Wow! check this out.

I was a kid when computers started being used in making animated films. In those days, though, it was a much more limited thing and the animation was still done by artists using cells. Nelvana was a great innovator in the field, and started making films that were of interest to adults as well as children.

Now, of course, they are simply astonishing, and they are producing films ostensibly for children that adults can really love. Some of my happiest movie experiences lately have been Up, Despicable Me and The Incredibles. I also quite enjoyed Ice Age (though less so the sequels) and that Hedge movie with Shatner. Looking on YouTube under "short animated films" will reveal some absolutely astounding and wondrous work. These movies are probably some of the best film making, including in the script writing, character and stories, going on right now. So much that it seems a whole new genre of high-quality movies has been created.

This thing, Epic, looks to be following that trend. I have one reservation though. A story made by modern people about fairies and their interactions with the human world seems wide open to be a vehicle for some very evil ideas. I don't know anything about it other than the trailer above, but I've got a suspicious feeling about it. I fear it could be what a friend of mine calls an "ambush movie" where the beauty of the work is concealing and slyly selling some terrifyingly evil political or philosophical message. Like that Avatar thing, that made everyone so depressed. I wanted to see the Philip Pullman movies for that reason, they looked so visually amazing. But the reviews were rather bad.



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Batty

Sometimes my brain gets so clogged up with things to think about that I don't sleep. It's OK, as long as I can get caught up later. But as a result, I've become quite familiar with the sounds and habits of the night hunting animals, particularly the bats. It's just about six thirty, and the birds have just this minute started twittering, but I noticed that just a couple of minutes before they did, I was hearing quite a different sound. A chirping noise that was quite unbirdlike.


It was the bats who live in the pine trees. The noise was exactly the same as in the video.

They have just this moment stopped, as if there is some kind of Nature Rule that the birds have to have their turn now. It had been quite quiet out there for several hours, no chirping bats, not even cicadas. But really just moments before the birds started, there was quite a loud flurry of chirps. As if the bats were telling each other that their shift is over and it's time to go to bed before it gets light out.

Time to put the tea on and start getting ready for class. Day 2 of Bozetti portrait painting class.



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Chilly the other night

It's still pretty warm here. I went for a swim yesterday and it was fantastic, but certainly not as warm as it was a couple of weeks ago. Getting closer to BC sea temperatures. Which is fine by me. There's something faintly repulsive about getting into sea water as warm as a bath.

Nonetheless, the day is still pretty far down the road when I have to think about taking the winter stuff out of the closet. Still making do with summer skirts and the lighter cardies.

But when that day comes, I'm going to do one thing I've been meaning to do for ages. I've told you about Mercatino, this amazingly amazing place that sells all the old stuff that the Italians think they're too cool and modern to like any more. One of the best places to get vintage clothes, and they sell lots of fox fur stoles, and mink coats and collars and wonderful politically incorrect things. There was a gorgeous one there the last time for 40 Euros and I'm still kicking myself for not buying it.


Despite the absurd weather (18 degrees on Christmas day! Gah!) Italians are BIG into furs, and they like to keep up with the styles. So it means they get rid of a lot of them and you can pick them up cheap. I'm building up quite a nice collection of fur collars. A friend gave me a lovely mink-dyed rabbit fur scarf the other day. It was a pretty chilly night and I was coming home from the City and because it had been a warm day, I'd had nothing on but a cotton sun dress and flimsy cardie, and it was great to have it.

I'm gonna get me a fox stole to wear with my filmy flowered dresses. I've got this great long black flowered silk skirt that goes fabulous with a white ruffled blouse and cashmere cardigan that a fox stole would make perfect.


And they go rather fabulously with tweed suits



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Ooooooo!!!

It's Fringe Night!!

Wheeeee!!!

(Only ten episodes left... boooo!)

This just in from a friend in Vancouver:

8 October
Friend:
Joshua Jackson came into the shop today and I sold him a lot of tea! He was totes dreamy n'stuff and was wearing a lovely sweater.

Me:
Aaauuuuuughhhh!!!!!!

Did you tell him your friend in Italy totally has a crush on him?

10 October
Friend:
no, sadly i just told him about tea.

It's just occurred to me that I like my men at least slightly dangerous.

Dear me! How embarrassingly ordinary! I guess I've still got a few demons left of my own. It's what I have you guys for, I suppose; to keep me from getting too far ahead of myself.

So listen, if any of the rest of you have any batty ideas about going into strictly cloistered convents, just you stop and think for a minute about your responsibilities as O's Picnickers.

Mkay?



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Good bye,

Kathleen.



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I painted!!!

Yes! I painted! Me! I'm a painter!

I kinda sucked. But I'm doing it!

Classes started again today for the autumn session. Two months of Bozetti and figure drawing classes. And today I used oil paints for the first time. It was new, exciting and difficult. It's going to be great.

Also, many thanks to the kind souls who send me books from the wishlist. The two most recent ones have duly arrived and they are beautiful, inspirational and instructional. One of the first things they have made me want to do is haul my sorry self over to the

...wait for it...

Natural History Museums!

I've discovered today that there are no fewer than three museums of natural history in Rome. The big one with the mammoth bones and dinosaurs and dioramas in the Borghese Gardens, and two more doing smaller stuff at Sapienza.

And they're double-plus cheap to get into. 7.50 E a day, and unexpectedly easy to get to on the transit. I had fully expected them to be in some suburb served by one bus a month, but I forgot for a moment how into education Italians are.

The list of people who can get discounts or get in free is amazing. Of course, I don't qualify as any of them, but that's OK, it just makes it seem like they actually want people to go to it.

