Ilustration Friday - Magnify

What would it look like if you could magnify people's thoughts?

A rather late entry to Illustration Friday for last Friday.

IF - Opinion

Opinion - for Illustration Friday - in Corel Painter

Have you noticed that opinions seem to bloom whenever they are given a chance? I remember, when a teenager, that a classmate said she hadn't realised she had so many opinions until she went to a dinner party and was asked what she thought about this and that.

Today I realised I had some strong opinions about Miniature Schnauzers - we met one that was a couple of years old and its owner told me very forcefully that:

• Miniature Schnauzers all bark
• Their recall, when called, is bad
• That they are terriers

Now I do realise that I've only had Teasel for a few weeks but one of the things I did before we got her was a lot of research about dog breeds and once I'd started to seriously consider a Miniature Schnauzer even more about them.

One book did warn that many of them bark as a hobby - however not all the owners I've met so far have had barky dogs and Teasel is the quietest, least barking puppy in the puppy class we go to - she can bark and will give the odd bark but not repetitively - and her mother didn't bark at us as far as I can remember - so although I do know it could be a problem its not necessarily so. (Any hints on what to do if she starts to get barky would be appreciated!)

On the recall... Teasel's is currently good (most of the time and especially when there is sausage in the offing) and certainly very good compared to the older ones. I assume that this is something we'll have to keep on working on. However I have noticed that none of the other owners take treats of any sort out to reward their dogs for returning - its as though they assume that just because the dog knows that its meant to come back it will and this is despite also knowing that their dog isn't that good at coming to them when they call... we currently take the tastiest treats with us when we are going to the park and I think that is something I'll continue for as long as necessary... it may well be that she'll always needs some sort of an incentive.

Miniature Schnauzers are Schnauzers, not terriers. In this country they are in the same kennel club category as the bigger Schnauzers (utility dogs), in the US the American Kennel Club has them in the terrier category but they were not actually breed from terriers so have no more genes in common with them that with other types of dogs.

What they do have in common is that they were breed to hunt rats and other small creatures. This means that they like to shake things and can be very persistent. But they don't have the same argumentative nature that so many terriers have though here too there are, of course, exceptions in both directions. As a child we had two West Highland Terriers - the first was as sweet as pie, the next an absolute monster!

IF - Island

Island by Caroline in Corel Painter

This illustration started off as a smudgy pen and ink treasure island on paper that I was doing for Illustration Friday in June when the prompt was hoard. I was planning to do a map to buried treasure. Somehow I didn't get it finished. This was a version that I scanned in and that later became a pretend postage stamp which is why there is a version of the island as a sort of Queen's Head on it.

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Habitweb - the No Diet Diet is all about becoming more aware of ones habits and breaking free of them.

Today a dreadful one took hold of me!

I had decided to break a habit I have of getting a hot drink (usually just hot water) and then sitting with it at the computer. One reason for wanting to break this one is that I've broken several keyboards that have not coped with even minor spillages of water on them...

So today several times I was very aware and sat downstairs whilst drinking my hot water. I put a cold water by the computer with the idea that it would help me if I knew there was something there to drink.

And then around lunchtime just when I was planning on going out, I was sitting at the computer and knocked the cold water everywhere, including over the keyboard - and what did I knock it with?

The mug of hot water that I hadn't noticed myself bringing in!

Oh dear.

Not only water everywhere and the worry that my keyboard might no longer work but realising just how much I had failed in basic awareness!

Luckily the keyboard does seem to still be working - though if I go off line for several days it may be because its stopped!

However my determination to break this habit is now very much stronger.
No water or other drinks are to be allowed in here at all!
And that's final!

What's your worst habit?

More islands this week at Illustration Friday.

Routine

"Routine and the Habitweb" by Caroline using Corel Painter

Illustration Friday's theme this week is Routine - how useful with respect to the No Diet Diet. The book is clearly expecting most people to be stuck inside a routine as well as lots of habits. For instance always getting up at the same time, working the same hours, lunching at the same time, going to bed at the same time, etc. I have no such time-based routine. As I'm not working I don't have anyone else setting my hours for me so my habits are mostly regardless of time and more to do with context.

