Identity photos

My passport has expired so i need to get a new one.

However it turns out that I need to send off the papers before
the 6th of April or apply for a new biometric passport with a
data chip.

Today and yesterday spent ages at photo booths trying to get a
decent passport photo. I always seemed to look like an axe murderer
or sleepy or angry.

Anyway, I came home with some4 photos I liked and discovered
that the new rules for passport photos  meant that the face needed
 to be between 29mm and 34 mm  -none of these were suitable- even
 the grimmest ones!

So tomoorow i need to start all over again, but this time i have a handy
template in my sketchbook so i will be able to see right away if the photo
 will work or not.

Fingers crossed.

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Illustration Friday- Monster

I thought this was quite a difficult I Friday challenge - it was really hard to decide on a single idea that summed up 'monster'. Plus i have a few of monsters in my portfolio already and i wanted to do something different from the other thinsg i've done.

At first i thought about cybermen, Autons, or daleks - monsters from Dr Who [a long running BBC sci-fi series thats recently started again after many years].
I remember finding the Autons and Cybermen particularly terrifying. The Autons becuase they were malevolent showroom dummies that could shoot people and of course the real 70s dummies looked like they could come to life at any minute and run amok = which made shopping trips worrying ; and the cybermen probably becuase they seemed so alien yet vaguely human in form - like Tin Man from Wizard of Oz gone bad.

The daleks , though , were in a class of their own. Bizarre pwepper pot machines with living creatures inside created by the megalomaniac genius Davros. They had weird weapons seemingly made from sink plungers and whisks and metallic catahrral sounding voices that shouted brusque phrases - like , "seek , locate, destroy" and "you will obey the daleks" -and especially "E_X_T_E_RM_I_N_A_T_E " before obliterating people with their whisk ray gun.

I realised how terrifying I'd found the daleks when I visited a Dr Who exhibition aged about 15 and screamed when a dalek came towards me shouting "E_X_T_E_RM_I_N_A_T_E ". I probably wasn't the only person with that reaction - the daleks were definitely well loved but terrifying monsters for a lot of people my age.

I decided against Dr Who monsters , though i had toyed with the idea of pop-art style daleks and cybermen.

I then thought about people that have been described as monsters- especially folk like Vlad the Impaler and Erzsébet Bathory both of whom had the reputation for incredible brutality and mass murder and were part of the insiration for Dracula, but i decided against them as well.

I thought about giant creatures next and even did some sketches of the South American giant centipede Scolopendra gigantea, which can grow to around a foot in length [30cm] and has a poisonous bite - enough to potentially kill a human [though apparently this is a rare occurance and usually people have severe pain and swelling and palpitations due to the action of the venom on the heart].
Not so long ago a British man found one roaming about in his house which must have been a shock.

I gave up on that and decided to do something different and imaginary - a child monster but not a cute one - well as much as i could make it. I also wanted to do some horns and multiple eyes as these are quite difficult to paint- at least for me.







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Photo Friday - smooth

I took this photo of icecubes in a pub in Torquay where a friend and I were having lunch.
I'd asked for a jug of water to drink with the meal.

I don't think anyone had ever asked for water before since the server brought us an enormous jug that must have contained well over a gallon of water and ice cubes.

I was quite impressed wth the smooth floating ice cubes so i couldn't resist taking a photo.


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Changes - Alexander Graham Bell to Vincent Van Gogh

I swapped the banner from Alexander Graham Bell to Vincent Van Gogh.
I didn't have time when i put the Graham Bell banner up to write anything about it.

Alexander Graham Bell was born on the 3rd of March 1847 [died 2nd August 1922]
He was born in Scotland and worked and lived in Canada and America after the age of 23. It seems he is the only person to have made the top 100 citizens of the USA, Canada and the UK [100 Greatest Britons, Greatest Canadian, 100 Greatest Americans]

He is often described as the inventor of the telephone [and there is some crontroversy about this - as is so often the case, other people were working on similar ideas at the same time and Antonio Meucci was awarded the honour by a US House of Representatives Bill in 2002.]

When I was a child someone told me that we were in some ways distantly related to Alexander Graham Bell [my original family name is Graham].

However I found out researching this piece that the 'Graham' middle name that was added as a mark of respect for an old family friend, Alexander Graham.

