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...

Ok. We're in the clear!

All of a sudden the result became clear. The Nationalists win. The greens have not made it, therefore the Nationalists are safely installed in government. Sigh of relief. No screwing around with EU membership and the future of this country.

I hope we can put this nasty business behind us for another five years now.

Wishy-washy Malta

This is a very unusual election for this country. A historical one they're saying on TV. Usually the difference in votes between the two parties, while not enourmous, is large enough that a reliable indication of which party will govern can be quickly obtained by the parties taking a quick sample of the number 1 votes that were cast. In past elections, the winning party was always divined relatively quickly - usually by noon - leaving the rest of the day for the political hooligans to perform their various shenanigans in the streets.

Today however, the result appears to be so close - figures of less than 1000 votes are being bandied about - that no amount of sampling has managed to resolve the result with a small enough margin of error. This means that all the number one votes will have to be counted before a definite answer is obtained. This is already annoying enough, causing high tension in the country. Remember that this is Malta, where politics is the national sport. I cannot emphasise how seriously politics is taken by the Maltese. For an average (read "sane") foreigner to the Island this amount of fanaticism might seem perplexing, but one must keep in mind that Malta has been independent for only a very short time and self-rule is something that no Maltese takes for granted.

On the bright side it appears that the Nationalists will come up on top in number of votes. Due to the obtuse nature of the Maltese electoral system, however, this is not necessarily a guarantee of them being in power. The problem is that the Labour party has a larger number of seats in parliament, albeit having fewer votes. This is due to the way the country has been divided into electoral ditricts. In the 1981 election this situation had already happenned, with Labour taking charge with less votes but more seats. This is, of course, a perverse anti-democratic result. Due to this the two parties have since agreed amongst themselves, with lots of groaning and grunting, that in such a situation the party with the greatest number of votes would be awarded extra seats to make up for the deficit and allow it to govern.

This scenario will definitely apply to today's election - however there's a complication. You see, the law I described above only holds if two parties are elected into parliament. In their arrogance, the two major parties did not think of legislating for the eventuality of a third party making it too. Due to this ommission, the appearance of a third party in parliament would imply that, by default, this law would not apply and therefore the party with the most seats (and potentially least votes) would reign.

Guess what - it appears that the green party, a gnatfly that has never managed to elect a candidate, all of a sudden has a chance of electing one! This is not a likely happenning to be sure. He will definitely not make it in the first count, however there is no way to know whether he will manage to inherit enough second, third etc. votes to make it to home base unless we go through the whole blasted process. That means that we will not know for sure who the ruling party will be until tomorow. Grr.

Nail biting

Yesterday was voting day here in Malta, and today everyman and his dog is waiting with bated breath for the counting results to start coming in. For anybody who doesn't know, elections are a serious business in this country. Election turnout is routinely in the ninetieth percentage and voter loyalty to the two main parties is more reminiscent of the hooligan's loyalty to his football club, or the faithfuls' to his deity than of a well thought out opinion based on past performance and future proposals.

This electoral campaign has been particularly vicious, even for the Malta that is used to the sharp divide between the Nationalists and the Socialists. At stake is the future of the leaders of both respective parties. Lawrence Gonzi has been the Nationalist leader and prime minister only for the last four years. He succeeded the old prime minister Eddie Fenech Adami after his retirement following the successful election of 2003 and Malta's accession to the European Union. Gonzi, an unelected prime minister, has had to live in Fenech Adami's shadow ever since his appointment to prime minister and, truth be told, in my opinion at least, he has done a reasonable job of it. Employment is up, investment is up, the financial and ICT sectors are being boosted. For the first time since Malta's independence the finance ministry is planning to have a surplus instead of a deficit by 2010.

On the other hand the nationalists have been in government for the last 20 years and they have been dogged by allegations of corruption for years now - the allegations, of course, coming mostly from the Labour party. The Labour party has been in the opposition ever since 1987, except for a brief 22 month stint in government under the leadership of Alfred Sant, characterised by an abysmal performance and an early election called by Sant due to a vote of no confidence and which he duly lost. The Labour party in Malta has long had a history of violence and corruption which, to his credit, Sant managed to patch up a bit following his appointment to Labour leader. This was mainly the reason he was elected in 1996 in the first place, together with his policy of indiscriminate mudslinging at the Nationalists. Of course mudslinging might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there.

