Happy days...

The last 48 hours or so have been pretty good ones.  Barring the ones I spent failing to get to sleep, that is 8p


The artwork is going well.  I finished Stained Glass V on Saturday, started SG VI on Monday, and am very pleased with both.  River III and untitled variations no. IV are also coming along more or less as planned.  Piccies follow:

Stained Glass V (complete) & VI (WIP)

River III (WIP)

untitled variations no. IV (WIP)

Tim's been writing some music for one of my in-development animation projects, and it's very cool.  Not ready to be shown off yet, but it's one more reason I'm chirpy at the moment.


My new Lego arrived last night.  Made my evening, needless to say.  And before you all start saying "but I thought you were almost 24..." - there's no such thing as "too much Lego" or "too old for Lego"; those are myths invented by boring people.  I haven't had any new Lego in years, and I've tended to put Christmas and birthday money in savings, but this time round I decided I'd actually use some of the cash to buy something I wanted, so I ordered a custom-designed Lego set, with new equipment for Doctor Murkum's private militia.

Some of Murkum's men with their new uniforms, blasters and aircraft - the one in the blue fighter craft is Atkun, the chief engineer, and the one with the white top is Gonce, the cook.

The guinea pigs are gone.  I always said they were a bad idea, and eventually everyone else (except Sophie, of course) has come round to my view on the topic.  This morning, Ben and I were handed the offending rodents in a box and asked to take them for one last trip, in the general direction of an animal shelter on the far side of Wokingham.

I did get there in the end, no thanks to our satnav which spent the whole journey claiming it couldn't find a GPS signal, while I navigated using memory, road signs, and the odd atlas check by Ben.  I decided I don't like driving in Wokingham.  Too many confusing one-way streets and stuff.  But that's not the point - the point is, it might have looked for about four months like I'd lost the debate, but as of today I have absolutely definitely won.  No more pets bigger than a hamster in this house, I don't think.


Speaking of rodents: Dusty is quickly turning out to be a much better critter than the guinea pigs ever were.  He's followed Scribbles' footsteps, quite literally, taking his first evening stroll around my desk on Monday.  He tried nibbling all sorts of things (including the curtain), but fortunately seemed to decide he didn't like the taste of any of them.  I did get a bit worried when he started showing an interest in some coins I'd left lying around, and it looked for a moment as if he was about to stuff a 20p in his cheek and never give it back, but then he changed his mind and waddled off to taste the speaker cable instead.  He's incredibly similar to his predecessor, including having big tufts of hair growing out of his hips and making him look like some sort of overgrown fluffy earwig, and including a tendency to jump off the side of the desk and perform dusting services on the way down.


Statistics:

• First 12 for '12 status: 10 down, 2 to go
• Latest book read: part of 1 Kings from the KJV
• Latest film/TV watched: Michael Palin's Sahara, part 2
• Latest music listened to: Golden Cube OST (WIP) by Timothy Johnston
• Latest edible item eaten: beefburger
• Predominant colour of clothes: blue and grey on the outside; red t-shirt underneath
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Outlook and Excel 2007, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Dashboard; Blogspot Create Post; MatNav 6.1), Windows Media Player 11, Skype
• Webcomics posted today: n/a

- The Colclough

Been Busy With the Ink Again

I've been drawing and painting a bit more over the last few days.  I finished Stained Glass IV on Friday; yesterday saw the production of another 19 episodes of Cylinder and Miserable Series 3, and today I started work on two new paintings (River III and Stained Glass V) and completed the third in my ongoing series of untitled circle-centric Sharpie-on-cartridge-pad super-doodles.  I've got an idea for a possible name for the series, but I'm not saying anything until I've made up my mind whether I think it's a good one.  And I drew a mexican in a spacesuit, which I'll leave Josh to explain.

Photos follow, at the usual exchange rate of 1 photo = 1k words.

Stained Glass IV (18" x 24", completed 6th January)

To be honest, that didn't really come out how I intended, which is part of the reason I'm doing an SG V, this time using my new tube of Process Cyan.  But the relatives seemed to like it, as it disappeared off the kitchen table as soon as it was dry, and turned up again hanging off a nail in the stairwell, like so:

Stained Glass IV, A Dive in Blue and Open to Interpretation in situ on our staircase

untitled variations nos. I, II and III (all A2, completed circa October, 1 December and 11 January)

I already showed you variation I, but I re-posted the photo as a reminder of what came before.  And I should point out that the different colouration is due to the light conditions when I took the photos - the papers and inks are actually identical.  To some degree I see these three as a sort of trilogy, and although I have plans for a fourth instalment I suspect it'll be somewhat different to its predecessors.

SG V and River III aren't developed enough yet to be worth taking any photos of, so you'll just have to wait and see.


Statistics:

• First 12 for '12 status: 8 down, 4 to go - I could try claiming I'm on 9, what with having written yesterday's Fort Paradox Backstage, but that wasn't on my main blog so it probably doesn't count, and I can't be bothered to quibble.
• Latest book read: part of 2 Samuel from the KJV
• Latest film/TV watched: Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2011: Meet Your Brain, part 1
• Latest music listened to: How to Train Your Dragon OST by John Powell, I think
• Latest edible item eaten: jambolaya followed by coffee
• Predominant colour of clothes: shabby blue-greys
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Outlook, Word and Excel 2007, Firefox (tabs: MatNav 6.1; Blogspot Dashboard; Blogspot Create Post), Skype
• Webcomics posted today: n/a

- The Colclough

513044

The starting gun has fired!  Registration is closed, and at least half of the four contestants have already hit the ground running.  I suspected in advance that Hannah would be writing in the small hours of this morning, which she did, but I didn't expect the same from Tim - who did anyway.  Sam hasn't posted anything for the challenge yet, but something tells me he probably will do very soon.

