New shoe(s)

I bought new shoes yesterday – this is just a quick doodle.

Flowers

Having been inspired by this post at Skinnylaminx, I picked a few flowers yesterday to draw.  The ones I picked turned out to be completely different in style to those used in the Skinnylaminx post – what I liked most about the other drawing was the composition of a number of, individually, relative simple drawings; what I actually did was pick whatever took my eye, resulting in too-big and too-intricate flowers for that idea.  Though I didn’t finish with what I expected, I think they turned out pretty well.

They were drawn yesterday evening and by the time I’d finished it was too dark to photograph them properly; when I came to it this morning, I found the apple blossom (below) had flowered even more; they are the same flowers I drew, though they don’t look it.

I used to be pretty good at drawing as a kid, but fell out of practice once I gave it up as a subject in school.  I’ve wanted to get back into the habit for some time and, having read this rather interesting book, I’m now actually making an effort to do so.  The book’s full title is The Creative License: Gving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are, which might tell astute readers that the author is American.  Despite some misgivings (mostly due to the title), the book is full of sensible and helpful advice for drawing and incorporating more creativity into your life generally.

Amongst his other tips, the author advocates using pen rather than pencil when drawing.  In so doing, you commit to your drawing far more than you would with pencil, when you can erase and erase to the nth degree.  I’ve always been a pencil person, but I quite liked this idea and have been giving it a go.

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RIP Humphrey Lyttelton.

A glut of cards

Daintree have some beautiful Japanese screen-printed papers at the moment but they are amazingly expensive – while they are available in A4 size sheets, Daintree split each sheet into three and sell each strip for over a euro.  I think this is ridiculous but they are undeniably lovely, so I was determined to eke as much value out of each strip as I could.  For each design, I got three cards – two of the larger design and one of the smaller.

Above, the smaller and below, the larger.

My sister is thirty this month.  I hope rather than know that the daisy is the flower of April, so I put thirty of them on her card.

When I took the photo the glue was still wet; I hope it dries a bit clearer.  It may be obvious, but if not, using a hole punch for the yellow circles was a way of ensuring I didn’t go mad.  I’ve been experimenting a bit recently with papercutting and this is as far as I’ve got with it for now.  Rob Ryan shows how it’s really done.

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On a side note, I was in Hodges Figgis today and saw that the OUP have taken the insane decision to re-design the cover formula of their Oxford World Classics.  The formula isn’t a bad one, exactly, but it is over-ambitious.  By putting the chosen archive picture to the fore of the design (as happened with the revamped Penguin Classics), it will naturally lend itself to certain books – their Dorian Gray and Dracula both look good in the new formula – but once they come to lesser-known books without such defining images associated with them in the popular consciousness, it will falter.

Adam and Joe

Hie thee to the Adam and Joe podcast on BBC 6Music.  (Why isn’t it BBC Radio 6?)

Trinity College Book Sale 2008

I’ve often heard about the Trinity Book Sale in previous years but it’s always been after the event, much to my annoyance.  The sale is held annually in April, opening on a Thursday and ending the following Saturday and is made up of donations from various college well-wishers; it is popular not only with readers but also the secondhand booksellers of Dublin because of both its selection and the prices.  This year I got to hear about it before the event and I queued up early for Thursday evening on the recommendation of my friend Pádraig, a veteran of such scenes.  For the privilege of getting first dibs at the books, you have to pay an admission price but it was very much worth it for the bargains to be had.  The whole experience was quite bizarre: a large room packed to the rafters with brusque, jacketed men (they were mostly men) very slowly squeezing past each other to grab anything remotely likely-looking in sight.

I feel I may have got a bit carried away with some purchases because of the prices – am I really going to read Selections from Ovid anytime soon, even if it was only 10p?  Possibly not, but I have the option to do so whenever the mood strikes.  In total, I got thirteen volumes for less than nine euro and I did make some good choices – here are my favourites.

I got a few old Pelican/Penguin books on Thursday, including Gilbert and Sullivan by Hesketh Pearson, In Search of England by H. V. Morton and The Romans by R. H. Barrow, but this is by far and away my favourite of the Penguin haul:

It’s quite an interesting book, as well as having the perfect title.  That was 50p.

My other great find of the day was this exquisite Everyman edition of Don Quixote:

It was €1 for the two volumes and they are in lovely condition.  I’ve only very rarely come into contact with Everyman editions like this and whenever I have, I haven’t been able to afford the price.  I may make more of an effort in future, though, as they are things of beauty:

Finally, I was tickled pink by the spine of this one: 

When Stephen met Clive

A captivating interview between Stephen Fry and Clive James in three parts. (Total length about half an hour.)