Alexander Graham Bell was interested in the telephone and similar devices due to a lifelong interest in deafness.
His mother and wife were deaf, he was apparently a close friend of Helen Keller and he spent a good part of his life teaching a special kind of elocution to deaf people [Visible speech] that had been developed by his father, Alexander Melville Bell.







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Illustration Friday - feet- mudskipper

This week's topic is feet - which made me think immediately about mudskippers.

Mudskippers [also known as mudhoppers] are amphibious fish in the Gobiidae family who live in brackish water in mangrove swamps.

Mudskippers don't exactly have feet since they are fish ; though they can walk , jump , run and limb trees.

They use their modified pectoral fins as their feet and legs and can move fairly quickly on land -though their 'walk' is more like a series of small jumps or like someone using crutches.

They climb trees using their pelvic fins like a sucker while the pectoral fins grab the branch and pull themselves up.


They use their gills to breathe when under water . On land, they can breathe through their skin and the lining of the mouth [when its skin is wet] but they rely mainly on special water storage pouches which allow their gills to continue to collect oxygen. When there is no more oxygen in the stored water, the fish will refill the water pouches.

The need to keep the skin and eyes moist and fill up the gill pouches regularly with water means that the mudskippers don't stray far inland.

Having their eyes on top of their heads gives them an enormous field of view and these eyes can see in colour on land and black and white under water.

They can also see above and below water at the same time using their eyes something like a submarine's periscope.

This is obviously useful in avoiding predators [snakes and birds] and also catching prey [insects, crabs, prawns- though some species feed on algae.]





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Photo Friday- technology

The Photo Friday topic is technology, which was interesting since i'd been looking inside my computer earlier in the week and wondering about taking some photos of the wires, chips , circuit boards and power supply.

I took some photos today but wasn't too pleased with them. Then remembered the PCI adapter that is going to be added to give me some USB 2.0 ports and took some photos of that instead. I had been impressed by its glossy green colour and squiggly lines of the circuits.


On wednesday afternoon , my kids and i were on the beach searching for sea glass- glass that has been smoothed and battered into interesting shapes. We collected quite a lot and are now trying to decide what to do with the collection. Most of the glass is different shades of green or frosty white and might make interesting jewellery or sun catchers.

While i was wandering along, I found this tiny piece of circuit board washed up amongst the pebbles. The edges have been smoothed off by the wave action and the metal circuits look the worse for wear- i wonder what it came from.




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Illustration Friday - tattoo

This weeks topic is 'tattoo'.

I briefly considered the military meaning of the word - signals by bugle or drum, continuous druming rhythm or entertaining military spectacles such as the Edinburgh Tattoo

I discarded these thoughts quite early on as i wasn't really sure how i would manage to convey the idea.

When i was thinking about tattoos in terms of permanent inking of the skin, I first thought of Oetzi the Ice man. He was a man accidently mummified by a glacier 5000 years ago on the border of Austria and Italy.

His body and clothing and weapons were amazingly well preserved and recent studies show that he was injured by an arrow shortly before he died. His body was found to have tattoos in various places- mainly lines which have been suggested as intended to cure in a way related to accupuncture or similar therapy.

His tattoos weren't very visually interesting so i dropped the idea of drawing Oetzi but I was reminded of a similar mummified body called the Siberian Ice Princess or Ice Maiden.

The Siberian Ice Maiden was found in a burial mound near the Altai mountains in 1993 by the archaeologist Natalia Polosmak. Her tomb was surrounded by the remains of six sacrificed horses and her coffin was covered in ornately decorated leatherwork.

Unlike Oetzi, this mummy was deliberately preserved in the 5th century BCE ; her internal organs and even muscles were removed and her skin stuffed with peat to help with preservation and the skin sewn back into place.

Her remains were additionally preserved by water seeping into her larch-wood coffin and deep freezing her in the permafrost.

The woman's clothes were well preserved- a shirt red woolen skirt and leggings and a sheer wild silk blouse that showed probable early trade links with India. She wore a huge headdress made of black felt decorated with birds and this headdress had been so important that the coffin was made long enough to fit!

She wore a necklace of wooden camels and dishes of coriander seeds were placed around her- which were probably burned to disguise the smell of decay before her body was finally buried.

Apart from being a unique female burial , this woman was discovered to be elaborately tattooed with intertwined horned beasts on her left arm and right thumb which may suggest she was a woman of unusual status -maybe a storyteller, a singer , or wisewoman rather than a princess or noblewoman.
The tattoos were thought to be made using needles dipped in soot which leaves a blue-black mark in the skin.