So I'd better catch up on this "First 12 for '12" thing, hadn't I...


I thought I'd have a bit of a ramble about Christmas while it's still relatively early in the year (just had a conversation with Mum about what we did on the evening of the 25th, and we're already struggling to remember).  That's where the cryptic blog title comes in.

For a large chunk of Advent, we had a cardboard box, about 3' x 2'1" x 3", stood on the middle landing half-way up our stairs, with no markings except the number "513044" hand-written on it in red ink.  It was taken for granted that it was a Christmas present, and no more questions were asked (at least not openly), but it exercised my curiosity for a good couple of weeks before disappearing shortly before Christmas Eve.

For assorted reasons, we ended up having our 'family Christmas' on Tuesday the 27th, so that was when 513044 came out of the woodwork.  Turned out it was for me, and it contained two 24"-square canvases, two 14" x 10" ones, and three new paints: process cyan, process magenta, and process black - yes, I do have other, non-process colours.  So later on in the morning I beetled off into the kitchen, put one of the 14x10s on the table, and started slathering it with the cyan and a titanium white (which my grandparents had given me on Christmas Day along with three 16x12 canvases), with the odd streak of the magenta.  The result isn't exactly a realist masterpiece, but I was mainly interested in seeing how the new pigments would behave, and the answer to that question is that they did exactly what I wanted them to do, which was a pleasant change after the odd behaviour of some of my other acrylics (I'm looking at you, mars black).  Here's a piccy:

Pick a Day, Any Day - 14" x 10", Tuesday 27 December 2011

The title came about partly because of the resemblance between this canvas and one of its predecessors, Another Day, combined with its similarity to the 'water vortex' in the promotional material which preceded the release of Doctor Who Series 5 with the accopmanying tagline "All of time and space - where do you want to start?".  Somehow, all those notions found their way into my brain at once, and got conflated into a title for the painting.

I have plans for how to use at least one each of the 24x24s and the 16x12s, plus Stained Glass IV and a third untitled variations drawing already in progress, so hopefully you can look forward to (or dread, I guess) being exposed to some more photos of my artistic output over the next few weeks, as 513044 comes into its own.


Stats:

• First 12 for '12 status: 1 down, 11 to go - the same as almost everybody else in the running
• Latest book read: A Brit Different: A Guide to the Eccentric Events and Curious Contests of Britain
• Latest film/TV watched: The Gathering Storm
• Latest music listened to: Diamond Music by Karl Jenkins, preceded by his Requiem and In These Stones Horizons Sing
• Latest edible item eaten: I had a shortbread cookie for breakfast
• Predominant colour of clothes: blue/grey (the old story)
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Firefox (tabs: Fort Paradox offline archive; Blogspot Create Post; MatNav 6.1)
• Webcomics posted today: n/a

- The Colclough

Gallery of the Analogue

Okay, sorry about the wait - here's the aforementioned gallery of photos of my recent drawing and painting work.

First up, two attempts at a stylised depiction of a river.  Both of these missed the stylistic mark I was aiming for, with the first veering off in one direction and the other then overcompensating.  I'm planning to do a River III sometime, but I'll need to get my grubby mitts on another canvas first.

River I (10" x 10", completed 8th September)

River II (16" x 12", completed 19th October)

This one was done in a hurry, mainly to use up some watercolour which I'd mixed for Open to Interpretation (see below), only to find out that it wouldn't work on canvas and I'd have to go back to acrylics.  Didn't want to waste all that paint though.

Yellow Morning (A2, completed 25th October)

This one is the first of multiple variations - although the only one completed so far - on the theme of the giant Sharpie doodle that forms the basis of my current wallpaper on A White Horizon.  The big differences this time are the fact that the drawing developed in a slightly less haphazard way, and I did it on an A2 sheet of relatively pricey (and rather nice) 220gsm cartridge paper, instead of leftover wallpaper backing sheet as used last time.

untitled variations no. I (A2, completed sometime in October, I think)

I painted the background for this one back in May, and then it got buried and forgotten for months before I finally rediscovered and finished it the other day.  The whole thing was more of a technical experiment than an attempt at expressing anything; in particular, I put the gold pen details in the corners to check that it would work on top of acrylics, as a precursor to using the pens on Open to Interpretation.

Coffee, Maybe? (~ 12" x 16", completed 7th November)

The big one!  Not my largest painting by surface area (only my third-biggest canvas, if you count the square inches), but by far my most ambitious and detailed painting ever, and I think one of my most accomplished pieces of visual art in any medium.  My kingfisher impression took nine days to paint, but that isn't counting the time spent sketching the composition in pencil, wandering up and down the River Blackwater absorbing the atmosphere and analysing the colours, and generally sitting around staring at the canvas and mentally plotting next moves.  Not to mention that those nine days were spread out across a period of five-and-a-half months, during which several other, smaller projects came and went.

A Dive in Blue (32" x 12", completed 7th November, after almost half a year in the making)

Details from A Dive in Blue, L-R: tree trunk, background vegetation, kingfisher, oak branch

The latest completed piece: a re-interpretation of a pen-and-watercolour-on-wallpaper-backing abstract I created circa June 2009, this time with pen and acrylics on canvas.  Possibly my smelliest work, as the gold and silver inks really pong when they're wet, but fortunately it's stopped smelling now that they're dry.  Also my largest canvas to date, at 24 inches squared.  The painting takes its name from the fact that every other person who looks at it seems to interpret it differently - is it something on fire?  Is it a flower?  Is it supposed to be an optical illusion?  I don't know myself; I just painted it, and I'm happy for people to make of it what they will.