Today is day 12 of the No Diet Diet for me and it is about being, either more spontaneous or more systematic, whichever one is less comfortable with. There is no doubt about which way I verge - I find being systematic extremely difficult; hence the lack of routine. Not that I haven't attempted to get more organized, I have, but my default behaviour... um... habit... is that of being spontaneous. So that's spontaneous but habit-ridden! A bit of a puzzle but it seems to be true.

I attempted to show the drag of the web of my habits in the picture I did. I'm not sure how well it works as an illustration but it was fun to do.

A couple of years ago I gave myself a day like my school days used to be with everything planned for each hour. I set a timer and did it. That day I felt exhilarated by it but the next day I felt the most extreme refusal to ever do it again - body and soul! Or maybe it was less body and soul but more my habits reasserting themselves... so hard to tell the difference... whichever it was I haven't done it again and decided today to be a little easier on myself in my pick of new systematic behaviours to try. Instead I've planned a few things to do today and over the next few days.

Yesterday I fell into a habit I didn't know I had. I failed to break it at the time, I was sort of aware that I was in it but found it particularly hard to break out of despite several times almost managing to. And this was a habit to do with food.

I'd bought pizzas from one of our local delis; smaller and more expensive than the usual supermarket pizzas and I hoped both more wholesome and more delicious. When I started mine I immediately didn't like it, and yet I carried on eating it. The bread-base was far too thick and the cheese tasted stale and nasty. And the result was it sat very heavily in me and I felt very much less happy than I had that morning (which had been lots of fun; we'd shopped in a new place and bought Japanese ingredients so that I could finally make Jim the sushi I've been promising him for the last 13 years - I wish I'd made the sushi instead of having the pizza!).

In the past, I've had quite a few discussions (arguments?) with my mother-in-law about leaving food. She is very anti-leaving food and considers it a crime to waste it. This is despite the fact that she would also like to be a few pounds lighter than she is. I say that simply eating food because its on your plate won't feed people in other countries or poorer people here and it is using oneself as a waste bin.

I don't set out to waste food but I do know that simply eating something because it is there, rather than because I want it, is more likely to harm me than help anyone else. Unfortunately my rational argument seems to have been forgotten by my body and somehow I've picked up her habit of eating something because it is there even when it is horrible!

Something else that seemed to be going on also seems key. This was the first thing I'd eaten, whilst on the No Diet Diet, that hadn't been satisfying. I noticed that part of the urge to continue to eat was the need to feel satisfied. However it didn't satisfy me at all and I just ended up feeling stuffed! Yuck!

All useful lessons for me and I hope I'm more able to break this habit when it creeps up on me again!

Today, in the interests of being more consciously systematic I finally got around to checking out the website for the No Diet Diet and was most disappointed. They want a subscription of £22.95 per month, or £275.40 a year! Something that's available to the non-payer are the previous monthly newsletters which, frankly, are not very inspiring, nothing like as good as the book. And yes I read (quickly) all 20 of them - this is my day for being systematic.

I got my copy of the book from my local charity bookshop but even full price its only £10. Clearly even more of a bargain than I'd previously realised.

And talking of bargains - remember September 4th is my 3rd blogiversary and I'll be featuring a giveaway then!

Update: I've just scared myself silly looking at some of my books on how to be more organised... I think I'm going to have to consider this an area that really does need some serious changing of habits.

Books I've looked at:



Organizing for the Creative Person may be the best bet out of the organising books but it feels too dense for me today.

The Ultimate Book of Organising Hints and Tips is at least brightly illustrated and can obviously be dipped into - maybe I'll pick one thing from here to actually do today.

Getting Things Done - I know I've thought this potentially useful in the past but today it too feels too dense.

Looks like the message is that I'm feeling dense - still feeling the after-effects of that pizza from yesterday I think!

Illustration Friday - Enough

Digital collage based on my own version of the only portrait, from life, of Jane Austen that exists.

