Saturday, 29 March 2008

Blood vs Beard


I usually scan my A4 and A5 sketchbook pages in grayscale and adjust the colour to match the tanned pages of my smaller A6 pocket book, but today I decided against that and opted for a slightly larger file size to fully illustrate (no pun) the obvious reason for todays blog title.

I'd been sitting in a comfortable chair in front of my monitor doing some quick studies from a selection of movie screen captures, when I was suddenly faced with the impromtu arrival of colour on my sketchbook page. The initial confusion didn't last long though, and I quickly located the source of this scarlet intrusion. A bleeding knuckle.

The tiny tiumphant feeling I got from the sucessful use of my limited observational skills rapidly evaporated as I was plunged into a second, deeper confusion. How did I cut my knuckle when I had been sitting in a nice soft chair away from any noticable sharp edges (apart from the point of a 2B graphite pencil which was obviously spending all it's time pointing away from my hand and towards the paper) for a good 15 minutes?

To attain the answer, I had to remove myself from the room, spend a further 10 plus minutes trying to stem the annoyingly obstinate flow of blood, and rely on the oft helpful intellectual enlightenment (sudden lightbulb *ping*) that comes from having a pee.

So how did I cut myself?

Answer: I didn't. I just knocked off a little scab I had aquired at work a few days ago. :-)

So what did I learn today?



  • Blood dries a lot slower on paper than I would have previously thaught - had I took the time to think about it.


  • Sherlock Holmes' methods of combining logic and elimination actually do work and are useful in every day situations.


  • "Blood" and "beard", or rather Bloodbeard, is a great name for a fictitious pirate.


  • Writing a rather long and protracted rant about a single page of my sketchbook which consists of 2 very bad portraits and 1 half decent effort is ludicrous.

2 comments:

Xumca said...

:D "not a writer" my ear!

You made me laugh, hard. Thanks, I needed that.

Munin said...

Haha... I'm afraid I am just a scribbler at best, but thank's all the same. :-)