Open to Interpretation (24" x 24", completed this morning - 15th November)

And finally, a couple of things that I've made a start on in the last couple of weeks, but not got very far with.  I've also sanded down the second of my four ex-cupboard-door boards ready for sketching or painting on, but I haven't decided yet what to do with it, and I didn't think it was worth showing you a bare board with some scuff marks on it, hence the lack of photo.

untitled variations no. II (A2, work in progress, begun 1st November)

Stained Glass IV (18" x 24", work in progress, begun 7th November)

I'll try not to let such a big backlog build up next time 8p


- The Colclough

Stuff I Made: September 2011

Been a while since I did one of those several-different-paragraphs-on-unrelated-subjects blogs...


1) Arbitrary Stopframe: I mentioned the other week that I was working on an idea for Episode 11.  Here it is.





2) Painting: did a little painting the other day, experimenting with paint surface effects and trying to make it look like running water, but I forgot to photograph it yet.  Also did more to the kingfisher - new photo follows.

Untitled Kingfisher Painting - now with some paint on the kingfisher!

3) Root Hill on Camera 2011: pretty much finished editing the Concert reel (runtime circa 70 minutes).  Might go back in and add some video filters on one little segment, but otherwise I think the Concert's all done and dusted.


4) Writing Megastropulodon: now nearly 2/3 of the way through the third draft for the opening episode.  Haven't decided yet whether my next move will be the third draft for Episode 5, or starting work on a first draft for Episode 2.


- The Colclough

The Meanings of the Mediums

Question 5: "Do you have a favourite medium to use when doing artwork?"


Nope.

That is to say, I don't think I have one overall favourite.  I have different favourite media for achieving different objectives, and I find that using different ones for different projects helps to keep me sane.  Ish.  I think I'd go mad(der than usual) if I was forced to stick to the same medium for a long time.

Some examples:

• If I'm trying to do an expressive drawing, I find it's a good idea to start in pencil, and work over it in ink and/or colour pencils once I've got the linework right.  Example here.
• On the other hand, if I want a more energetic feel, then I sometimes just go straight for the pen.  For example, my latest Fort Paradox illustration, Episode 076.
• I find paints are usually a more ad-hoc, hyper-analogue medium.  I tend to use paints when I've got a general idea but I don't have all the detail worked out, and I just want to grab a brush and see what happens.  There are exceptions (e.g. that kingfisher...) but a lot of my paintings are experiments in impromptunity.  Did I just invent a word there?
• When creating CD cover art (usually for Tim's compositions), I always work in the GNU Image Manipulation Program, because I feel CD cover art requires a certain level of technical sophistication.  The component images may come from a variety of sources (scanner, camera, CGI renders, whatever) but the final composite is always done in GIMP.

I've also been given five more questions by Sam, which I will try to answer soon:

1. If you could be in a Rock Band what Instrument would you Play?
2. Have you seen any Godzilla Films?
3. If you could buy any car (money No Object) what would it be?
4. Which do you prefer: Motorhead or Metallica?
5. Who is your favourite Stand Up Comedian?

I shall try to answer these, as well as Hannah's questions, in the near future.  So many questions... maybe I should have got a Formspring account after all?


Statistician Fodder:

• Twenty Questions status: 3 down, 17 to go
• Days until Root Hill: 19
• Latest book read: still Operation Mincemeat
• Latest film/TV watched: still Endgame
• Latest music listened to: the 9-tune mashup that forms the soundtrack of Arbitrary Stopframe episode 8
• Latest edible item eaten: apple and walnut cake, and coffee
• Predominant colour of clothes: denim blue on one half, medium red on t'other
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Dashboard; The Fantastic Blog of George Darlan; Josh's Most Excellent Blog; A White Horizon; Blogspot Create Post; MatNav 6.1); Sony Vegas; Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1324

- The Colclough

More Paint

Just because I like showing off photos of my paintings in progress...

(No, the water isn't going to stay all black and depressing like that.  There's some reeds and a load of light-blue reflections still to add)

And here's the really good bit: I've finished some of them!

#011: Stained Glass II (doesn't necessarily go this way up)

#012: Stained Glass III (yep, an unimaginative title, perhaps, but an accurate one)

You might notice the serial numbers have stopped being in hexadecimal. That's not because I've gone off hex or anything, it's just that I've decided I should probably save the ABCs to designate the constituent panels in multi-part works. Method in the madness, see?


- The Colclough

Unrelated Bits

* Not sure whether to be really excited or scared stiff about this bit of news: Benedict Cumberbatch being cast as Smaug in The Hobbit - not only doing the voice, but (apparently) some motion-capture performance as well.  Now, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Cumberbatch.  I loved his turn as Sherlock last year, and am looking forward to Series 2.  But I always thought Smaug would be voiced by someone a bit... older?  And the burning question of the day is: how the heck do you motion-capture a dragon?  But what with the whole production being so darned secretive about the character, it looks like I'll just have to wait and see 8p


* Hedge-trimming hurts.  That was Monday, and I'm still aching on Wednesday.


* I miss programming.  I recently revisited a breakout-type game I wrote back in 2006, and got really nostalgic. I spent two blissfully happy years (I'm sure there's some rose-tinted-spectacles-ness going on there, but never mind) dabbling in Visual Basic 6 on the college computers while I was at sixth form, but since then I've been largely unable to do any programming, due to my lack of access VB6, the fact that VB7 onwards is incompatible with all my old VB6 code, and the fact that every other language I've come across is far more difficult to work with.  I miss the feeling of power when you bend the computer to your will.

So I decided to go programming again.  I had a look at C++ yesterday.  It's supposed to be the world's favourite language, but I can't see how to get started - the Microsoft C++ compiler is hideously over-complicated, and the GNU Compiler Collection has got a really neat trick up its sleeve: they only distribute it as un-compiled source code, which means you have to use another compiler to compile the GNU compiler before you can use the GNU compiler to compile anything else... which defeats the point of having the GNU compiler in the first place.  The open-source community has done many wonderful things, but an uncompiled compiler just reeks of stupidity, IMHO.