This woman fascinated me when i first heard of her and so i realised i wanted to to do something for Illustration Friday based on her burial and tattoos.

Reference photos of this mummy and her tattoos are not easy to come by and so i really went for something inspired by the description of her burial that i'd read rather than a slavishly accurate depiction of the actual Ice Maiden mummy

My daughter posed for me so i could get a reference photo of a woman lying on her right side - she was quite amused when she saw what i did with her pose and hoped that she didn't really look skinned.

The tattoos that i've painted are based on the beasts with floral horns design that were mentioned in the description of her tattoos and i have added in snow leopards in a cycle of predator and prey and rebirth that was inspired by early art. Snow leopards and deer entertwined were apparently carved into the leatherwork on her coffin , so it seemed right to make that my verison of her tattoo.

The necklace i've given her is of three wooden camels and some beads on a leather thong- I have no idea if it looks anything like the real one but it seemed right to me.

The wooden artefact is a 'mirror' that had major significance for these people - as all known burials from this culture contained these objects- all of the mirrors were inscribed with antlered beasts - so i have followed that. There were conflicting reports of the material the mirror was made of so i made this one of wood

btw I made no attempt to depict the headdress - i really didn't t have a clue about it apart from it being black felt and very very tall and covered with little birds and a griffin - plus i liked the idea of the composition focussing on the rounded shapes of the skull and mirror.

I'm quite pleased with how she turned out in the end.






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Photo Friday - Red

This is a Fire bug or Gendarme -Pyrrhocoris apterus which seemed a good candidate for the topic 'red'.

The red and black colouration is very visible to predators but it works as a deterrant since it is mostly associated with a bitter taste or even toxins which the predators quickly learn to avoid.


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Illustration Friday - praying mantis

'Insect' is the Illustration Friday topic this week. I like insects and have painted quite a few for Illustration friday over the months so I wasn't sure what to do for this topic initially.

Then i thought about praying mantises and realised i hadn't ever drawn one I was happy with.

They are interesting insects.
Their heads can swivel round by 180 degress to keep a look-out for prey which they catch wih their spiky modified front legs. Thes folded front legs are the origin of the name Praying mantis Mantis religiosa , since they were thought to look like a person praying.

There are about 2500 species of praying mantis and they tend to be well camouflaged with greenish or brownish bodies which ressemble leaves and limbs that look like twigs. Flower mantises hide in flowers so they have pale pink or white bodies.

Females are generally larger than males and in most species the male is eaten by the female after mating [and sometimes during mating. ] They mainly eat other insects but some of the larger species can manage to catch and eat small lizards, tree frogs, mice and even humming birds.

Birds, bats, spiders and snakes eat praying mantises and some species of mantis have special ultrasonic hearing chambers which help them avoid being a bat's meal.

I thought I'd trying a new way of doing things with today's praying mantis - ie instead of flat colour and line using some texture and shading with this topic and i'm reasonably happy wth how it turned out. I think I need to try a few other creatuires using the same techniques to see whether its worth pursuing or not.


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Photo Friday -feminine

The Photo Friday topic is Feminine. I wasn't sure what to enter until I remembered i'd taken a photo of a white dove sitting on our window ledge the other day.
For some reason doves, regardless of their actual sex, seem feminine to me.


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spiders and boxes

We have finally given up the keys to the old flat and moved in to the new one in Nice.

Things did not go to plan and our carefully organised overlap to minimise disruption to web access and phones didn't work - best laid plans or mice and men etc.

We were also without electricity and gas for light, cooking, hot water and heating for several days -which ended up being good fun as we huddled round candles and talked and laughed at night.


Boxes and bags are still all over the house and need to be unpacked and so many things seem to have been put in boxes that were labeled somewhat inaccurately so we have have lost track the kettle and toaster among other things.

One thing that we seem to have brought with us from the other house are a few spiders, probably because some boxes were stored in the cellar for a while before moving.

The photos are of a large spider we found when we were clearing out the cellar - though this one did not end up moving with us.
The spider was inside a sports bag
The abdomen patterns reminded me of polished walnut wood.