Fast forward to this year's election and I'm afraid I'm seeing exactly the same pattern in the Labour party's actions as in 1996. There have been various accusations targeted at various Nationalist candidates leveled by Sant together with the instigation of an "us versus them" mentality amongst the Labour supporters. This contrasts sharply with the Nationalist slogan of "flimkien kollox possibli" (together all is possible) and their emphasis on a message of reconciliation.

In general this confrontational attitude does not really cause me undue concern, after all exposure of corruption can only be a good thing. Unfortunately the electoral programme of the Labour party seems to be composed almost entirely of these kind of aggressive attacks and far from enough well thought out proposals for future policies. The few clear policies they managed to articulate in between their frequent bouts of invective all seem to be tinged by an instinctive aversion to Malta's membership in the European Union. Labour had always opposed Malta's membership and they only grudgingly accepted the fact after they lost the 2003 election - Sant even openly pledging to disregard the positive result of the EU accession referendum if he had won in 2003. Of course, anybody in his right mind would immediately see that Malta's future could only have been as part of the EU and in fact the Maltese voted convincingly in favour - twice.

Since then Malta has clearly benefited from its EU membership, and the Nationalists have milked such membership for all it was worth - while the Socialists have obdurately persisted in dissing the whole concept. What worries me more than any other of the peculiarities of this election campaign is that Labour have pledged to re-open negotiations with the EU regarding Malta's accession deal. This is patently insane. There is no other way of putting it! Resurrecting such an important issue which has been dead and buried since 2003 can only bring huge uncertainties for foreign investors and it is foreign investment that Malta currently needs badly. If the work that has been done to consolidate Malta within the Union over these last years is threatened, we can kiss goodbye the plans of making Malta into a center for financial and ICT services.

I guess that from what I wrote above, it is pretty obvious where my preference lies. I'm currently following the counting process on TV and things don't seem to be looking up. We have exceptionally low voter turnout, especially in traditionally Nationalist localities and even though the ballot papers are still being sorted and counting in earnest has not started yet, the Socialists seem pretty bouncy while the Nationalists are starting to look rather twitchy.

And all this when I had managed to kick my nail biting habit!

In the meantime let me regale you with a picture of a painting of mine that is one of my favourites. It is a (loose) copy of Rembrandt's "A young girl leaning over a windowsill" I did some time ago in hard pastels over black pastel paper. Rembrandt is one of my favourites. I'm always amazed at the effects he managed to conjure up out of his canvas using a surprisingly limited palette of colours as well as his unbelievable brush handling skills. With one brush stroke he would, by making use of the texture of his canvas and his paint, create the illusion of fine detail without it being actually there. He was a master portraitist and my humble efforts at copying his work are of course not aimed at equaling his skill but only as an attempt to get into his mind - to get an inkling of what and how he was thinking while he was painting. Perhaps it's just the hope that some of his genius will somehow rub off onto me. Yeah right. :-)

Etienne's Scribbles grand opening!

Hello there all you netizens out there. Welcome to my own private little space on the net. This will be a place for me to share my thoughts about life, the universe and everything as well as to show off anything I may be proud of.

I'm following a fine arts course right now so I plan on posting regularly some of my work hoping to make this blog double up as a chronological log of my progress (if any) as well as an online portfolio. I also dabble in lots of other hobbies so there might be stuff of interest to anyone here.

Of course you might think that I'm just another blogger wasting time and bandwidth. You'd probably be right, but hey - bandwidth's cheap nowadays.

Coincidentally, today I have made the purchase of a brand new Canon A720 digital camera following the premature demise of my trusty old A80, so I've been busy today taking snapshots of some of my past work. I plan on posting them one at a time over a period in parallel with my current work, mostly because I couldn't be arsed to post them all at once.

The bulk of the work is quite a number of A2 size pencil or charcoal life studies completed during the course of my first figure drawing class ever. They're not masterpieces, but I'm quite happy with most of them given that they are mostly half hour sketches done under less than ideal circumstances. I also have several paintings done in pastel as well as one or two oils.