Tut, tut Asda.

As I was removing the pathetic amount of follicles atop my upper lip this morning, I noticed this on the crappy Asda's shaving cream...

I see a flaw in their design...

Art.

Art is such a tricky thing.

It’s as tricky as Richard Nixon posing you a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. In Dutch.

It can be tricky for different reasons. Some people find drawing a straight line difficult...even with a ruler. There are a million and five ways to find the concept of art complicated – line, tone, perspective, colour, composition...plus a million other things.

Art is tricky.

Throughout my time of arting about at A Level, I faced many problems. I can’t say I enjoyed all of the time spent painting and drawing and writing up about the painting and drawing. The main reason for this is because I had a guideline to stick to. I had several strands, objectives and assessments to follow and mould my work around. At the time, we all despised this system. “Damn you Edexcel!” we’d moan as we finished a rather superficial page in our books about how our piece had come to fruition.  These guidelines may work for the sciences and the mathematics, hell even English, but Art as a subject is much more personal and set mark schemes can’t really do it justice. We were trapped in the qualification organisation’s grotty cell, rattling at the bars eager to be free. There’s no need to explain why we’re painting this or that, and there’s no need for these stupid preliminary sketches and pages. Or so we (I) thought...

My oh my, how things have changed.

Now I’m outside the educational system, helplessly trying to create some art myself on my own, I’m rattling at the other end of the spectrum. No longer am I stuck in that cell, instead I’m on my knees crawling under the burning sun in the middle of a barren desert. Too much space is the problem now, too many possibilities at my leisure. Where do I start? Where do I begin?

Art is tricky.

I have a few set rules, starting off with focusing more so on the sea, water and the coast. I live on the coast, so why not use it? I live where Turner painted some magnificent pieces of art (something about the unique way the sun sets over the Margate sea I hear). Now I’ve simply got to the find the correct mixture of contextual references, something a few months ago I would have shuddered at the thought of, and personal responses.

Art is -

Priorities.

And on the eleventh day, God said “Let there be Skyrim!” And it was so, the skies fell with Bethesda’s highly-anticipated RPG sequel. And God saw that it was good, if a bit buggy.

-Genesis  2:3.5

Yes, today Skyrim is released and gamers will rejoice. Not me though, I don’t really care. I also don’t care about Modern Warfare 3, another big game released only a few days ago.

Now I don’t want to get too preachy or ‘uncool, maaan’ but let’s not forget that 11/11/11 isn’t just the day where fantastically new games are released. Or when Facebook users can shove down our throats the idea that “OMG!! ITS 11.11.11.11.11!!!!?!! THIS WON’T HAPPEN 4 ANUTHER 100 YEARS!!!”. No, it’s also Remembrance Day/Armistice Day/Veteran’s Day and let’s not forget that.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Arty Stuff - 10/11/11

Right-o, last art update for this bloody horse picture. After quite a few attempts at finishing I've realised the desired outcome will never be possible. Part of this is probably down to my own skill, but also because the painting is too damn small! You can't get much detail when you need a brush approximately 1 hog's hair thick!

Anyway, here it is -

Finished study. Acrylic, ~35 mins, 10/11/11

Overall I think it's ok. I'm liking the background less and less, but it's too much hassle to try and correct it properly now. It'd be easier to start the whole thing over again if I were to do that. Nonetheless, it was still a nice piece to create, I just hope the final, proper horse painting I'm going to do will be more successful. Though, because I'll be doing it on a larger scale, it should be.

Let's see...

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Arty Stuff - 07/11/11

Not much arty stuff today at all I'm afraid. In fact, it's only one piece - the horse thing from a while back which I'm trying to finish.

Background filled in but still messy, plus some more details on the legs - 4/11/11

I finally added in a background and I quite like the use of the brush strokes for the planks of wood. However, I never seem to learn that leaving the background until the end, or at least after a while is the most annoying thing EVAR! Now I've got to neaten up all the edges of the horse.

Minor tweaks - 6/11/11

Yesterday I didn't make any major changes, just as it says - 'minor tweaks', particularly to the legs and the rider. Although looking at it now, her nose looks like the size of the child snatcher's due to the shadow of that hat. Must fix that or else I'll be creeped out by it...

Something about time, or productivity, or nerds? I don't know.

I often wonder where all the time goes. Where all those seconds, minutes and hours flow to after they’ve passed your conscience at varying speeds. It’s annoying that time has such power over people, and can often nay frequently alter the perception of other people. Although what I’m about to describe is a fairly niche idea surrounding time, considering scientists are pondering about the qualities of time and its relativity plus much other hoo-har, I’d like to think it’s something a number of people go through and understand.

Time is a strange little thing, or big thing, or not a ‘thing’ at all. For example, the effect of it comparatively between two people could vary wildly. In a situation where myself and another who happens to really like creating databases are creating databases, the time will inevitably drag and linger and outstay its welcome  for me  (I mean , I only offered it the use of my bathroom and now it’s staying here for dinner), but not for the other guy who really likes creating databases.

