@

well, I was indeed right, for it is now 4 in the am. i am winning at this

Tale of Tinuviel (part 2) – shaping up!!! Edited the hair a fair bit for the both of them, and Beren’s armour now bears the crest of the House of Beor. Mountains and trees are also in. Once I do the hemlock, this one will be done.

san-sews-seams :

How many quilt wips are too many? Asking for a bitch with 6 waiting for some combination of borders, basting, and quilting. 😬

really not feeling the two day weekend. where's the undo button for me to go back to part time?

Started on part 2 of the Tale of Tinuviel. Here is a shameless rip off of a combination of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones (whose engravings have that classical line work style of old fairytales). I do not have a good idea of human form, alas, so this is largely just copying. Tried the hair whorls for the first time to illustrate shadow, and they look snazzy when correct (I speak of the one correct hair whorl). Beren has the ring of Barahir, but I’ll have to replace the juvenile attention marks. Will likely be replacing a fair bit, now that the people look like actual people (Beren's clothing, for example... Luthien I am sufficiently satisfied with). The rest of this piece should come easier. There will be plants aplenty.

Refs below: Edward Burne-Jones (above), William Morris (below)

avycatte :

The beautiful colours in the painting of Marcel Rieder (1862 –1942)

pictures-of-dogs :

cringe

pictures-of-dogs :

follow for more hatred and bullying

derinthescarletpescatarian :

“Apex predator” just means that you hunt and nobody wants to eat you. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re particularly good at eating them.

nightmaresyrup :

A royal two headed spazzy Lindwyrm, doodle break.

Work is graahh!

Spent most of the day on Procreate. Wanted to see if I could design some sort of paleontologically–inspired fabrics, ultimately for quilting purposes, though it’s proving to be more taxing than expected! The first was done on a whim some time ago. The second was today’s venture, a reasonable piece after a series of abstract failures that did not manifest prettily.

The first is the Quilted Organisms of the Ediacaran. I thought it was rather serendipitous, having quilted organisms on a (future) quilt. There are a bunch of Precambrian life forms in this one, including Charnia, Rangea, Dickinsonia Spriggina and Fractofusus. (There’s also Vernanimalcula in the background, and I have a bunch of blender fabrics with the same).

The second is the March of the Dinosaurs. This one is based on dinosaur trackways, which are vaguely colour coded here—red for theropods, yellow for a sauropod, orange for ornithopods, dark green for triceratops and light green for ankylosaurs. Alas the spectrum does not imply relatedness, though if it bothers me sufficiently I might just change it, but we’ll see. 

ok, so my favourite thing about the whittard's in covent garden is that they have free tea/coffee/hot chocolate samples everywhere instore. like, you can just sidle up to a round table with several teapots and stacks of little paper cups, and pour yourself a bunch of tasters, and nobody bothers you while you down them. and by god if this isn't the most effective way of enticing people into your store.

anyways, I tried milk oolong for the first time and it tasted really nice!! it was very wintery as a drink, and the name struck as quite accurate despite the lack of milk (how can something without milk taste milky? who knows? not I). anyways—once i exhaust my current supply of whittards, and the thirty odd packs of loose-leaf I got from tea route in greece, I will buy milk oolong.

oceans7 :

It is called Chicama, it occurs in a single point on the Peruvian coast, and it is the only wave in the world that is protected by law. Nothing can be built within a radius of two kilometers so that nothing can affect its natural formation.

so finally after two years of staring at the >£100 price of this one textbook that I very much need and love and want a hard copy of, after two years of waiting for the price to go down or another edition to appear, so that I could buy this one, and so that I could be the very first to sniff those lovely new pages, and make my annotations and break (myself) that nice new spine, I have realised that it simply will not happen and the price will not go down.

the breaking point was today, when I spent £2.30 on a macaron. I asked myself why I would spend £2.30 on a macaron when I have a >£100 textbook to buy; I asked myself what I am spending my money on that justifies me not buying that textbook; I reviewed my extra spending habits of the last couple months (books, transport, occasionally food, but cumulatively, a sum >£100) and then in a fit of utter frustration caved and bought a used copy of said textbook.

which was much cheaper. but also—the sheer anxietè, of 'what if there are notes on the pages' or 'what if there are STAINS' or 'what if it is utterly tattered and I have to live with it for the rest of my life'—none of these are big deals but you can bet I will be thinking of this every day for the rest of the month while I wait for it to arrive. and chances are, when that perfectly good book arrives I will be ginger around it for another month just because of the cumulative overthinking, which is so DUMB, but hey, I'll do it anyway.

anyways. agh. let's just call it post buy-jitters. it was either lamenting this or the exorbitant new book price tag.

nobrashfestivity :

F.A. Pouchet, illustration from Universe, or the Wonders of Creation, the Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Little

neshamama :

Egyptian mosaic glass fragmentary bars and inlays, 3rd century BCE-1st century AD

Saw the Life of Pi in the West End today. Went for a matinee showing at Wyndham's theatre, which is very vertical and very pretty; there's a lot of striped wallpaper in pistachio green through the corridors, and hardwood frames bearing watercolours of women in long dresses with parasols in the bathrooms. I liked it very much; the overall impression was something quaint and clean and gently-aged. It was more intimate than I thought it would be, for something so centrally located. (Then again I can count my theatre experiences on one hand, all only half remembered, and largely from school trips where we had to leave early).

The production itself was great. I wasn't sure how they would fare given that so much of the movie rested on the visually spectacular CGI scenes, but through a combination of animal puppetry and projections and some really effective use of light and shadow and mist and rotating stage floors (the usual theatre fare? I would not know, but it was good) it all came through very well indeed.

The acting was fabulous. There was some cheeky scripting with jokes of a religious nature which receieved hilariously mixed responses from the audience (ranging from uncontrolled laughter to horrified shock, because the jokes were not entirely politically correct, even if evenly applied across the board). The puppetry captured animal mannerisms exceptionally well; very controlled and stylised execution (and executions, what with the death of the zebra and the orangutang and disembowelment rather effectively portrayed with ragged red ribbons floating away). Very enjoyable experience overall!

Think I might go again, and try to make a habit out of it while I remain in London (got the cheapest seats which were not at all bad and set me back the same as a cinema ticket. given that I do not go to the cinema in favour of nice free questionable alts... perhaps I could go to the theatre instead).

trinitybluestuff :

Volcanic amphitheater by Dario Lo Scavo

Source

Hm! Washington DNR just released this beautiful poster of Mt St Helens using LiDAR data, and it's free to download (the original file size is 66MB, and it's gloriously HD).

This is an excellent reference photo with all the nice important features, like the lava domes, the breached crater and collapsed flank, the channelised pyroclastic flows, hummocky debris flows and what are, I think, fan-shaped lava flows on the still intact flanks.

I wonder if there's a geomorphological map of the volcano, because the depth and field of view in this poster lends itself very well to learning–by–comparison (Google Earth doesn't provide the same definition and contrast). Might try and find later, just so I can point some interesting features out.