It all looks so different... (MySpace)

now my black and white glasses are off.

How Embarrassing (MySpace)

Tonight the Growly Bear sent his sister a link to my blog so she could see the drawings. Then he looked himself. There's no pictures here, he said. Seems that the pics showed fine on my computer because I was also able to access the site where I'd been storing them, but other computers didn't have the permissions.

So, to anyone who looked at the little red X's and wondered 'what's she on??' now you can finally see what I've been going on about.


I can never work out whether this is the most patient cat I've ever seen, or if it's just plain too dumb to get out of the way when it sees the kid coming. They look happy enough here but it's usual for a whole lot of meowing and fur pulling to happen. Then it hangs around for more.

Another disaster (MySpace)

This is the second of the unflattering picture disasters. Of course, the photo was taken with her standing outside and squinting in the sun. She looked at the drawing and said, 'oh'. The actual drawing doesn't look quite this bad, the scanner tends to wash out a lot of the subtler shading.

Erk (MySpace)

At the moment I'm still just trying to put stuff down as I see it, it's been a long time, I'm out of practise and all, just trying to get down what I see gives me a benchmark. Copying with colour pencils doesn't really take much thought, so I've been using the good old grey lead pencils so I'm forced to interpret the image at least a bit. But apart from that, I try to get it warts and all.

When the subject of this piece saw the finished result he said that if I wanted to make this a day job I'd better learn to make them more flattering.

Which pretty much explains why I'm a hermit. I do things like take bodgey quick unflattering snaps of people, turn them into technically decent but unflattering drawings, then expect the subjects to go 'oh well, the drawing is good' while not really bothering about whether they look pretty.

Hey, I even did it to myself (yes, that pic under my name is me) and it didn't bother me. But from now on I guess I'll take more care on the photo side of things, at least for other people.

(Edit for the Blogger version)
Here is the, rather severe, portrait of myself that I was using at the time as my MySpace avatar:

Mark (MySpace)

Dad (MySpace)

The Growly Bear (MySpace)

Just as scary as he looks.

I hate Christmas shopping (MySpace)

That feels like all I've done all weekend.

This was our babysitter today. I think he's drained too.

Toffee (MySpace)

We made toffee today and decked the front of the house out with Christmas lights.

Stuff (MySpace)

Drawing is what I'm doing now, so I'm experimenting with a few different 'net venues for sharing my work.

Ten

A Start.