Today, 18th July 2008, it is exactly 191 years since the death of Jane Austen and I just happen to have been going through a Jane Austen season recently, hence this image.

Money and marriage are her themes. And how much money is enough is a common thread. Miss So-and-so with so many thousand pounds is a common way to describe an unmarried woman. The marriage market required money or breeding, preferably both.

I wanted to know just how much this was in today's terms. According to one source (measuringworth.co.uk), £10,000 then is the equivalent of over half a million pounds now. It would have been invested in government bonds that gave a steady income of 5% per year (sorry I've lost that source), so was the equivalent of an annual income of £25,000 now (or $50,000 in US dollars).

No wonder the wealthy Emma, with £30,000, could pick and choose and need not have married at all.

Most of the heroines are not so lucky and Jane Austen experiments with a mixture of bad luck financially and a variety of backgrounds setting herself the puzzle of how to get them from this position to some sort of happy ever after. And being a romantic at heart she was also determined that her favourites would at least like, if not fall madly in love, with their future husbands!

More than enough Enoughs at Illustration Friday.

IF - Foggy

Figures in the Mist - Digitally painted in Corel Painter

One of the photo challenges I like to do is the Monthly Scavenger Hunt on Flickr. Back in May I blogged about this and showed this photo for a category of Heavy Fog:

At the time I said I wasn't wearing glasses... since then I've decided that maybe I could do with going back to wearing some for reading at least. And today I had an appointment with my optician, the first time I'd been to see them since 2002:

UK date format: 11/07/08 = 11 July 2008

What's more for this months hunt I took all my pictures using a faceted bead in front of the lens and for the category of computer I showed one with the same blog posting on it because it was about the MSH, though I showed the end of the posting, which was actually about a book I was then reading:

How's that for a well-documented synchronicity?

Here's the mosaic of all of my entries for this month's scavenger hunt using wobbly pictures:

1. Playmobil Playground, 2. Table Soccer, 3. Is it a bird? Is it a plane?, 4. Four Wheeler!, 5. Pink Power Ranger, 6. Aquarium, 7. Fireworks!, 8. Basket Ball!, 9. My Computer, 10. Tin Toy Horse Race, 11. Go faster streaks?, 12. Motorbike, 13. Skateboard, College Green, 14. See you later, Alligator!, 15. A book by a Fox!, 16. Here be Dragons!, 17. Diamond Ring, 18. Ready for the beach!, 19. Camping, 20. Cricket Ground

Someone commented that they hurt her eyes...

More Illustration Friday entries.

IF - Sour

Lemon Tea painted digitally in Corel Painter IX.5

I've been re-reading the Morse books by Colin Dexter. Its really odd how on this second time through I keep on noticing all the middle-aged male ego stroking; Morse is a middle-aged, paunchy, morose, sour, crotchety, pedantic bachelor. He is obsessed by pornography, cigarettes and alcohol. He is only able to think with a drink; his lunches are typically liquid. His intellectual superpower is being able to do the Times crossword in 10 minutes and spot a spelling or grammatical mistake in any piece of writing.

The Morse of the books is far less refined than the Morse of the TV series, yet throughout the stories all the women need only see him once, speak to him on the phone or even hear about him to become besotted! At the very least they spend far too much time thinking about him... and at the worst they run around doing time-consuming errands for him in the hopes of pleasing him. No-one ever reacts to how he must smell with all that drinking, smoking and lack of exercise...

It is also interesting to see how the early Morse changes in the later books to become a lot more like the Morse of the TV series... the battered Lancia is suddenly no longer mentioned and he's driving an eye-catching Jaguar; his whisky is no longer Bell's but malt or Glenfiddich and he becomes worse at buying rounds. His interest in music becomes more pronounced too.

But for me its the constant attraction that even the really young women, all of them, find for Morse, and some of the other older men, that is the least believable aspect of the written stories. Its a superpower too far. Luckily the TV Morse is a lot more presentable, though still not my cup of tea.

For more Sour illustrations see this week's Illustration Friday.

Punchline

Punchline - for Illustration Friday. Drawn using Corel Painter.

