Tag: sea

A walk along an empty beach

Not many people are getting to the beach these days, but I live right next to it (in fact I can see the sea from my living room window). It’s strange to live in a tour­ist town when there are no tour­ists.

Split

Here’s some photos from my trip to Croa­tia this summer. It was a real last minute thing, I suddenly had a week free in a packed summer of teach­ing engage­ments and still didn’t actu­ally live anywhere yet, so I bought a cheap flight to Croa­tia and did some sight­see­ing.

Sea Serpent Book­plates

I’ve made these print­able book­plates, in both A4 and US Letter sizes. Four per page. They are for person­al use only- you may not sell copies you have prin­ted, host these files on anoth­er site, or use the artwork for any other commer­cial purpose.

The down­loads are free, but if you like and use them, a pay-what-you-want tip is very much appre­ci­ated.

Naoshi­ma

Naoshi­ma is tiny idyll­ic island in the Seto Inland sea devoted to modern art. The open­ing of the Benesse modern art museum (owned by the same organ­isa­tion as Berlitz language schools) revived the island’s fortunes, although it’s still a small and quiet place with only a few villages and a lot of old people.

Kerguelen Islands Prints

I’ve done some prints of this picture I drew of the Kerguëlen Islands off the coast of Antarc­tica. Noth­ing there but penguins, cabbages and the odd french scient­ist. What could be more delight­ful? They are avail­able in two sizes- A4 for £7 + post­age and A3 for £20 + post­age (the small ones will be sent flat, the large rolled into a tube), and are prin­ted on 250 gsm semi-gloss paper with a white border. Avail­able now from the shop.

Kerguelen Islands

Recently I was look­ing up some­thing on a map, and my eyes were drawn to the Kerguelen Islands at the bottom. They seemed quite substan­tial, yet I’d never heard of them. It turns out they belong to France, are unin­hab­ited except for a few scient­ists, and are full of penguins and cabbages. Sail­ors used to stop off there to have a grim cabbage feast to fend off scurvy. Here is a lonely penguin in the cabbage fields. I will never have anoth­er reas­on to draw that. The picture is avail­able as a print and vari­ous other items on Soci­ety 6.

Endless card

This was some­thing I made as devel­op­ment work on my MA, and never finished. It’s an endless card. Basic­ally you cut four rect­angles of card, and fold and glue them in such a way that you create a card that opens to reveal anoth­er open­ing, which then opens to anoth­er, and so on. You get four differ­ent pictures that open up. There’s a tutori­al to make one here. I went to a work­shop where they showed you how to make them, and the woman running it had made a very nice card of the story of Dori­an Grey.

Long time no see

I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, because I’ve been work­ing all hours to finish my MA project and disser­ta­tion (I handed in my disser­ta­tion last week). This is the kind of thing I’ve been doing. Yester­day I stuck on the Beatles Antho­logy, the longest docu­ment­ary I could think of, and sat and just sewed and sewed until about 70% was done. I was in Spain for two weeks before that. I’ve got lots of photos, but I haven’t had time to devel­op the film ones and organ­ise and post-process them. It will have to wait until later.  The first week was fine, but the second was far more stress­ful than a holi­day should be. There was a 40C heat­wave, and the air condi­tion­ing broke down, and there were ants, and we both had insom­nia and short tempers and it was too diffi­cult to concen­trate on the work we’d both been forced to bring with us. Stress. In two and a half weeks I should hope­fully be all finished with my MA, and free to find a full-time job, and actu­ally earn steady money again (I hope). I’m really broke right now, and I’m tired of being broke for so long.