Drawing

I’ve made a kind of resolution to sit down and draw every night, so far it’s going rather well. Perhaps resolution is too strong a word, becase a resolution is too easy to break – infact a resolution is almost asking to be broken.

What people never seem to realise is that drawing is almost entirely down to practice, its about training your eye to see what is actually in front of you rather than what you see and what you think is in front of you. The thing is, when you see things normally you are just making assumptions, half the time your brain is just doing a join the dots routine.

The reason people often think they can’t draw is because they draw according to the dots – they draw according to the processed image their brain produces rather than looking past this to look at the angles and the actual realtionships of the various subject objects in 3D space.

Unfortunately I haven’t drwan in a serious way for years and years – most of the time I can still fool people but frankly my current level of drawing is crap. Hence the practice.

At school we used to have life drawing for I think about 4 or 5 hours per week, and no matter what kind of art you produce I think its a worthwhile thing to do – its a kind of visual meditation, anyway practice makes perfect. Hopefully.

cross browser min-height CSS

Always forgetting the usefull tips I find and use every other day. Despite now using http://del.icio.us I still have an ocean of bookmarks.

notes to self

400 px element that will expand with more content:

#content {
height: 400px;
height /**/:auto;
min-height: 400px;
}

Problem

  1. IE does not recognise a min-height but will use height and expand as needed.
  2. Firefox will not expand with height

Solution

  1. Reset height to auto in Firefox with a hack

logfileicious

Do you ever look through the log files of your website? I can’t say I do on a regular basis, but when I do time suddenly takes on a different quailty – as you follow and see who and what is linking to your website and borrowing your bandwidth, starting to trawl the wierd depths of the web.

The other day I was very suprised to come across a picture of one of my own sculptures at http://artblog.roua.org/2005/03/14/cloud but on the whole thats a nice thing to find.

Last week at work one of our clients who had been perusing his own log files called us up rather concerned as to why his e-commerce site was linked to by hundreds of strange eastern european dating sites… to which there is no good answer at all except for search engine optimisation strategy – a phrase that has more than eneough mystical conotations… at the end of the day there is nothing you can do except amend the weblog analyser to ignore them all.

Marilyn as a pebble

Some pictures of the ‘Flow’ installation re-setup for H & J’s wedding earlier this month. A lot of people camped and J’s old car Marilyn (a Morris Minor) had to be moved from its resting place in a barn to a new spot in the orchard for the duration.

marilyn and flow installtionMarilyn sat like a boulder in the stream of butterfiles – eddys spinning off around her. There was some good feedback from the damaged wedding guests as they emerged the next morning for breakfast.

marilyn and flow installtion