An action shot as the spider ran across the fabric

Some photos








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Illustration Friday - Simple

I've been busy packing boxes and sorting out things for moving house, so this weeks Illustration Friday had to be very quick as well as simple.

I thought about drawing a single celled organism or maybe doing something with the old idea of simple -as in a medicinal plant or plant preparation.

In the end I decided to do a quick valentine card since we move house on valentine's day.



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Photo Friday - Blur

I thought this underwater photo- taken with an ultra cheap underwater camera worked for the theme of 'Blur'.

There are nine blurred fish in the photo plus some artefacts from sand and particles. I'm intending to get a reasonable digital underwater camera for this summer as i was severely bitten by the 'taking photos of fish' bug.



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Illustration Friday- chair

The topic this week is 'chair'.
We are busy packing boxes for moving so i didn't have a great deal of time to work on anything. However i decided that i woudl have ago at painting my daughter's computer chair in the style of van Gogh's famous chair drawings and paintngs.

Its vaguely based on the chair and pipe painting with a box of onions in the background.

Since I'm allergic to onions and don't smoke, I've used a mini vase of bamboo twigs and a cell phone which are much more me. I've also used the patterned floor tiles [probably c1930] from this house instead of the plain terracotta tiles from the original.

It was pretty difficult using someone elses's perspectives and drawing style and i don't think i have quite managed what i wanted to do - but at least i have managed to finish it.

I wish I had found this much better image of the chair with pipe before starting the painting as that would have helped with getting the paint strokes right rather than going from memory



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Photo Friday = Disguise

A car cunningly disguised as a rose bush . Taken during the Bataille des Fleurs in Antibes last year.



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Illustration Friday - Glamour - Peacock butterfly

The Illustration Fiday topic is Glamour this week so I wanted to do something with the original meaning of glamour - a type of magic spell to make someone or something look different from their true appearance. The sort of spell that is used to often in myths.

The kind of tales where the hero's or heroine's brothers or sisters meet a haggard old woman and are asked to carry her across a stream on their backs or harvest her apples , tend her pigs or grind her corn.

The sisters and brothers are always rude and unhelpful , sometimes even cruel and they always get their just desserts when they are turned to stone or covered in boils.

The old woman is of course a beautiful Otherworldy creature; a faery or Goddess who has enchanted herself with a glamour and appears beautiful or ancient according to whim.

The pure of heart heros and heroines, of course, are helpful and kind and are only too happy to break their quest to help out and they are rewarded beyond their wildest dreams.

Other examples of glamour enchantments are found in Snow White, when the wicked Queen disguises herself in order to present Snow White with the poisoned apple.

This made me think about mimicry, and the many animals and insects that seem to be something more poisonous or agressive or bigger than they really are.

Ants and beetles and flies take the yellow and black stripes of wasps and hornets to deter predators.

Other flies have fake and often lethal looking 'stings' that deter even humans from approaching , never mind birds and animals.

Many butterflies have eye spots on their wings which look like owls eyes and when the wings are flapped, the eyes seem to blink and make small predators very wary.

Peacock butterflies Inachis io are found in Britain and the rest of Europe. They have two sets of prominent eye spots visible when the wings are held open. The underside of the wing ilooks like a shriveled, dead leaf so when the wings are closed the buttefly is well camouflaged.

The lower set look very like the eyes of a cat. This butterfly also makes a kind of hissy sound by rubbing its wings together when it 'blinks' them when threatened which probably adds to the impression of 'hunting cat'.

I think this butterfly also qualifies as glamourous in the more modern sense as well- since it has arguably the most impressive wings of any British Butterfly.
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Photo Friday - Vanity

I wasn't sure if I had any photos that fitted with this weeks Photo Friday theme.

I remembered a fantastic photo of a beauty queen talking on her cell phone which would have been perfect, except it was one of my husband's photos and not mine.

I searched and came up with this one of a confident adult swan and a juvenile who seemed to be swimming along looking at his reflection.


The photo was taken at Loch Lomond, by the pier at Luss village.


Here is a view of the Loch taken on the same day.


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Frozen Antibes

It was bitterly cold this morning - even though there was a great deal of cloud before the sun rose. Usually cloud cover seems to raise the temperature , but not this morning.

There was even a frost, so i managed to get some photos of frosty grass and leaves before the sun rose and melted the ice.

Some of the leaves looked as though they had been dipped in icing sugar, the frosty edging was so delicate.