Good for that guy, where would we be in a world without databases? Dead I presume, in some sort of terrible Y2K incident where the robots and motherboards and circuits revolted against us cruel and “just turn it off and on again/just give it a little whack”-ing humans.

Time is often demonstrated or analogised as water (see second sentence), yet often people can fall in this water and start to drown. Reflecting this back into the real world, it would equal something like spending all day browsing the internet doing nothing at all in general. In a zombie like fashion, you tab in and out of websites such as Reddit and YouTube, absorbing everything and producing nothing – i.e. being unproductive. As you’re ‘drowning’, the water around you is passing but you’re stuck under the current helplessly flaying around trying to move to no effect. What this equates to it that you come off the internet realising it’s now 8:00pm when only a little while earlier (according to you), it was 2.00pm. Damn, where did the time go?

Let’s compare the above effect with other types of people – people who I despise because I can’t be like them, or at least find it difficult to. Instead of drowning in the river of time, they are beautifully bobbing along with it. Imagine the Lady of Shallot but not dead. They realise the time, move with the time, use the time to their effect and crucially realise the organisation of time. Once again, in reality this would relate to, well, just organised people. Organised in any sense of the word.  It doesn’t have to be academically, you wouldn’t have to be writing essays, painting masterpieces or composing orchestras every day. No no, to some folks it could be putting the washing out, going shopping, creating their next dolls house piece of furniture.

And sometimes I am like this, other times I am not. I swing from one end of the spectrum to the other, throwing consistency out of the window. Annoyingly, I could be super productive one day, feeling great and accomplished, then use that one day of productivity to subside the next day’s – “oh, well I did a lot yesterday so it doesn’t matter.”

Therefore, the way time can alter people’s perception of one another is through its use between two different people. I know someone who is constantly out and about, never in his room and doing stuff and who therefore views me as a lazy, good for nothing that should straighten up and fly right.

In some ways this relates to this blog, although overall I have been impressed with the way things are going. I realise this week has been a bit terrible but there are reasons for this (let’s just say the work experience didn’t work out, hence the lack of Day 2, 3, 4 and 5). But it also relates to the days of the weeks and the weeks of the year. I don’t want to be doing nothing, so I’ve got to be doing something. Routines can work, sometimes (usually for the first day, statistically) but it’s a start. I mean, it worked a bit for this blog so hey, there we go.

Enough of this elusive rambling, it’s just I enjoy rambling so much. It doesn’t require any true structure or cohesiveness – it can be anything. Marvellous!

Work Experience - Day 1

After waking up late leaving no time for getting ready, I quickly dashed out of the house at around 8:33am, needing to get to said work experience for 9am. In the end I was around 8 minutes late - not great, but it could've been a whole lot worse.

Today didn't comprise of much, although I did gather a basic understanding of the routine the Isle of Thanet Gazette has. (Remember that thing I said about knowledge?)

After a reasonably slow and daunting start (meeting all these new people in a new environment, or even more daunting, try to do something these people are professionals at), I started typing up some letters and meeting announcements for this Friday's Gazette. Never have I been so paranoid of my spelling. Not even in an exam was I so worried about those bloody apostrophes, despite the fact I was only typing up who won this months bridge tournament!

Following that, I went with some reporter - Andrew Woodman - to Margate Magistrates and Crown Court, which was rather overwhelming. I realise it's only Margate and nothing spectacularly big, but seeing the whole process of justice was rather cool. I did get some odd stares from the Magistrates though, who probably wondered what this little brat was doing there.

In the afternoon, I learned about NIB's (news in brief), where I took some overly long press releases or lifeboat reports and summed them into roughly 100 words. Sounds easy, and some were, but for others you really did have to think about the who, what, where, why, when, how and more importantly - what people wanted to know from the story.

Towards of end of the first day, there was a long but ultimately helpful news meeting where I could see how stories were gathered, formed, moulded, processed and pushed along that production line of journalism. All very fascinating.

So, in general, the first day went well. I can't say I was very confident but I listened and watched a lot to what the people did there - who they spoke to, what they asked etc. Let's see how it goes tomorrow...

Things are a-happening!

Indeed they are, for tomorrow I'm starting a week-long bit o' work experience for my local newspaper. It doesn't really sound like much, but in truth it is.

The main reason is because if journalism is a career I want to look into, getting some knowledge of the field in any way, shape or form is useful. Ok, so it's a local paper but what they do is still the same - finding stories, writing, editing. Knowledge is power, and all that.

Plus, it's just going to be cool. At the very least it will keep me busy for a week, at the very most it could cement my desire to enter the field of journalism and get a little toe in the door of it.

Anyways, I did some more art earlier, finally going back to that horse picture I started a while back.