Anyway, the books I've got are full of the most wonderful botanical and anatomical drawings of all manner of creatures, green, feathery, scaly and fluffy, and it has made me want to go do likewise.



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For your viewing pleasure

Time for a Trek Break

Two of their best ones...


Bad! Woot!


Norman! Coordinate!
Kirk vs. the Dumbest Robots in the Galaxy.



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Drawing tip of the day

Draw the shadows.

A lot of people approach drawing the same way they did as kids. Our first instinct is to draw "outlines" of objects, and fill in the "shading" later, as more or less an afterthought and a nod to "making it look real".

A great deal of the work of developing drawing skill, as I've banged on about endlessly, is overcoming your instincts. We unthinkingly assume that a head, for example, is done by drawing a big oval shape, eyes are almonds, a nose is a kind of inverted triangle. A cat is two connected oblongs, one big and one little, with a tail at the bottom, all topped with a pair of triangles for ears. Trees are bulbous green blobs atop a brown stick for a trunk (or in my case, having grown up in a coniferous rainforest, flounced green triangles with a little stub of trunk at the bottom). Seagulls are represented by flying Ms...etc.

But the quick little demonstration above will surprise people stuck in the outline mode of thinking. She didn't draw anything but the shadows. Particularly, she didn't draw anything of the nose except the tiny bit of shading under the end of it. And she tells you straight out not to draw the lower lip, but only the dark place under the lip where the shadow falls. And the thing she ended up with, in that fifteen seconds of drawing with the watercolour, is something that looks much more like a real human face than an outline and iconic symbols we habitually use.

This is because, in truth, everything we see is actually just shadows. Darks and lights in juxtaposition with colour added. There aren't any outlines. Look at a photo of a human face up close. Click on the Page Tab at the top of the blog and the first photo will be of my friend Anna whose portrait I've been working on. Where is the outline of her face? Of her nose? Where are the edges? There aren't any. Edges and lines are optical illusions, landmarks filled in by our brains to try to interpret what we are looking at. The illusion is created by transitions, sometimes abrupt transitions, from dark to light. The "edge" of Anna's jaw isn't an edge. It's a fast transition.


As an experiment, a good way to teach yourself, or to teach your brain to notice that you're seeing this, sit down some day with a photo of a statue and draw only the shadows. A marble statue will eliminate for you the extra complication of colour, leaving only darks and lights. So you would look at this Bernini statue of St. Teresa and approach it by looking only at first the darkest forms. The broad dark shadow under her chin, the darkest shadow shapes under her nose, the shadow under her eyebrow ridge that defines the ocular cavity.

When you draw something, you are asking, Where are the three darkests parts? How are they placed in relation to each other? Where do the very darkest parts end and the middle darks begin? Where is the lightest part?

Go ahead and give it a try right now. Get a piece of paper and an ordinary HB pencil and draw St. Teresa's face. The one on the left. Start by drawing outlines of the dark and light shapes around her eyes. Focus on them carefully, noting where they start, how they connect together. Entirely ignore the outline of the face and features. Tell yourself that you are not drawing a face and features or drapery. You are drawing only the darks and lights in relation to each other.

You might be surprised that your assumption that you "can't draw a straight line" has been incorrect all along. Your problem is not that you cannot draw, but that you haven't been taught to see.

One of the things I find myself doing now, even when I'm not drawing with a pencil, is to look at objects, scenes, people, buildings, etc, and mentally draw them. I pinpoint where the darkest shadows are, how they connect each object together with the shadows next to them. Where the differences between darks and lights, the transitions, create the illusion of lines and edges.

Even if you don't learn to draw, you will find it amazingly different if you really concentrate on what you are looking at, how you identify objects, their edges, their depth, their size and weight, by automatically interpreting these juxtapositions into meanings. Right now I'm looking at Winnie sleeping on the armchair opposite the sofa. I can look at it in the regular way, and it's Winnie sleeping on the armchair, with a bunch of cushions. Then I turn on the Drawing Brain, and I can see it in terms of a little corner of shadow under the pillow, that reaches up the side of the arm of the chair in a curve to articulate the curve of the chair's upholstery. I can see all the little regimented lattice of shadows that create the pattern of the crocheted pillow cover that then creates a darker shadow on the chair back. Winnie herself, being conveniently a black, white and grey cat, is a series of dark markings on top of white fur, with a few fainter shadows indicating the curve of her muscles where she is curled up.

Try it right now with some object in the room. Don't draw the thing itself. Draw it's shadows.


We all love cartooning, of course, and I will write at some point about the huge influence of children's book illustration that uses cartoony and iconic/symbolic approach to help us create indelible images in our minds at very early ages that forever shape our inner imaginary landscapes.


There's no question that these simplified forms hold a greatly underrated place in western art. But the people who do this know how to draw. They don't come to this ability to create timeless images without great facility with these principles of value, tone, line etc.

It's a bit like my mother's Good Grammar Rule: you can break any grammar rule you like in your writing, but in order to do so judiciously and to good effect, you have to know what they all are.



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Now we're cookin'

Re: Benedictines

FROM:
The Evil Vicar
TO:
Hilary White
Message flagged Sunday, October 7, 2012 11:22:45 AM
Dear Hilary,

...

I've been keeping up by periodically looking in on your blog, which (if I may say: I will, anyway) has achieved a breathtakingly-admirable poise in its present form, melding the confessional and the reflective modes.

Ah, affirmation...



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Ducks rescued from abuse discover water's pretty great

OK you ingrates! I go pouring out my heart here, and all I get is a measly three comments. I know what y'all want.
So, fine...

More funny duck videos!



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