Little Brownish Jug.

Water Jug, oil on canvas, 9" x 12".

I did the background quickly and very loosely, and concentrated on the light passing through the glass and the water, which is a phenomenon I never get tired of. It's lovely. This was based on a photograph taken on a camera phone when we were invited round to some friends' to eat. They had spotlights in the ceiling and placed the jug right underneath one so that it was full of light.

Succulent

Pencil study of succulents and cacti, Giardino dei Semplice, Florence, 15cm x 15cm.

I started this study before I launched into the comic strip competition entry. I had something of a breakthrough in my painting technique recently, too, of which hopefully more later, very impressionistic, almost semi-abstract - which is very exciting, but I was really happy to get back to the glasses-off microscopic pencil-stroke stuff. It's got me a portrait commission, too, which I've done and sent a scan to the client for approval.

I've already spent the money. I bought a second-hand Campagnolo chainset on eBay from a bloke in France. Absurdly pleased to have "Campag" on my bike. (I can say "Campag" now, although I'll try really hard not to be such a twat.) And of that, too, more later.

Brian #5: Questionable Content

'Brian' being used in schools as part of personal & social education lessons, yesterday. She's probably his form tutor.

Questions. There are, you learn, two sorts - open and closed. And then there are questions so open that tumbleweed, litter and huge flocks of birds blow through them.

Borderline Behaviour

10 steps to create a text with black borderline and overlay it on an image, using GIMP 2.6.

I learned how to do this over the weekend, so I'm going to share while it's still fresh in my mind.

I wanted to overlay a word on a panel, and wanted white text with a black border. Importantly, the background image had to be seen behind the letters of the overlaid text.




Step 1.

Open the image onto which you want to put the text.



Step 2.

Create a new, blank image. (Tip:I haven't, but if you make this a grey background, it will help when you turn the text to white in Step 4.)



Step 3.

Using the 'Text' tool, create a text box, choose the font style (this is DigitalStrip Bold) and enter the word. For arbitrary and puerile reasons I'm going to put 'Arsebiscuits!' onto this image.


Step 4.

Change the colour of the font to white using the text colour function. If you've made the background to grey then the text won't 'disappear.'






Step 5.

Click on 'Path From Text,'


then select the 'Edit' drop-down menu. From here scroll down and select 'Stroke Path.'




Step 6.

This will open an options box. In this case I'm using plain, solid colour, and reducing the line thickness to 3.0 pixels. Once this is done, click 'Stroke.'


This can take a while, so don't panic if it appears that nothing is happening. Your text will eventually appear with the border around it.


Step 7.

Using the 'Rectangle Select' tool, outline the newly-bordered text. Right click 'Copy.'

(It's important not to merge this text layer down before selecting and copying; the above steps mean you'll create and copy the text with a transparent background.)



Step 8.
Return to the original image. Right click 'Paste.' The text, with transparent background appears on the picture.




Step 9.

At the moment it's too small and in the wrong place. There are good tools on GIMP to shift things around; Scale, Shear, Rotate and Move (highlighted in green) mean you can resize, reshape and move text like this around until you're happy.


In this case, I'm scaling the text layer; use the box 'handles' to drag it and re-shape it; once you're happy click on the 'Scale.'



Step 10.

Once the text is the right shape and in the right place, it needs to be 'fixed' to the drawing beneath. In the 'Layers' drop-down menu, click 'Anchor Layer' and that's it, done.






(And I was listening to the transfer day madness unfolding, in case you were wondering.)

Piece of Cake

...Ho bloody ho.

I got an email from Matt Craig, West Midlands comic dynamo, before Christmas asking if I'd be up for entering the Eagle Intiative comic competition, which closed yesterday. He was drafting a story when he was taken ill rather dramatically (hope you're still recovering well, Matt) and told to rest up.

The idea of entering had rather struck me, though, so I wondered if I couldn't set about writing a story of my own which I could then draw up. The short version is that I could and I did, the long version is that from the first scratchings of an idea to inserting the final speech bubble on GIMP took over a month of long hours. I dithered over whether I could get an action sequence into one page or would have to stretch it out over two, and I'm glad I managed to keep it to one because I was working up until Saturday night and wouldn't have fancied having to complete a whole extra page with the Monday deadline looming.

Anyway. Is it the Very Best that I can do? I tend not to think anything I do is quite as good as it should be, but I think it's about as good as I could get after giving myself a rather squeaky deadline. From what I can gather, something like half the population of the planet has entered, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Winner's cheque to plop through the letterbox, but stuff it - I wrote it, I drew it, I lettered it, I learned some things, and I finished it to the dealine.

So that's why it's been nothing but an extended musical interlude for weeks on end.

Anyway, it's called 'A Piece of Cake.' A few random panels to meet Rosie:

(I should say, before it goes all Richard Keys, the disparaging 'just a girl' remark in the first panel is not editorial, and indeed its disproving is part of the story.)

Music on Monday: No Geese Farts

...just some devillish fingerstyle guitar from Leo Kottke.

In the 1980s, Kottke developed serious wrist problems, something like carpal tunnel syndrome, which jeopardised his whole career and forced him to radically reinvent his picking style. Just watching this rampage through John Fahey's Last Steam Engine Train gives me cramp.

He gives good anecdote, too, even if the pleasure is the journey not the destination. Bob Dylan's book Chronicles details a meeting between the two musicians in the 1970s, which was news to Leo. This clip also contains a rare clue as to why Kottke never made it as a trombonist.

Music on Monday: That's Some Bad-Ass Farmer.

Bo Diddley was, in his time, a Lover, a Gunslinger and a Lumberjack, but also, and less snappily, a Pioneer in the Integration of Race and Gender in a Musical Environment.

Bass player Debby Hastings led his band for twenty-five years, and when Bo was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, it was with Hastings alongside him. Before that there was Cornelia 'Cookie' Redmond, a backing singer small in stature but big in personality who became an integral part of his on-stage show, including a snazzy line in repartee.

"Bo," Cookie would say, "you look like a million dollars."

"I do?"

"Yeah, you look like something I've never seen before."

Peggy Jones, 'Lady Bo', was a fantastic guitarist and singer who was an integral part of Bo Diddley's band and sound between 1956 and 1962. She taught herself Diddley's unusual tunings and style, and to list her work is to list some of his biggest hits - Say Man, The Story of Bo Diddley, Mona, Hey Bo Diddley, Crackin' Up, Aztec, Roadrunner. None of them would have sounded quite as they did without Lady Bo.

When Jones left the band, audiences missed "the girl" and so Norma-Jean Wofford stepped into her dizzying high heels. Also known as 'the Duchess', she was mentioned in the Animals' The Story of Bo Diddley as "his gorgeous sister." (I was going to say she was 'immortalised' by the song, but it's not like she was sitting quietly counting on a bunch of herberts from Tyneside to get her noticed.) The 'sister' thing was just a line Diddley put around; "we did everything together. She was like family, which was why I told everyone she was my sister." Another reason Diddley gave for this was that "it put me in a better position to protect her out on the road." The favour ran both ways; it was the Duchess who Diddley trusted to look after his money. (He could have done with her in the early 1970s, when he signed away all his copyrights with Chess, a decision that literally cost him dearly the rest of his career.)

And here she is, wearing a characteristically understated outfit and standing shoulder to shoulder with the great Bo Diddley in guitar-slinging bad-assery.