be improved with more practice. Are more practice – this seems to be way of things – the more you practice the better you get. I keep going back to the thought – 10,000 hours to be really good at something. I’ve got a long way to go! In the mean time I have had a bit of fun with a quick painting in Brushes. This was really relaxing if, as always, frustrating. I have come to realise that it is far easier to understand how things work in real world than working out the metaphor built into the Brushes software.
I know I have been a little unfair to the iPad edition of the Times. Many of the things that I have moaned about over the past three months have turned out to be ‘user error’. However I have had this for about three months now and ,because of production problems, this has been free so I have had a great test of whole concept. This will soon come to an end and I will have to pay for the paper so the question is will I ?
As thing stand at the moment the answer is probably no. This is not because the product is sub standard but rather I feel it is now starting to miss the point. I find having a static document, with poor interactivity, very restrictive. I find I am using flipboard far more than reading the Time iPad edition. So what does flipboard have that the Times doesn’t? Well, I choose the news feeds and other sources of information to meet my needs and tastes. The news is more up to date and relevant . Of course the people at the Times would argue that you are buying great journalism, and this is true, but find that is not enough anymore. So will I renew? Not sure but if you has asked me three months ago then I would have undoubtedly said yes. Shows how things change very quickly. Sent from my iPad
