My first observation

So, picking up the thread from my last post, I practically ran home with my half bottle of dirty water and, fairly trembling with anticipation I whipped out the microscope out of its carry-case, put a couple of drops of my precious water onto a clean slide making sure to pipette up a few of duckweed leaves with it, floated on a cover slip and slid the whole thing on my stage setting the lowest magnification (20x), looked through my ocular and saw...nothing.

I frantically rolled the slide all over the stage trying to locate anything interesting, but all I could see were a few very tiny critters zipping around all over the place so fast that I had no hope of focusing on one.

Out of sheer desperation I then refocused on the Duckweed thinking that if I found nothing that moved that I could study, I would study the leaves as closely as possible - and finally, just as I had given up, there it was! I saw a tiny movement out of the corner of my eye - something attached to the edge of the Duckweed leaf. Centering the field of view on it and switching from the 4x objective to the 10x objective I could see at last a slug-like creature, almost totally transparent.

It appeared to be slowly extending its head from a contracted position and then, as if by magic, it extended a pair of crown-like flaps which appeared to be ringed with tiny hairs that were rotating a high speed. I would have had no idea what this monster was had I not, quite coincidentally have seen its like on a Youtube video a couple of days before. It was a Rotifer, quite a common creature, but nevertheless an extremely interesting one.which I will write about in a future post.

In the meantime though here is a small video of my First Rotifer!

And a close-up of the little gal (these critters are always females!)

What can I say? At this point I was hooked!

Driving in the rain - and fixing punctures

Today was the first heavy rain after a spell of fantastic weather. Of course it was this morning that I had to have a puncture. Let me tell you - changing a tyre in the pouring rain is no fun! It wasn't a simple puncture either. The tire was completely split - I believe I ran over an ugly piece of scrap iron lying around on the road. That means that I had to get a new tire as it couldn't be fixed.

On the upside though - I got a very nice girly calendar for free from the tire shop where I got the new tire that almost made my day! Sample pics later :-p.

Praying Dog

I came across this and I just had to post it. This little chap is way cool!

This Chihuahua is called Conan (!), an eighteen month old long haired chihuahua that hangs out at the Shuri Kannon-do Temple in Naha City, Okinawa. It only took the priest at the temple two days to teach the dog how to pray.

From the BBC:

"He may be showing his thanks for treats and walks," says a priest at Jigenin temple on Okinawa island. Priest Joei Yoshikuni would like Conan to meditate, but "it's not like we can make him cross his legs", he says.
"Basically, I am just trying to get him to sit still while I meditate," he told Associated Press news agency.
Mr Yoshikuni said it only took Conan a few days to imitate the motions of praying.
"I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it too," he said.
Jigenin temple now gets 30% more visitors than it did before Conan joined in the prayers, Mr Yoshikuni said.

Speaking about dogs, I cannot but show you about my best buddy Lucky, who is not really into all that religious stuff - he prefers the easy life! Give him his beloved blanket to wrap himself in and he's happy to let the others do all the praying.

Good Friday

Today is Good Friday and with basically nowhere to go and nothing to watch on tv and seeing that my last post was almost a week ago I'll take a few minutes to make up for the delay and post a few new drawings from my live drawing class. Here goes...
This is one of my first ever figure drawings and I thought it didn't come out too bad. I did it during a summer class at the Malta School of Art and it is done in soft pastels on gray pastel paper. The teacher there insisted that we should always draw the background - you'd have thought that it was more important than the figure itself!







This is another one done during the summer class. I did this one in a freer style than the one above

















Same class, different model. Actually this charming lady was the wife of one of the teachers there. It's nice to do a clothed figure once in a while :-).

















This is a much more recent drawing done a few weeks ago in sanguine. The foreshortening is quite interesting, but I did struggle for a while with the head, causing it to be quite dirty due to the fact that the sanguine did not erase as easily as normal graphite. This was a half hour short pose.