A think layer of frost over a fallen leaf
A delicate edging to a heart shape leaf


Lost of plants have hairs on their leaves and stems. The frost made some interesting patterns by clumping the hairs tgogether.The ice made some hairs stand out due to the mini icicles
Zoomed in on the hairy stem - it had a barbed wire or tinsel look- but within a few minutes the sun had risen and the ice started to melt.



The temperatures have stayed low and there is a lot of snow around. In fact the schoolkids were sent home early today in case they got cut off.

More snow, frost and sleety rain is forecast for tomorrow - normally January here is bright and sunny though very cold at night or in the shade.

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New banner for Burns Night

Burns' Night on the 25th January celebrates the birth of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns wrote poetry and song lyrics in the Scots language and also in Scots English.
The quote written on the banner is taken from the poem Tam O'Shanter.

His most famous poems are probably Tam o'Shanter and To A Mouse and the most famous songs Auld Lang Syne, and Ae Fond Kiss .

The complete works are here

He was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1759 to a poor farming family. The small cottage where he spent his early years is still standing. It is now part of the Burns National Heritage Park and can be visited.

Despite the lack of money and the necessity for the children to help out on the farm, Burns' father made sure that his children were well read and employed a tutor, John Murdoch, to teach them Latin, French and maths.

Robert Burns [and his brother Gilbert] tried to farm at Mossgeil after the death of their father in 1784 . By 1786, Robert was planning to emigrate to Jamaica - the farm was not making money and his love life was chaotic.

He had already fathered an illigitimate daughter and now he wished to marry another woman, Jean Armour, who was already pregnant with his twins.

Despite the pregnancy, Jean Armour's family refused them permission to marry. Robert then fell in love with yet another woman, Highland Mary, and planned to take her to Jamaica.

In order to raise the money for his passage to Jamaica, Burns was persuaded to publish some of his poetry - his first book known as the 'Kilmarnock Edition' - aka, 'Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect'. The first printing [612 books] sold out within a month and he became a sensation in Edinburgh literary circles, where he was known as the 'Ploughman Poet'.

Literary success and plans for further books , the birth of Jean Armour's twins and the death of Highland Mary ended the plans to emigrate.

Jean Armour and Robert Burns were eventually married in 1788.

Burns became an Exciseman [a sort of Customs officer who ensured that tax was paid on alcohol] which gave him an additional income and allowed him to buy house in Dumfries.
He wrote The Deil's Awa wi' th' Exciseman which summed up the low popular opinion of his new job.

On the 21st July 1796, at the terribly young age of 37, Robert Burns died of rheumatic fever, possibly weakened by the early years of poverty and back breaking farm work.
Maxwell Burns, the ninth child by Jean Armour , was born on the day his father died.

A few years after Burns' death, the first Burns Supper was organised: where Burns' poems were recited , whisky was drunk and a haggis served. The poem Address to a Haggis
is recited and the haggis generally stabbed with a knife and cut open with a flourish.





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Illustration Friday - Cats

I started off with the idea of painting the Cheshire Cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,, by Lewis Carroll.

Alice meets a mysterious cat several times , who vanishes leaving his grin behind him. I started drawing the cat , and had several attempts at different versions before giving up. I had a really good basic cat grin but i was having a lot of trouble with getting its disappearing act to look right.

However it made me think about kalaeidescopes and mirrors and for some reason i wondered about quilting designs and pondered over the idea of a cat quilt.

That lead me to a simple cat sketch , mirrorred and coloured a range of sugary colours. I decided i quite liked this - though my cat loving daughter wasn't keen on the colours.



I thought about doing some more to the cheshire cat after this but got side tracked and started painting some cat's eyes , the wildflower , Germander speedwell.

I used to love these when i was a child - their tiny blue flowers always seemed cheerful and twinkly , very like blue cat eyes.

One of our neighbours always had lots of speedwell in his garden. He used to ask us if we wanted to pull out the plants - a sneaky way of getting his rockery weeded for free. We were happy to oblige though the flowers woudl fade and the petals would drop quickly.

Germander speedwell, Veronica chamaedrys, has some other common names; bird's eyes , angel's eyes, farewell flower and used to be thought of as a cure for small pox, measles, coughs, asthma, and a variety of other illnesses. The farewell or speedwell name is due to its panacea like nature and to how quickly the herb would bring about a cure.
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