So instead, I looked into Java.  The Java developer kit installed fine on my PC... and then refused to run, point blank.  I tell it to start the program, and it just gives me this blank stare.  I hate it when computers do that.

I wish they hadn't destroyed Visual Basic with all those stupid changes in version 7.  It may share some similar syntax with version 6, but it basically isn't the same language any more.

I might not be going programming again after all.


* More painting:

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (the main difference this time is the added branch and leaf detail on the right, plus a few other, subtler touches)

Stained Glass II (no, you're right, it was the other way up in the last photo)

Told you the geometry would get clearer!

- The Colclough

Now Illustrated!

Just thought I'd show you some photos of the stuff I've been rambling about lately...

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (now greener than ever!)

Beginnings of a second stained-glass experiment, this time with more freehand-ish geometry.  Any resemblance to an eye was purely coincidental.

The line work hasn't shown up too well in the photo, but this is another of my abstract-geometry ramblings.  The image will be a LOT clearer in the finished product.

And finally, those snails...

Cepaea Nemoralis shells, x8

That photo is currently my computer wallpaper.  Just thought you might like to know that.

Maybe next time I'll actually think of something to talk about 8p


- The Colclough

The Varnish of Impedence

Typical, isn't it - just when you've got three different paintings on the go at once and you really want to work on them, you find you can't because the work table has been dragged outside, sanded down and covered in wet varnish.  Hmph.

I had a rotten sleep (or lack of) last night, and I'm barely awake enough to write a coherent sentence.  (Not sure what possessed me to think I could paint coherently.)  My dreams were profuse and pointless, and among other things they involved a shower room with a kitchen-sink waste shredder in the floor, a moment where I relived a minor event from a few days ago and then realised in-dream that i was reliving a past event in a dream (that was a seriously bent piece of metaphysics), and a failed attempt to navigate a really badly designed Portal-style test chamber.  Then I woke up, forgot all the rest (which there was a lot of) and then wished I was still asleep.

I've got some recently-acquired snail shells sitting on the kitchen windowsill waiting to be cleaned.  So I'll go and clean them and see if any more writable thoughts occur to me while I'm at it.

*Goes and cleans shells*

While cleaning the shells, it occurred to me that I may as well talk about shells for a bit.  The ones I've just been cleaning up are mostly Cepaea nemoralis, alias Grove Snails or Brown-Lipped Snails.  My interest in collecting shells in general, and my soft spot for C nemoralis and the very similar species C hortensis (White-Lipped Snails) in particular, date back to around 1994, when I found an empty snail shell in the back garden and decided to keep it.  It's gone from there.

For a few years I collected more exotic species by buying them, but more recently my collecting habits have gone native again, and among other things I've been gathering shells off the beaches in different parts of the country where we've been on holiday, which has turned up some interesting results.  E.g. the winkle shells were nearly all yellow off Guernsey, nearly all black off Northumberland, and a surprisingly broad range of colours in the Menai Straits; while my clams from the Sussex coast are much more robust than ones from Cornwall.


As an unrelated aside: I came across an interesting word in the King James version of Leviticus this morning: "beeves".  As in, "...whether the offering be of the beeves or of the sheep or of the goats..." - so by cross-referencing it against other translations, and with other words like "beef" and "bovine", it seems to mean "cattle".  So there we go: my random archaic word for the day.


So now I've managed to write a fairly longish post where only the first couple of lines have anything to do with the title.  But I like the current title anyway, and I can't be bothered to change it.


- The Colclough

A Microcosm of Extremities

I went for another of my walks by the River Blackwater this morning, and I came across a rather paradoxical little scene: some sort of bird lying dead in some grass (I'd guess a magpie, but there was enough missing that I couldn't really tell) - fairly unpleasant, but then again, things die. Fact of life. And then, sitting on the corpse, there was an immaculate red admiral butterfly, apparently unfazed by its mouldering perch.  I got within two feet of it, and it just sat there.

Ironic, I thought, that the closest I've ever got to a live butterfly in the wild was when it had decided to take a sunbath on top of a headless bird corpse.

I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to read some significance into the event, but then decided not to bother.  These things happen, I guess.

Then I thought about painting it.  The jury is still out on whether or not that's a good idea.

Speaking of painting stuff from the Blackwater, here's some more development on my kingfisher:

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (work in progress++)

I did some more work on it today, but I haven't got a photo of the latest increment yet.


- The Colclough

Mixed Stuff

Yay for anthology blogs!  At least this time I've got a keyword that conveniently helps describe all of my points...


Mixed Reactions: Tim told me yesterday that he has written the last-ever episode of Sidewards - again.  This time, I'm told, it really is the end, and there are only a few weeks left before the final instalment of the strange but hugely enjoyable sandwich-assassin-fuelled weirdness is published online.  I'm really looking forward to finding out how the plot resolves, but there'll be a little sandwich-shaped hole in my internet life for months afterwards.



Mixed Media: speaking of webcomics, yesterday I finished illustrating Fort Paradox episodes 67 to 70, using a technically complex art style that gives a parchmenty look (appropriate, considering the subject matter - you'll see what I mean when I publish the strips in a few weeks' time), which involved hybridising pencil sketches, an ink drawing, a failed attempt to incorporate oil pastels, and quite a lot of digital manipulation and arty-farty typography.

As a random side note, the new episodes are the longest consecutive run of FP strips to use the Candara font - the previous record being three, for strips 26 to 28.