The medieval mind

Here’s the post where I prove what a pretentious student I really am.  I read English at university and in one of my college modules, we study medieval literature (under the marvellously extravagant title of “Sin and Redemption”).  As you’d expect, the professor in charge of this module is zealous about his subject.  The medieval age for him is the high-point of man’s achievement.  He often talks about the scope of medieval ambition; so many works from this period are formed with monumental intent, from the intellectual achievements of Dante’s Commedia, St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica or the output of Chaucer (he is understandably quite keen on Chaucer), to the more tangible achievements of practically any cathedral you care to mention.  Medieval man knew no bounds - so his argument goes.  Implied in this argument, though not often stated, is the other side of the coin, that modern man, that sorry excuse for a successor, does indeed have bounds.  Where the medievals painstakingly mastered a single craft and laboured all their life to perfect it, we nowadays are jacks of all trades, dilletantes, amateurs.

This lecture happened to fall on the same day as another one on popular culture, in which another lecturer told us why one school of Marxist thought argues that all popular culture is the ultimate tool of capitalism, to keep the drones (that’s you and me) pliant and docile.  Its most menacing means of doing this is via the television, the most insidious and numbing of them all, the medium by which everything, whether red-carpet coverage or news commentary, becomes an entertainment.

While I am not entirely sold on either theory, I feel there is more truth than falsehood in each.  The popular culture lecturer had a very interesting comparison to make, which was news to me.  The upcoming presidential debates in America will be televised.  But each debate will not be conducted as an event independent of whether there might or might not be a camera in the room – the format of the debate will be entirely dictated by the demands of the television audience.  Each candidate will have around five to ten minutes to speak on a given topic (so the lecturer says – I’m afraid I’m lazy enough to believe his figures rather than go and check for myself).  This, as most people would guess, isn’t really enough to go into the details of economic or foreign policy, but the TV channels can’t risk anyone turning over to the other side as a result of boredom.  Even five or ten minutes of pure politics might be too much for some people and so the politicians descend into more amusing (more entertaining) mudslinging and verbal sparring.  Instead of being fought on the grounds of issues, the debates will be fought by force of sheer personality.

In 1858, in one of their presidential debates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas also debated in a truncated format: Douglas spoke for one solid hour, followed by an hour and a half from Lincoln and ended by a final half-hour of rebuttal by Douglas.  This was down from an occasion in 1854, when Douglas had spoken for three hours; following this Lincoln advised the audience to go home for their dinners and return for his answer and Douglas’ rebuttal.  Not only did the audience go home, but they did indeed return to witness the rest of the debate, which went on for a further four hours.

While there are of course people of great ambition these days, our scope seems to be shallower and more trivial.  Of the three literary examples I cited above, chosen off the top of my head, both the Commedia and the Summa deal in matters of the weightiest philosophical import, and Chaucer deals in plenty of that himself, though with more humour, and does so on a preposterously ambitious scale (if he had fulfilled the conditions laid down in the General Prologue - the start of the pilgrims’ journey – the Canterbury Tales would have totalled one hundred and twenty stories of the greatest detail and variety).  Why are there no Chaucers today?  Has the tyranny of the half-hour programming schedule put paid to such vision and determination?

Dad’s birthday card

This is the card I made for my Dad’s birthday yesterday. The style is almost exactly the same as the album covers I made recently; this is an artistic decision, not laziness.

The quote is adapted from a P. G. Wodehouse description: “He was either a man of a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years, or a man of a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.”

Some album covers

A combination of too much time on my hands while poorly over the weekend and having a few too many naked copied CDs in my possession resulted in these album covers.  I quite like the simple, clean design, which was just the right combination of undemanding and yet concentrated work for my groggy state.  I printed out a font that caught my eye – Windsor Light Condensed, from ufonts.com, related to the typeface Woody Allen typically uses for his title and credit sequences - and traced them on to some light card we had at home.  If I were to do it again, I’d choose a heavier, more durable card, but this is all that was in the house. 

I then traced a CD-sleeve shape around the words and cut this out with a knife.

A bit of glue along the joins and an hour pressed in a heavy book resulted in a good, flat finish.

I quite like the effect as it fits each of the albums for different reasons.  Spooked is an acoustic album, mature and pared-back in sound and a clean design suits it.  Night Falls is a younger album but with a ramshackle, hand-made feel to it; care and love went into its making.  That goes for Hithcock too.  The albums are to be given to others, but The Complete Holmes is for me, and is just a data disc of the Sherlock Holmes BBC Radio productions, which is truly the nerd’s choice of Holmes productions.  Why only make pretty things for your friends?