I found several different reference pictures of Mr Punch and drew my own versions of them... in a line. I think each of them is really hamming it up!

Digitally Painted in Corel Painter

Originally this had a bit of a jesterish Mr Punch in it but now it makes me think of forests and greenmen... what do you see in it?

Finally, here is an article I scanned from New Scientist a while ago :

Its conclusion is that our brains have decided what to do before we consciously decide... In other words our brain has decided for us before we know it... I'm not sure how this really works in practice... is consciousness simply a symptom of the way our brains are organised? Nor do I know whether or not this is good research or an appropriate conclusion to draw from it... my brain isn't giving me any clues...

Their experiment involved having to punch buttons... probably why I, or my brain, thought to put it in here.

Illustration Friday - Forgotten

Its so long since I've done an Illustration Friday I'd forgotten how difficult it is to select what medium I've used on the input page.... this one was drawn in pencil and pen then scanned and inverted.

In fact I think its almost a year... the last one being Fortune last July.

What do you do to help yourself remember things?

IF - Fortune

Remix using images from flickr with appropriate cc licenses:

Nagahama Hachimangu well by MShades
four leaf clover by Greencolander

I consider Illustration Friday's choice of word very fortunate as on Tuesday I got both of these up on Flickr and also published a bit about where they came from and the ten other images in this series on my card blog.

Good luck to you all!



Remix using images from flickr with appropriate cc licenses:

Wishes to Buddha by Suviko
Chorten and Ama Dablam by Sam Judson

IF - Green

Relax in Green by Caroline using Corel Painter IX

Images used in this remix include from flickr with appropriate CC licenses:

Here Be Squirrels by Nyx
Fluorite octahedron by MShades
Regal Queen by laszlo-photo
morning glory by only alice
nuez (a tropical nut) pendant with malachite inlay by kafka4prez
Graphium sarpedon by melop

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I have recently been making SoulCollage® cards which are done by collaging whole images together . I love the effects created by the changes in background and juxtapositioning of previously unrelated images. Most people do these with magazines, scissors and paste but I've been mostly doing them digitally. The above image is a variation on one that I call The Relaxation Teacher - I put it together specifically for this week's Illustration Friday's theme of Green.

Links:
More of my SoulCollage® cards
Illustration Friday
soulcollage.com

IF - Sprout

Watercolour and pencil of Potatoes Chitting - sorry the photo is a little off centre but it was hard to avoid reflections - this is one of the few pictures of mine that's framed - probably dates from the 1980s.

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What week is it?

On Wednesday I got that the word for the week was "Turbulance" but not to post it. When there is turbulance its hard to know exactly where one is going... though if you've got enough momentum up before you hit it there's a good chance you'll still be travelling in the right direction....

Then yesterday I got an update and that the word was now "Quest".

All my dreams recently have been about my cards. I wake up having been shuffling them and looking at them all night long.

I've got rather a lot now... 78 are backed on card and another 70 or so printed out and ready to be backed. I was in a frenzy of making them until yesterday when suddenly I felt the pressure had stopped. Now it is time to look at them. And this morning I figured out what the quest was for... its for what my own essence is... the essential me... if I had to make a single card that represented me what it would be. So I'm looking at what I've got and trying to see where this leads me.


A card that was crucial in getting here was one I started off calling "Can't see the wood for the trees". I started off with a dense evergreen forest. I then added leaf after leaf until I'd covered it up and there was no forest showing. So now this card is called "Can't see the wood for the leaves". And yes I know that the number of cards I've made is excessive... but a tree has many leaves.

See the words for it on my card blog.

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I'm currently reading S Is for Silence which is the last of the Kinsey Millhone books available - I've been really enjoying my re-read of the series and then the two that I'd not read before R and S. Maybe I'll need a bit of time off from fiction after this marathon!

I've ordered the most recent Julia Cameron book Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance and am planning on joining Leah et al in going through it starting in 2 weeks on Saturday February 17th.

Are you planning on joining in too?

Update: The place to go to join in is Finding Water

Week - Renewal

Illustration Friday's topic is "Red" I was happily making a blue, yellow and black picture until the email came. So here is my picture with added red. Done in Painter IX playing especially with the Hurricane distortion brush.