Mixed Shades of Green: remember that pencil-on-canvas sketch of a kingfisher in action, which I mentioned a couple of posts back?  I said in my last post that I'd painted the sky in, and this morning I've done a second, rather more involved round of painting, this time focussing on the vegetation.  It took five different tubes of paint (only one of which was green) and five different brushes to create what could be described, in a reductionist analysis, as a big blob of green.  But I'm quite pleased with my big blob of green, so I've decided it's time to take another photo and show you my progress:

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (still a work in progress... but this time with more progress!)

Mixed Quality: I saw the Doctor Who 'mid-series finale' A Good Man Goes to War the other day, and I feel compelled to comment on it.  I'm amazed that a certain sheep-liking ginger person hasn't blogged on this topic yet, what with her well-documented obsession with all things Whovian, but that's beside the point.

The point is that for me, AGMGTW was a very mixed bag, brilliant and depressing in equal measure.  It had some excellent lines (I found Rory's final remark before the title sequence particularly funny), and lots of lovely VFX stuff, and so on and so forth, and in several places it showcased the usual Steve Moffat cleverness.  And that Sontaran was hilarious.  But there were problems, on a scale I haven't seen before in a Moffat-scripted episode.  Spoilers follow, so if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip the rest of this post - if you're going, then take a biscuit, and I'll see you next time.  Otherwise, you're in for some ranting and railing.

Moffat, like Davies before him, seems to have something against the Church.  Yes, I know, that's common enough, but it does get depressing when one's favourite science-fantasy telly show feels it has to join in the bashing.  Granted, Moffat's bizarre depiction of the 51st-century 'Church', as a pseudo-faith-based interplanetary military organisation, seems to be stabbing mainly at Roman Catholicism (what with a reference to 'the Papal Mainframe') and high-church Anglicanism rather than the smaller, more down-to-earth Baptist congregations like the one I belong to, but it still irks a bit.

Some of the supporting characters were frankly unnecessary.  Lorna came across (IMO, anyway) as an insipid example of the 'person who is in awe of the Doctor and desperate to meet him' archetype, and I really couldn't work out for the life of me why 'Thin One' and 'Fat One' had been included at all.  I don't think they added anything interesting to the plot whatsoever, and they should have been cut from the script before the episode got anywhere near the filming stage.  I've written some screenplays, and I know a thing or two about writing out unnecessary side characters, and I'm sure AGMGTW would have been better off without those two.

So, that's the thematic and narrative problems whinged about.  And finally: anatomy.  Yes, you read that right.  The thing is, I'm a great stickler for basic anatomical plausibility in fictional creatures.  I can accept the hypothetical existence of a faun, a unicorn (provided you assume the horn doesn't grow until after birth, so the baby doesn't rip the mother apart from the inside), a dragon, and many other things, but there are some fantasy critters out there whose anatomy just doesn't make any sense.  As I explained in this post back here, I dislike centaurs on the grounds of their badly-thought-out physiology.  You try to figure out the skeletal structure or the position of the major organs, and you'll quickly find out that they just don't fit! Which is where the Headless Monks go wrong as well.  The phrase 'Headless Monks' does sound rather funky, but the literally-headless chaps in AGMGTW have a few fundamental anatomical glitches.  You've got to wonder: how do they eat, drink, taste, breathe, smell, hear or see?  Most known higher life-forms do all those things with their heads, and if the Monks don't have a head then they could face some serious difficulties.  Well, not 'face' the difficulties as such, since the face is part of the head and they therefore don't have one, but you know what I meant.  My suspension of disbelief can stretch to cover the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada, the Star Whale, the Pandorica, Sardick's sky machine, the Silence, and many other things, but people who stay alive without heads?  Sorry, Steve, you've lost me.

Here's hoping the monsters in the next few episodes make a bit more sense.

And, for those who are still reading: sorry about the whinyness.

Have a biscuit.


- The Colclough

Random Shoes

No relation to the Torchwood episode of the same name.  I just couldn't be bothered to think up a clever title for another anthology post.


1) A painting that I somehow ended up not posting when I first did it:

#00A: Another Day

Yes, that serial number is in hexadecimal.  Because I can.  Interpret that fact (and the rest of the painting, for that matter) as you will.

On a related note, I've started painting the kingfisher, but it's not really worth uploading another photo yet as I've only done the sky so far.


2) CGI robots!  Another one.  I've had this idea at the back of my mind for a while, for a computer-animated short film about dolly mixtures, called Golden Cube.  A few months ago I finally managed to work out what was going on with the story (with some help from a friend at church), and then started experimenting with production design.  I re-used a load of elements from a previous CGI project which had fallen through, including the robot which was meant to be the main character, but the robot design just never looked right.  So over the weekend I decided to throw it out and start again from scratch, taking more than a little inspiration from Dyson vacuum cleaners in terms of the elemental geometry, the semi-exposed gubbins and the bold colour schemes.  Here's the latest render of the new droid (still WIP, I might add - the eye needs a lot more work, and the arm is mostly missing), along with a piccy of its spiritual predecessor, courtesy of the internets:

Ancestor on the left, Descendant on the right

There's probably a bit of WALL-E in there somewhere as well, but that's beside the point.


3) Arbitrary Stopframe still hasn't officially ended.  I've sort of got a plan for Episode 8, and I've had Odom the Grud sitting on my desk for about a month, in intermittent peril from marauding hamsters (I'm not sure if hamsters like the taste of plasticene, but I haven't left Odom within range for long enough to find out), waiting to film, but there are one or two little creative obstacles to be overcome first.  My apologies for the ridiculously long wait.


4) Cylinder and Miserable has its fifth anniversary a week on Thursday.  It's been half a decade (as close as makes no difference) since I started writing it.  And for once, it feels like it.  To be honest, it doesn't really feel like it was only yesterday, or any of that stuff.