Did a bit more to the legs and overall blending in of the tones. Acrylic, ~40 mins 

I mainly focused on the legs, although to be honest not alot was done for the amount of time it took. Looking at it, that front right leg needs enlarging, but I'm liking it so far. The contours of the the muscles are quite difficult to capture, especially with the size of this painting (it's A3 size) but we're getting there slowly. It's still terribly annoying that the rider's head is just out of the frame but what can you do? (Apart from framing it correctly in the first place, silly.)

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Nerds unite!

This year, I thought it damn time we got some pumpkins for outside our door, so we picked them up cheap a few weeks ago ready for the occasion. Not that we've got any sweets or treats for the little brats...

Anyway, we finally got around to carving them today but I wanted to be a bit different with mine. Screw the classic pumpkin faces with the buck teeth, squinty eyes and nostrils, I wanted something only nerds could find interesting. Therefore, I give you the Creeper pumpkin!

Now to fit it with explosives for when the kids come a-knocking.

Review: The Adventures of Tintin - Secret of the Unicorn

I saw The Adventures of Tintin the other day, so I thought I’d write up a quick review about it.

I’ll start off by getting the main thing out of the way – I enjoyed it. It was entertaining, enjoyable and didn’t annoy me. All good things. Time did not drag, nor did it constantly morph my seat like a piece of plasticine into an uncomfortable  pile of fabric and sponge, making me wiggle and fidget throughout the entire film (something which inexplicably happened during Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, despite it also being very good). No, Tintin was a good film. Good.

But it wasn’t great.

And the only thing I can put that down to it the fact that, at its very core, Tintin is a children’s movie.  There’s no intellect or emotion, or really any humour, it’s just a film designed to keep the youngun’s happy. And let’s be clear, it did - I heard several giggles and guffaws around me. But what separates Tintin from the likes of Toy Story is that it targeted only children, whereas Disney Pixar usually sprinkles in a few lines for adults to pick out. Unfortunately, none of that was in here, or if it was I missed it. So that’s what stopped the film from being great, it catered to only one audience, but it was still good and here’s why…

First off, the art style was brilliant. I loved it. Producer Peter Jackson has previously said :-

“We're making them look photorealistic; the fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people – but real Hergé people!”

That last bit, about looking like Hergé’s people rings true to me. Now, I’ve never actually read a Tintin comic before, but most people know what is meant and have at least seen a picture of the comic. Immediately it was clear (and I won’t give away anything) this film was going to offer a faithful adaption of the famous comic book characters, at least in visual form anyway. Often, the type of CGI-capture this film used can be jarring or just look plain creepy (ahem…Polar Express), but here it was beautiful.  Hergé’s actual art style was something called ‘Ligne claire’, which basically left everything in a panel with equal importance e.g. the background had the same ink thickness as the characters in the foreground. This gives a clean, almost refreshing quality, which I’m pleased to say transferred over to the silver screen remarkably well.

The plot is apparently three Tintin comic stories all tied together - The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. This being the case, the film ran rather smoothly indeed and any disjoints or gaps were obviously sealed with some good polyfilla by writers Edgar Wright, Stephen Moffat and Joe Cornish.  I had heard one review before seeing this film, by the much beloved Mark Kermode who said he found the story rather flat and plain. All I can say is that it seemed big enough and exciting enough for my £3.75 (go Orange Wednesdays!) so goodness knows what it was like for 10 year olds. That being said, Kermode had read the comics, so he might be comparing it to a brilliant comic story or something. The action and events were very Spielberg-y – the rises and falls, the relationships, the dialogue, the action (all of the ‘set action pieces’ were creative, inventive and very well put together). In fact, the film had a Spielberg stamp all over it, being another producer. He really does leave a mark doesn’t he? Suffice to say this film included actual guns and no walkie talkies.

Finally, to wrap up this increasingly overwritten review, I’ll say a bit about the acting. And yes, it was acting, just done in a costume with loads of bobbles all over it. Jamie Bell was, as a replacement, good. Nothing spectacular, but then I hear the character of Tintin isn’t meant to be. Tintin is, in fact, rather plain – it’s the characters around him. Or so I hear and read anyway. Personally I felt Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were underused as Thomson and Thomson, but at the same time I found them slightly annoying so hey, perhaps the balance was correct. Daniel Craig can do a damn fine ‘villain’ voice, yet to me the voice didn’t match the character visually. Now I’m just nitpicking.

Overall, The Adventures of Tintin is a wonderfully crafted, hugely enjoyable film. It’s well worth a watch, but that’s probably it. Unlike other classic children’s movies, this doesn’t warrant repeat viewings, which sums up its problems quite well. Oh, except, there’s going to be a sequel so you might have to watch it then too. If anything, the film has made me (and probably many others, including young children) want to read some of the original comic books, so for that it must be appreciated!