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I'm a bit late in posting my word for this week - Renewal. I like this and really hope its going to live up to its promise.

When logging in to blogger this morning I got the usual thing about moving over to the new version and as usual I said yes... and today was the day when to my surprise it worked! So there is one renewal.

The bed that we ordered a couple of weeks ago turned up today. Its one that they deliver and assemble for you - apparently this turned out to be cheaper than having to replace all the bits people broke when it was a DIY assembly. They were here before 8.30 am and done within 40 minutes. Very neat, efficient and polite. I haven't got a wide enough angle to take a decent photo of it. But you can see the style here - its the boxer bed from the boxer bed company.

What would you like renewal to mean in your life?

Illustration Friday - Cake

This is a layer cake that is growing at the Camel Exchange - please feel free to add a layer. Layers so far from JohnnyNorms and Caroline (that's me!).
Rules such as they are can be found here.

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Mixed Media - pineapple upside-down cake (see below for recipe), candles and photo then played with in Painter IX

(And just in case you don't get the joke this really is mixed media, as in mixing a cake... )

It was Jim's birthday during the week so he took today off to make an even longer weekend and of course we baked the cake today too. How convenient!

The recipe we used was a varaition of one featured in the April 2006 issue of BBC Good Food and comes from Gregg Wallace's "Veg, the greengrocer's cookbook".

For the base

1 pineapple (there are lots in the shops at the moment)
3 oz dark muscado sugar
3 oz butter
1.5 oz flaked almonds (as much as we had to hand - the recipe called for 3 oz)
some pecans (to augment the almonds - not used in the original recipe)
8 maraschino cherries (the recipe called for 4oz natural glace ones)

For the batter

9 oz butter
9 oz light muscavado sugar
4 eggs
8 oz plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 oz ground almonds
2 tbsp rum (or pineapple juice)

Go out and buy 22cm / 8 in square tin. Wash it.

Oven: 190 C / 170 C (fan) / Gas 5 / 375 F

Peel pineapple. Slice. Discuss how thick the slices ought to be. The recipe says finger-thick... but what sort of specification is that? We found that 4 slices were enough but the picture showed 9... they must have used a much smaller pineapple. Remember to core the slices. It says reseve any juice... well if you used canned that's probably a good suggestion.

Cream butter and sugar. This starts off with you congratulating yourself for having left the butter out to get soft. But then you get sugar and butter over so many utensils that the congratulations stop and you have to clean up a bit before you go on and smooth this mix all over the inside of the 22cm square tin.

Scatter the almonds around getting some on the sides and the bottom of the tin. Place the slices of pineapple neatly in the base. Fill the centres of the pineapple with as many cherries as you can (that was Jim's variation). Add pecans in all the gaps. (Well worth doing as they really were a yummy addition).

Then the best bit of the recipe is where it says "Tip all the batter ingredients into a food processor and blitz until smooth". It forgot to tell me I really ought to have put an apron on first... and that Jim who always remembers his apron will therefore take over this thus leaving me to tidy up...

Pour the batter over the pineapple slices etc.

Bake. It said 50 mins - 1 hour but was cooked after 47 min. We could smell that it was ready. It says you can tell its ready when its puffed up and golden.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for a bit. It says so that the cake can relax... (What do cakes do to relax?)

Find something on which you can turn it out. In our case that meant putting some foil over the bread board.

Loosen the cake all around the edges gently then put the board on top and turn.

Decorate the cake with candles.

If eating it hot its good with custard and is more like a pudding.

And you really shouldn't look at the estimate of the kcalories per serving...

Of course having read the New Scientist this week you'll know that to lose weight you need to sleep more. (Okay that's a gross over-generalisation)

Then blog it and struggle for a while with blogger to publish it... and get into trouble with IF's Penelope as she thought it was just a photo... but now I've added in the Camel Exchange picture so I should be back within the rules of Illustration Friday except for being in the wrong categories and showing the wrong thumbnail of course...