I feel all old and decrepit now, saying things like that...


- The Colclough

Fresh Air and Canvases

I mentioned back at the end of March that I had decided to alter my morning routine to include a walk.

Well, yesterday, as I was pootling along the bank of the River Blackwater on my self-imposed programme of perambulations, I was faced with a fork in the path.  The main path went off to the left, while the smaller one followed a meandering bit of the river off to the right.  More Direct vs. More Interesting?

I chose More Interesting, and shuffled off down the smaller path.

Turns out that was a good choice.

About half-way along More Interesting, there was a splosh noise, followed by a vivid-blue streak leaving the water and heading for a nearby branch.  The kingfisher was even decent enough to spend a couple of minutes just sitting on the branch, right where I could see him, before he headed off again.

So I decided to paint it.  Not a photographically-accurate, taxonomist-pleasing portrait, mind you, more an impressionist rendition of the moment of the dive.  I've had a 32" x 12" canvas under my bed since Christmas, when I was given it along with my brushes, acrylics and canvas 'doodle pad', and I've kept wondering which way up it should go, and what on earth to put on it - after all, 2.66666 : 1 is a pretty extreme aspect ratio.  But now I have a plan.  Rather than bothering to explain the plan in words, I'll just show you a photo of the canvas with the planned image sketched onto it:

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (work in progress)

I might even post a photo of the finished product eventually, if you're lucky B]


- The Colclough

Living in Analogue

So... another anthology blog thing.

1) Arbitrary Stopframe - I scraped my self-imposed deadline pretty darn close on Saturday, but did manage (just about) to get Episode 7 uploaded before going to bed.  My supply of desktop objects and episode ideas is starting to run a bit dry, hence the fact that Tim guest-wrote this instalment, and I'm not too sure how much longer this thing's going to last.  But I don't plan on making #7 the last episode.  Not yet...



Anybody else got ideas for future episodes?  I can't promise that all suggestions made will be automatically accepted, but they will at least be duly analysed for animatability.

2) Painting.  Took my paints outside on Sunday afternoon and ran off this little sketch alla prima (apparently that's Italian, and basically means doing the whole painting in one go, without waiting for one bit to dry before applying the next).  It's a strange one in that it looks absolutely rubbish from some angles - especially upside-down and from a few yards' distance, but I quite like it so long as you look at it the right way up and at fairly close range.

#009: Impressionist Glade

3) Routines.  It's been bothering me of late how much of my life has been tied up in electronically-mediated activities, be they work or leisure.  So I decided last week to do something about it: I rearranged my morning routine from something like this:

• wake up
• find and apply socks
• read Bible while still in bed
• start computer
• find breakfast
• return to computer
• update webcomics
• eat breakfast while watching TV / DVD / YouTube
• get dressed
• ...and onwards

to something like this:

• wake up
• socks
• find breakfast and armchair
• eat breakfast while reading Bible
• get dressed
• walk (yes, really!)
• and only then fire up the electronics, update the webcomics, and resume business proper

Not sure how much difference it's making so far - I've only been at it a week - but I'll keep at it and see what happens.  This would also explain why my webcomics have been updating a bit later in the morning for the last few days.

4) Alien President.  I finished another batch of episodes yesterday (numbers 29, 31, 32 and 33 in terms of their positions in the story, but they bring the total to 37 as I've illustrated some episodes out of narrative order for technical reasons).  Number 29 in particular was a real pain to draw and colour - you'll probably see why when I publish it in a few weeks - but I was happy with the final result, which is the main thing.  Only 8 more left to illustrate now...

5) The fitful progress of Megastropulodon: a week or two ago, I managed to plug the last major hole in my character profiles, and started work on the second drafts of Episodes 1, 5 and 6, and for a few days it really felt like progress was being made.  But then I sort of dried up again.  I sometimes (read: often) doubt that I could actually make a living from creative expression, what with the way my ideas come in fits and starts, with productive patches separated by significantly longer dry ones.

6) Lack of blogging.  This is the first post on A White Horizon in 10 days.  Most of my recent posts have been triggered by having an episode of Arbitrary Stopframe to embed.  Is the lack of blogs indicative of a lack of life?  I wonder sometimes.  It might seem a bit ironic to make this connection, but: see point 3 above...

7) Firefox 4!  Mozilla have finally released the new, shinier version of my web browser of choice.  It's supposed to be several times faster than its predecessor.  Well, sometimes it is (smoother scrolling is noticeable), but it still takes a long time to load.  Version 4 has most of the same old good points (stability, for example), and several of the same old flaws, including the fact that whenever I open a new tab it comes up blank instead of going to my homepage.  The new interface is much prettier though, and the speed has improved a bit, so I'm generally happy with it.

8)


- The Colclough

Another Lack of Horror Stories

Once again, Arbitrary Stopframe has slunk into existence without any protest or complications.  I have no horror stories to inflict on you.  I have only the finished product, hot off the press:



One thing worth noting is that I took Sam's point about not having used enough sound FX in Episode 5.  There are a lot more sound FX in number 6.

On the topic of "stuff I finished making recently", here's another painting:

#008: Stained Glass I

Yes, the 'I' signals the intent to produce a 'II', and maybe even a 'III' and beyond...


*****


I've just realised: I spoke too soon.  There may not be a horror story in this blog post, but the post itself is arguably part of one: this is my 57th post on A White Horizon.  That darn number again!


- The Colclough

What's Possible

Possible Stuff:

As of Wednesday afternoon, I've actually got a paid commission - making a 90-second computer-graphics-based advert for Day One Publications.  Still doesn't seem possible, but apparently it is.  Crumbs.

Following on from that: it is possible to handle financial and legal matters without your brain turning to an off-green goo and exiting your skull via the earholes.  Or so I'm told.

