Randomy randomness

Time feels like it's going in a blur at the moment !

Mind you, last weekend was busy. Actually feel really busy at the moment.

Oh ! Thumbnail pic :

That's the latest.

The hair is better. I'm still rubbish at faces. What's on the skeleton needs work. I cheated on the bike wheels and pedals, plus the bike is not tall enough. (The bike is too long and shallow). I like the dog though. And it's made people laugh. To get chuckles from people is the whole point of doing the drawing.

I'm steadily learning more about the Paint programme that came with the graphics tablet. I'm using a pencil tool to do the outlines, the hair highlights (and attempt at braids) and the freckles. The colouring is done via the airbrush tool. That's one odd thing, the Painter programme is very much additive colour. Adding something on top of something else will change the colour of both, even if you're working on different layers. That's a big difference to GIMP, where something on a higher layer will cover up what's below.

The Painter programme feels more natural to sketch in though, compared to GIMP.

Oh - this one was done at work last week after an incident where we lost our network connectivity.

Click for bigger as per usual. These were sketched in pencil over lunchtime (I had a longer than usual lunch in order to get that idea out of my head on to paper where it wouldn't cause any trouble - ideas can be distracting). And then it was later digitised via the phone camera at home (hence the rubbish quality !) and you'll probably detect where I was struggling with the paint tool in order to cover up the boomerang (supposed to be laptop!) that got turned into the keyboard and screen.

That's enough of the pictures for now though.

Last weekend felt nuts !

Friday was spent having a quick wander through Cardiff on the hunt for music shops and other curious places. I didn't find new music but I did find more sherbets. The sherbets have disappeared already.

I also learned to not attempt to escape Cardiff at 5pm on a Friday. You end up escaping Cardiff at around 6pm having not moved very much in the meantime.

And then I retreated my exhausted bones back home (via Sainsburys for a little recycling !) Ahh. Domestic stuff. Since I've been putting the plastic bottles in the recycling bins, my waste bin has needed emptying far less often by the bin men. The bottles used to go in there and they're a decent amount of volume.

I may have watched 24 hours + of motor racing last weekend. The World Endurance Championship was a decent 8 hour race and the next day I was following the Lexus RCFs again in the 12 hours of Sebring at the same track. The two Lexuses decided to take bites out of each other though and didn't repeat the promise they showed at Daytona.

And then there was the Formula 1. A decent season opener and it was good to see Valtteri Bottas emerging from out of the shadow. He had a really poor year last year. It's sad to see what's happened to Williams, from being up with the leaders, they're now firmly at the back. You can pretty much expect who's going to be fighting for the win in F1 but there's usually a decent amount of interest down the field for what's going on in the teams.

What else is going on - it was good to have the run in the car to Cardiff and back ... and I'm getting longer shakedown runs later in the week too.

Random aside - it's really sad to see the state of international cricket at the moment, he says after seeing yet another bowler resort to throwing the ball. Throwing has become endemic in international cricket. The door was opened with bowlers maybe 10 years ago getting away with the occasional throw ... and now certain bowlers are doing it all the time. A blind eye is being shown. Dale Steyn was an incredible bowler when he started, now he throws the ball and is actually less effective for it. Lasith Malinga had a wonderfully weird slingy action when he started. Very round arm but definitely a beautiful example of how to bowl in a completely different way to how you are taught to. Now it's like a javelin throw. It's also less effective because the throwing means he doesn't get the last instant boomerang swing any more.

And there are more in a similar vein too. It's quite sad to see once great players have to resort to that either through injury or age. Bowling the ball means you can put a lot of spin on it, which stabilises it for seam movement and gives gyroscopic action which causes the ball to swing round corners if done right. Throwing doesn't impart that spin on the ball.

I better stop whinging about that before the trolls find me !

Hectic couple of weeks coming up ... then I'll be escaping and chilling out for a week before Easter. Been feeling the need to take myself off somewhere and disconnect. The neurons feel a bit toasty. I do like to keep up with the various streams and communities though.

That'd be the fear of missing out ! Need to post more too :-D