Dive 2

Greetings

I posted earlier about a painting I had done after visiting a swimming pool with observation windows.

Here is the second acrylic painting.

Until next time

Adieu

commission

Greetings

I have just completed a commission to provide  my friend Kelly four A1 size ink drawings for a performance piece.

The performance concerned the Harvey Wienstein  case, so I had to do an Oscar , a non disclosure agreement, a picture of the American version of the figure of Justice with TBC ( to be continued) on it and a picture of Weinstein.

She emailed me photos and a picture of Justice and I printed them up, then scaled them up from A4 to A1 to do the ink drawings.

As I am not a portrait artist, I made sure Kelly was happy with my best approximation of Weinstein's face, as  putting the person ' behind the eyes' is a particular skill.

Anyway, she was happy with the results and here are the finished drawings.

Until next time

Adieu

Eastercon part 2

Greetings

Here is a picture of the Georgian 1740's outfit that I wore on Easter Sunday, complete with clocked stockings, beaver felt tricorn and brown tie wig.

I received over 40 hall costume tokens...

That evening ( and after I had changed back into jeans and T-shirt) I took part in a programme item of sketches.  My part of this was to demonstrate the Builders' Tea Ceremony ( as dating back to the Mid eighteenth  century), which I had written.

The Ceremony was presided over by the Foreman ( or Gaffer), who served tea to the Lag ( or Old Lag) and the Lad ( or , in our case, the Lass). The ceremony was full of ritual phrases , the correct was to rotate the teapot, how to stir your tea ( with the handle of a fork) and the correct procedure for dunking and eating a biscuit.

We had great fun performing it and it seemed to go over well.

Our journey back on Monday was better than the journey up, but marred somewhat by Teddy getting a  bad stomach upset from something he ate at a cafe we stopped at for lunch , resulting in me having to make a couple of emergency stops on the hard shoulder for him to be ill.

Still, once it was out, he felt a lot better and was OK for the last bit of the journey.

Until next time

Eastercon

Greetings

We have just been to Follycon II, the British National Science Fiction Convention, which was in Harrogate this year'

The Journey up was horrendous. We had to pick up Teddy's cousin, Gail, from Walthamstow and, setting out just after 10, we didn't get there until after 12.

Then we stopped for Lunch at the services just before the A1(M) and began our trek. The traffic was horrible and, as usual, it had just started moving again just when we were near services, so the temptation to carry on was strong.

Towards the end of the journey, I realised that I was getting close to going Hypo, but the TomTom ( Yes, Tom has a TomTom) told me we were only an hour and a half from destination, so I thought I could make it if I ate as soon as we got there.

Unfortunately, the Machine did not seem to adjust it's prediction when we hit traffic again, but, by this time, we were off the A1 and onto B roads.

Teddy helped a lot as I finally negotiated the streets of Harrogate, dropped Gail at her hotel and, with some difficulty, located the way into the car park at our hotel. It was now 8.30 PM.

Teddy dealt with the hotel and they produced some ham sandwiches pretty quickly.

I  ate sandwiches and slowly recovered and was Ok after a night's sleep and a good breakfast.

As the theme for the Con was Mad Hatter's Tea Party, I took costume with interesting hats. I wore Fifteenth century  on Friday, with blue doublet, black hose, thigh-length back boots and a black borolay( Can't remember the right  spelling- padded roll hat with side drape and lirripipe ).

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of that one, but here is the Crimea War Green Howards uniform I wore on Saturday. I chose that one due to the unusual shape of the hat, which is halfway between a shako and a kepi.

I will blog further about events at the Con