After seven months in the making, Fort Paradox gained its fiftieth episode last weekend.  Half-way to a hundred.  Wow.  And as if that wasn't enough, the project has its first episode or two by a guest illustrator.  I don't know about the rest of you, but from my POV that's all terribly exciting.  And it does seem possible (like I said, it's been a while since we started), but again, I haven't quite got my head around it.

It is entirely possible (and I hope probable) that I'll get round to doing Arbitrary Stopframe 4 in the next few weeks.  I've been a little distracted for the last fortnight by long-stay visitors, paid employment, and the fact that I'm running out of finished Alien President episodes, but I've got story plans for a couple more Arbitrary Stopframe clips.  Watch this space.

It is possible, but difficult, to design a bathroom by committee.  The way it's going in our family at the moment is that we came up with a perfectly serviceable plan several months ago (before discovering that Mum and Dad's bedroom was going mouldy around the corners, and deciding to de-fungus and decorate in there before doing the bathroom), and ever since then Mum's been revising the plan in every conceivable way, working out why the revisions won't work, and coming back to the original plan.

It is possible for the same composer to create some music that's crazy and thrilling, some that's beautiful and uplifting, and one little track that's deliberately, pervertedly, infuriatingly, brilliantly cringible, all on the same album. Case in point: Thomas Newman's soundtrack from WALL-E, which I've currently got on my hi-fi.  Oddly enough, exactly the same guy pulled exactly the same stunt on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is also in my CD collection.

Speaking of music: it's probably possible to sit through the entire 2-disc Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack by Murray Gold (had it as a birthday present), and not feel the slightest bit like you're having any fun for the whole two hours plus.  But I suspect you might have to be a corpse in order to achieve this.


Impossible Stuff:

I'm sorry, but a dying man simply can't do what he did, with that implement, without missing at least a little bit.  IMHO, that scene went beyond the bounds of Suspension of Disbelief and into the territory of Plain Impossible.  If you've seen Tangled, you should know what I mean, although whether or not you agree is another matter.  I've phrased it that way to try and avoid being spoiler-ish.

It is impossible to sit in the same room for too long without starting to feel like you're going to go bonkers.  It's taken me a long time to realise this, but it's finally dawning on me.

And finally: IMPOSSIBLE GEOMETRY!!!

#007: Impossible Triangle

It was really tempting to paint a big letter 'S' inside the middle hexagon thing, but I resisted.


- The Colclough

Part III and All About It

Here's the third instalment of Arbitrary Stopframe, followed by a lot of verbosity relating to the clip:



Sam asked last week whether the episodes are going to fit together to form a bigger story.  The answer is: to be honest, I have no idea.  As of now, I'm not planning a bigger story, but as I go along I might start spotting connections.  Watch this space, basically!

I rambled on last week about the problem of YouTube series that start well but fall apart on or around their second episode, and listed Problem C as being when there are two instalments, and every indication that the series is set for a long and excellent run, but it somehow vanishes into thin air and Ep 3 never shows.  I've managed to avoid that one, as you can see from the presence of Episode 3 above.

I might not do one next week, as I'll have a guest staying, and it'd be a bit antisocial to ignore them for a day just to get a bit of animation done.  Normal service (i.e. Ep 4) will resume on the week commencing Monday 21st.

But having avoided Problem C, I've discovered something much more worrying:

• Problem D: you're busy animating, and after a few moments squinting into the viewfinder you suddenly find that you can't focus one of your eyes.

That happened to me yesterday while I was shooting Inkjet, and persisted for several minutes.  I couldn't get my right eye to focus on some normal-sized text on my monitor from about two feet away.  Very worrying.  As a visual artist, if I lost the use of my eyes then every worthwhile skill I've ever had would evaporate instantly, and life on this planet would become a blank, both literally and metaphorically.

On a brighter note, in case anyone's wondering what all that stuff says on the computer monitor in the clip, here's a transcript:

*****

How to Animate in Confined Spaces

Without Going Totally Insane

Contrary to popular belief, it is in fact possible to execute a stopmotion animation in a very small and hard-to-access location (such as the inside of an inkjet printer) without going stark staring bonkers in the process.  There are three main ways of achieving this.

The first way to avoid going stark staring bonkers during your animation session is if you are already stark staring bonkers to begin with.  Many of the best animators take this approach, and are always careful to remove any lingering traces of sanity and leave them at the studio door before commencing work.  While there is no reliable scientific evidence, it is widely believed that this is the approach taken by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.

The second approach is to channel in impending insanity through your characters instead of bottling it up in your own brain and allowing it to ferment there.  This is particularly effective if you are animating a character who is already deranged (e.g. Ron Haggard), or at least moderately eccentric (e.g. Wallace).  The results from this technique can sometimes be impressive – see for example the relative collectedness still exhibited by Nick Park after all these years – but they are not always reliable, particularly for method directors.

The third approach is not recommended, as its primary ingredient is paracetamol, in a dose which would be lethal to most known human-based life forms, even animators.

*****

Mea culpa: there's a typo in the third paragraph.  It was meant to say 'channel any impending insanity'.

And finally, on an unrelated topic, here's another painting I finished the other day:

#006: Arbitrary Strata

No relation to Arbitrary Stopframe, despite the similar-sounding names.  It began life as a random pattern of leftover watercolours dribbled onto the canvas, and then added to with acrylics.


- The Colclough

The Better Side

No, nothing to do with ITV1's current tagline.  That's "The Brigher Side", anyway, not "Better".  And I'm more of a BBC watcher.

More to do with the fact that Saturday had some really bad bits, and some really good bits.  (Hannah's blog post in the small hours of the morning about good and bad experiences was rather timely, as it turns out.)  I won't depress you with the bad bits of my weekend - I'd prefer to ramble about the good bits instead.

