Monday 14 May 2012

Greeting Cards for Eid and Chinese New Year

Here are a couple of the Eid and Ramadan Cards I made from the mosque in the moonlight.






And I’m afraid that, despite resorting to a set-square at one point, my straight lines are still not as straight as maybe they should be! I can’t explain how they come to be a bit wobbly so there’s nothing much I can do about it, short of avoiding designs that involve buildings! I’m not too bothered, though, by the slightly upward-sloping ‘horizontals’  - who’s to say that this mosque wasn’t built on sloping ground?

Just after I published last week’s blog post, my laptop started doing all sorts of strange and worrying things. My computer-savvy neighbour ran out of ideas and gave up trying to sort it for me, suggesting I might need a new laptop. ARRRGGGGHHHH! 

But luckily, my son came to the rescue in the evening and, although he lives more than 200 miles away, he was able to sort out most of the mayhem, though he only managed to get Outlook Express working again yesterday.

Later I discovered that Monday's problems weren’t the direct result of Sunday’s ‘Daonol’ Trojan but were caused by a new piece of ‘Scare-ware’ – it certainly scared the living daylights out of me! - called ‘FakeSysdef’. I spent the rest of the week scanning and re-scanning with various antivirus and malware programs until I was completely  confident that it was out of my system!

So it’s been a very ‘interesting’ week!

Instead of uploading designs in between more phonecalls and visits from the Community Police and the real police about the graffiti, I’ve been working on new designs while the scanners were doing their work. And it has felt like luxury to take my time, in the knowledge that I couldn’t rush on to the uploading stage as I usually do! In fact, it’s pretty boring watching a scanner’s progress so I was glad to have some other work to get on with in the meantime!

Even though I tend to work quite fast, I could never have drawn and painted this Chinese New Year card design for the Year of the Snake in my usual Saturday afternoon painting slot! So it was a good opportunity to tackle something with a lot of detail - though no straight lines! - while I had time on my side.

It still needs a fair bit of tidying up and I still have to decide on a background colour and font. I’ll have a lot of computer work to catch up with this week but I’ll try to have Sammy Snake finished for my next post.

Yesterday morning a group of young lads, from the Youth Offenders Programme, I think, came and painted over the graffiti and I now have a nice bright white side wall, instead of the grey roughcast that I’d never got around to painting when my extension was built. So things are looking up!



I'm really much more comfortable painting big - the bigger, the better. So, when the council didn't appear to be dealing with it, I was sorely tempted to go out and paint some sort of graffiti of my own on this inviting expanse of wall! A view of the mountains, maybe . . . ?




4 comments:

Betsy Grant said...

But I'm sure YOUR graffiti would have been beautiful!

Judy Adamson said...

Yes, I once did a very wide pastel painting of the profile of the mountains surrounding Abergavenny and it would have fitted the space perfectly!

Crystal said...

Glad you got your wall painted now you can paint a mural on the space :-)

Judy Adamson said...

Perhaps I should reproduce the flowers on the other side of the wall for the whole neighbourhood to enjoy? It would take an awful lot of paint, though, and roughcast isn't easy to paint on! I'd have to learn to use spray cans :)