The Battle of Evermore

Oh dance in the dark of night,

Sing to the morning light.
The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back.

Bring it back.

At last the sun is shining,

The clouds of blue roll by,
With flames from the dragon of darkness,

the sunlight blinds his eyes.
 

From: "The Battle of Evermore."

For guitar and mandolin; written by Robert Plant

When I was a teenager records cost $7.95.

They were so expensive we could only afford a record every few months - so we'd share them or tape them. We'd a small library of records going, and so it turned out that each member of our social group knew all the words to a small bunch of songs. This knowledge was a unifying factor, a kind of tribal subconsciousness.

Advice for Medieval Monks.

     Sorry I've been away, fell down a well again (as my friend the Labrat noticed). Whilst down the well I was thinking about my work and I realised that a lot of my images were ... err disturbing.  Not to mention the accompanying text.

    Well, they weren't disturbing to me, just to other people.

     Now, contrary to what it might indicate, this doesn't mean that I, personally, am disturbing. That would be like accusing my Wacom of being haunted, or my Cadmium Red Winsor and Newton pigment of being cruel.

    In fact I'm a fun loving guy who loves to grow flowers (dandeloins), vegetables (garlic chives) and rarely pulls the wings off flies -  unless they are really, really annoying me.

   It's just that I do medieval. I like to do Jungian Shadows. And I like teeth.

   Last week I did the Illustration Friday prompt "Duet". I'm sorry I didn't post it.

   It's at the end of this post - which is, you guessed it about the prompt 'Bottled".

   But in truth, this post is about thanking a few friends.

   I've turned off comments for this one. Instead of commenting, can you do me a big favour and visit   Ces and Bella who are organising a fund raiser for the recent Tsunami in Japan? It's a chance to aquire some of their amazing work and help people as well.

   You  can find Ces here. And Bella here.

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       And my conscience has been bothering me. People I have met through blogging have been exceedingly wonderful to me. I don't know why, I don't think I deserved it one little bit. I've been lucky enough to have been honoured bt being featured on a few blogs - and you know what, I've never said thankyou in the appropriate manner.

      Ugh.

        So here goes. First up I'd like to say thankyou to my friend Janne Robberstad, who in October last year named me as an artist inspirational. Now Janne, if you haven't seen her work, is one of those people who can do anything - and I mean it - and do it with flair. You can see her post here.   Thanks Janne :)
       Please take a look at Janne's work.

Next I'd like to say thanks to Amalia. Amalia's blog 'Art Memoirs' feautures artists from around the world. She featured my work in December last year. The post is here.  Thanks Amalia, that means a wonderful amount to me. If you haven't seen Amalia's own art, then you aint seen nothing!

       And thirdly there's the wonderful Bella. Now I can't really give you a link to that post for various reasons (the main being the opening line of the post), but I can tell you her work is so gorgeous that her last post attracted about 130 comments!

     You can find Bella here.

     Now the last artist I'd like to thank is Jack Foster. If you think my work is odd, strange macabre, well Jack Foster, who makes me laugh like a kid when I see his work (I laugh with it not at it!) has managed to make a small story about it that proves that I am a fun loving guy after all. Thankyou Jack!!!
     Please have a look at his post. It cracked me up. And it makes me look nice.

And lastly, thanks so much to everyone who commented on my last few posts!  You are very kind.



Old Fashioned

 

 

 

Oh just more self fulfilling prophecy! Thank you for looking again. And thank you for the poetry and prose on the last post! I have fallen behind again I am afraid. It's almost summer here and that bears ill tidings for my illustration work. 

Oh, sólo más profecía autocumplida. Gracias por mirar de nuevo. Y gracias por la poesía y la prosa en el post anterior! He quedado a la zaga de nuevo tengo miedo. Es casi verano aquí y que tiene malas noticias para mi trabajo de ilustración.

Airship Quickie: Practicing my Crookedness, The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes

Well, thankyou to the talented and intelligent anon-a-mous artist who suggested "airship." My brain, unlike a sponge, is actually a sieve, and so this one nearly fell through. Fortunately the holes in my brain sieve, were, unlike The Sieve of Eratosthenes, too small to let an airship through. And as you know, an Airship is not a prime number.

Consequently I have...... an airship.

A crooked one at that.

And a crooked cluster of medieval buildings, similar to those which might have clustered around a crooked Notre Dame before Baron Von Haussman cleared the place up.

Just before I finished this image, the airship was very straight and in the plane of the viewer - and boring. I tried to distort the perspective, and that helped slightly - to make it look like it was moving away. Then I hit it with a very small amount of wave distortion. And that fixed the problem and made it sit in with the style of the buildings.

And lastly I added the birds. As an edit after the fact. What a difference a flock of birds maketh! So I included the image without birds (small image) for a omparison.

Gee, it's amazing what you learn when you should be cooking dinner - specifically I made this while I was waiting for my free range chook to cook ---- well, I nearly burnt the house down actually. But that's another story. I guess you should never hide newspapers in the oven when guests stop by on an unannounced visit.

Thank-you for looking at this. I was trying to make a post a day in July. I think I'm upto 20, and today is the 21st.... slipping!

Anyway, tomorrow is visiting day. Watch out :)

PS: thanks To Elizabeth  Seaver's advice on UV stabilisers I can start work soon on some digital transfers.