The big news: I've finished making those blasted DVDs at last!  After waging an epic war against my DVD burning software, ranging across three different computers, I finally nailed it down on a little old laptop and compelled it to do my will.  So now I've got a nice neat row of finished RH DVDs sitting in a cardboard box by my desk and waiting to be put in the post.

I also decided that I was finished with my latest painting.  It involved six different layers of colour (each allowed to dry before the next was applied), and although I actually put the last one down on Friday, I thought at the time there would be more to do.  But on Saturday morning, I went back and looked at it again, and I said to myself "nope, that's enough.  I'm going to call it a day."  And then, for lack of a better title, that's exactly what I did.

#004: A Day

Yes, I  do realise that I have committed a truly atrocious pun right there.  My sincerest apologies to those of you with delicate linguistic sensibilities.

I also made more use of my new webcam.  It's rapidly turning out to be better value for money than anything else I've ever bought (not difficult, considering how little I had to pay for it).  Skype is much fun.

And I've done the illustrations for Fort Paradox Episodes 33 and 34, which feature a new experimental art style which I've never used for any other cartoon before.  It involves biros, I'm quite pleased with how it's come out.

And now for something completely different (and altogether nerdier): on Saturday, I used Linux for the first time.  My Grandad was asking if there was a free operating system he could use to recondition an ancient PC of his, so I made him a Ubuntu installer disc.  But before handing it over, I thought I'd try it out myself in demo mode on our family laptop.  It more or less worked, except that the laptop's optical disc drive is basically shot so it took ages to read the disc and load the software.  It took me all of two minutes to find my way around the OS though, and I already like it almost as much as Windows, and much better than Mac OSX.

Since I've already got a perfectly good Windows installation on each of the machines I use regularly at the moment, I'll probably stick with dear old Microsoft for the time being.  But I got a very good first impression of Ubuntu, so you never know - I might end up going the whole open-source hog someday!



My stats, for the next-to-last post of the 11 For 11 race...

• 11 For 11 status: 10 down, only 1 more to go... who will be the winner?
• Latest book read: *still* that commentary on Ephesians...
• Latest film/TV watched: haven't seen anything in a few days, and I've actually forgotten what the last one was...
• Latest music listened to: How to Train Your Dragon OST by John Powell (2010) currently on speakers
• Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: crossaint and cowjuice for breakfast, unless you count the bit of jelly sweet I'm currently chewing on
• Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Create Post; YouTube; Blogspot Dashboard)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1130; Alien President #9

- The Colclough

From Yesterday

Yesterday (Wednesday 12 January 2011), I did something I hadn't done for about six-and-a-half years: I went for a repeat viewing of a film at the cinema.  There had previously been exactly four films I saw on the big screen twice each: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Shrek 2.  As of yesterday, this exclusive list has expanded to include Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

As so often happens with films based on books, I spent a lot of the first screening worrying about how much it had changed from the source novel.  That, and being distracted by popcorn management issues.  This time round, it was more a case of sitting back and enjoying the ride.  I suspect the projector might have been ever-so-slightly better focussed this time as well - or my glasses were cleaner.  The rest of the family all seem to be in agreement that Dawn Treader is better than its immediate predecessor Prince Caspian, but I'm not so sure - not that I think VotDT has gone downhill, more that I didn't dislike Caspian as much as a lot of other people seemed to do.  Both have their flaws, but both did pretty well on the whole, IMHO.

Also while in town, I acquired a webcam.  I went into WHSmiths with £40's worth of gift cards to use, and after pootling around the whole place two or three times I decided that the webcam for £39.99 seemed like the best option.  The book section was mostly full of GCSE revision guides (I've got a first-class BSc, so those were a bit beneath my level), travel handbooks (I have no travelling ambitions), and vampire novels (I avoid vampire novels on principle, and I fail to see why so many other people are rabidly obsessed with the blighted things).  So webcam it was - and according to the price marked on the shelf, it would conveniently use up both gift cards.

Then I got to the till, and the computer only wanted to charge me £8.74.  So I've still got over thirty quid's worth of Smiths vouchers to use, and no idea what to use them on - you can only have so many pens in your collection before it starts getting a bit silly - but then again, a new webcam for less than nine quid isn't to be sneezed at.

Which leads me to Skype.  Yes, guilty... after all my ramblings about how much I dislike social networks and will refuse to join any, blah blah blah, you might think I've gone and betrayed the cause by having got a Skype account.  But I don't think it counts, really.  After all, it's not about posting banal, vapid nothings to be read by the public en masse (I'm looking at you, Facebook), it's about one-to-one realtime conversations - with added video-ness so you can see who you're talking to.

And finally, talking of seeing stuff, here's a photo of my latest acrylic painting, completed yesterday afternoon:

#003: Hamster Hamster

The idea is very simple: a blissfully happy hamster sitting on his own little planet made of solid cheese and supporting an ecosystem of broccoli.  It's got a bit of a The Little Prince vibe going on - I read the book once, years and years ago, and even though I've long since forgotten most of it, this bizarre image has stuck in the back of my mind ever since.

I've now started work on another, abstract painting.  Photo to follow in due course.

As for today... I've got a 'do' list as long as your arm, and writing this post is just one of many, many things to get done.  So I'll wrap up now and get on with some of the others.

• 11 For 11 status: 8 down, 3 to go
• Latest book read: still Stuart Olyott's commentary on Ephesians
• Latest film/TV watched: Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• Latest music listened to: Cylinder and Miserable: Official Webcomic Soundtrack (WIP), written by Timothy Johnston with some interference from yours truly
• Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: bagel and cowjuice for breakfast
• Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Dashboard; Blogspot Create Post; MatNav x2)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1127; Alien President #8

- The Colclough