And this is the last one for today. This was done in the same week as the previous drawing using sanguine and sepia as well as charcoal. In contrast to the previous one however, this was not a half hour pose. Instead I had a full two hours for this. The reason is that for this particular session there was a new attendee who did not use graphite, charcoal or paint at all - he actually sculpted the figure in clay. This is pretty impressive in my opinion even more so because he actually managed to obtain a pretty good likeness in the two hours that were available.
Anyway, the longer time allowed me to give more importance o the modeling of the forms which I really had fun doing. Incidentally there's a small mistake in this drawing, but thankfully it's not very visible. Take a look at her hand - it has six fingers!

Thank God it's Sunday!

At last it's Sunday! Today is the one day in the week I can really kick back and relax!

Here is one of the figure drawings I was talking about in my first post to this blog. This one is probably the one that turned out the best out of about forty drawings in all. I find the back of the figure the easiest to draw as well as the most beautiful due to the curving line of the spine. I also pay close attention to line emphasis on my pencil drawings, making the lines bolder on features to which I want to attract attention or items that should appear as being closer to the viewer and, conversely, making the lines softer or even omitting them altogether where features are to recede into the drawing.

Note particularly the varying line quality along the edge of the arms and the lost line at the right shoulder and the lighter line of the left knee, both of which help to unify the figure and really embed it into the plane of the paper.

What I like the least about this drawing is the right leg which still looks a bit flat to me. Given time I would have reworked the shading to model it better, but as a rule I never modify these drawings when the time limit of 30 minutes is over. That way I always have a baseline against which I can estimate my progress.

Oh by the way. Chris, see, I started to post my figure drawings at last! :-)

Mobile phone as a sketching device

My being a bit of a gadget freak, for some months I have owned an all singing all dancing PDA/mobile phone with a large touch sensitive screen operated with a stylus running Windows Mobile 6 (an XDA Exec for anybody who's interested). I have practically my whole life stored on this phone and I use it for a whole plethora of things - mp3 player, watching movies, e-book reader, writing email and any number of other uses I cannot actually remember at the moment.

A couple of weeks ago it occurred to me that if I could find the adequate software, this device would be ideal to use for doing quick sketches on the move when I didn't have my sketchbook close at hand!

A few minutes on the Internet and I found a nifty little software package called Photogenics. It's a Photoshop-like package that is scaled down to run on Windows Mobile PDAs while still retaining many features that are usually associated with high-end graphics packages, such as multiple layers, various filters and effects tools and, most importantly for me, a good selection of flexible drawing tools. I'm currently using the 30 day evaluation version, but I do plan on buying the package as I find myself using it every time I have a moment's free time.

Here are some samples of what I came up with. Note that these were all meant as quick sketches and a lot more would have been possible with the software if I had devoted more time to refining them.

This is a sketch of my little cousin Cameron who lives in Canada. I did this from some photos my Aunt Agnes sent me some days ago.

Here is a quick sketch I made while waiting for my turn at the doctor's waiting room when I had the flu. There was a cute little girl who was mesmerised by my sketching. After a while she started pestering her mum to come see what I was doing. LOL. Perhaps she'll turn out to be an artist when she grows up - who knows?

And this is an old man I did from imagination in a few minutes. I thought the wrinkles came out quite well. A good book for any prospective artists who are interested in drawing the head is Burne Hogarth's book Drawing the Human Head. Burne Hogarth is considered one of the greatest American art teachers in figure drawing - but I'll say more about him in a future blog.

That's it for now. I'll post more stuff (including some in colour) done on my mobile phone when I have time because I think that this kind of new technology is a treasure trove for artists and one that has hardly been tapped yet.

Roller skates

While browsing through my collection of drawings I came across one I did last year at school. It is a rather challenging still life that our first year teacher had set up for us towards the end of the year. I remember that it was by far the most involved set up that he had ever given us and most people were quite sure that it would be beyond their talents. It is easy, however, to underestimate how far one has come in a year and I remember that most of us came through fine and produced work that was reasonably good. Here's what I did. Let me know what you think...