things i've learnt watching BBC ‘Survivors’

There’s a new programme just started on BBC called ‘Survivors’, which is about a flu pandemic where most of the population of the world cops it. It's set in England though, and I thought it’d be quite interesting and a bit ‘Children of Men’ish.

Here are some things I’ve learnt from watching the first episode:


A thirty second rant by a hysterical woman can convince even a selfish rich guy and an ex con with a gun.

After said rant about the importance of staying together, she will leave behind a man with the knowledge to live without technology without even asking him to come with her.

An escaped prisoner will still value money, as will a rich guy with a penthouse. He’ll believe his 90 grand car is the best thing to have around in a crisis.

Prison guards have the strongest work ethic in the world, vowing to keep a prisoner locked up for his full term, but unfortunately is also willing to die futilely in the attempt.

People will blow up petrol stations for no reason at all.

Everyone is out for themselves, except apparently for one man who picks up girls in playgrounds.

Doctors will suddenly lose hope, try to take an overdose and take up smoking even though they are probably the most valuable people to have around. This sudden change is also despite the last thing her friend said to her was that it’s best to live.

A distraught housewife on discovery of her dead husband will instantly burn his body and then go on a wild goose chase to find her only potentially alive son.

Your own car will run out of petrol at the end of your street, but if you steal an Alfa Romeo (with only average m.p.g of 23) it will have enough petrol to drive you to Scotland and back.

The six or so survivors of a disaster will miraculously meet on the same motorway.

The government always does apocalyptic stuff on purpose.

People will lie dead in their cars on small, quiet, suburban back roads, but a major motorway will be empty for miles and miles.

Having a landrover makes you a farmer.

Some people will develop natural immunity to a virus, but somehow their children don’t… (ed. I don’t know whether this can happen, it just seems silly to me :P)

Only one person will get the disease and survive it.

With only a fraction of the population left, there will be a convenient smattering of ethnic races.

Two people of Asian background just happen to survive and bump into each other.

The one who doesn’t like kids finds a child who survived and has to look after him.

A government heath official would rather do a T.V. appearance saying basically ‘we’re screwed’ instead of spending time with her sick family.

damian

I’ve just been listening to Lifehouse, and at the moment the song ‘Somewhere in Between’ is playing, so I thought it was quite apt to talk about Damian. (he used to sing that song to me ;))

We went out after I was with Jonathan. He lived in Huddersfield, and was 25 when I met him, turned 26 during. We went out for a couple of months, and it was far too intense for what it was. I think the problem was he was looking for love, and I wasn’t looking for anything at all.

Also, he still had his, ahem, *whispers* big V plates when I met him! Anyway! The point of the presentation is, he just got married. (I’ve just been looking for the date – it was sometime in September, and I’d laugh so much if it was the 25th!!)

When we broke up, the night before (a Friday), he rung me and said all the classic “it’s not going to work” clichés, including the biggest classic of all kick in the teeth “I don’t love you”. But like I’ve said, we were on different tracks so it wasn’t too bad for me.

He was crying and stuff, and it was ridiculous seeing as he was doing the dumping! So I told him I was coming to see him the next day, to sort it out and ‘close’ it properly.

So we had a Last Night – it reminded me of the last scene in the film A.I. There were tears, and the doing of things we’d done during the relationship – eating pork chops, watching family guy, taking photos.

Anyway. That night we did it for the one and only time, he lost his V plates, and it was completely ridiculous. Not that it wasn’t the perfect end to this weird day and evening of wallowing and flagellating!! In the morning he used the phrase (I think it’s a song) “my first kiss was my first kiss goodbye”. I said something like, I’ve been quite selfish and you should have saved it for someone more important (which is true, it was too big a deal to kind of throw away), but he did say “don’t think you’re not important”.

Anyway, I spent the next two weeks feeling very sad – purely because I’m a very emotional person ;). I was on my foundation year then, working hard, and getting ready for uni. A few months later, he was going to ask me to go to his works Christmas do, but I think that would have been a very silly thing to do!!

So anyway, he must have met this girl in the new year after that. I’m assuming she was the next one after me. I think it’s nice he found The One, seeing as that was what he was looking for. I’m not sad about it, I do think about him sometimes, and saying we only went out for two months feels very strange as it seems like it should have been more than that.

I think it’s funny that I’ve never talked about Damian on this blog. Maybe because it was such a short time, and we didn’t really do anything of note other than our last night.

pudsey bake sale

Last year I gave around £90 to Children in Need (actually, it was less than that because I bought a Pudsey teddy for £6 + £2 postage, but only around £1.50 of that goes to the charity).

Anyway...this year I thought I’d have an event to help raise some more money. I like giving to charity; I try to do it whenever I can. I didn’t want to do a sponsorship thing, for the main reasons of – I can’t do anything hehe, I mean like running, swimming etc. – ugh, no thank you! And the second reason, I don’t think I could drum up enough people to actually sponsor me.

So then I found out about Pudsey baking things from Lakeland. Last year I was browsing Facebook groups, and there were sooooo many of them along the theme of ‘I hate the redesigned Pudsey’ (it’s been the same bear for about 25 years and last year they changed it), and so I set one up called ‘I bought a new Pudsey and I’m proud!’, because I hate people sitting around complaining about stupid things and forgetting that he’s just a mascot for a bigger issue – the charity!















Anyway, someone joined my group and put up some pics of the Pudsey biscuits she’d made. So I decided it’d be a good idea to have a bake sale! I can bake, and have made all kinds of yummy things in the past, so I’m sure if I can get people to come it’ll be a success. Plus buying the baking things gives money to the charity too!

I’m also going to be doing Pudsey face painting - a small Pudsey on a cheek or arm or whatever, or a full Pudsey face ;)

I’ve also set up a Just Giving site for it, for anyone who can’t come to the event, or wants to donate by card instead. Alice gave me £5, I’m always sponsoring her Race for Life’s ;) From buying the merchandise this year, I’ve already given about £15 to the charity! Woo!

Soooo if anyone stumbles across this blog and wants to give money then click on the donate button on the right --->, and if anyone is in Crosshills, Yorkshire, England on the 14th or 15th November then come and buy some yummy treats!

a rose as promised

As promised yesterday, here’s what I came up with on Painter – I decided on a different rose.

The original picture had three roses in different states of opening, but I decided on just this one, mainly because of time – I’m usually doing this at 6am real time (which is like 11pm my time) and so I’m quite tired and ready for bed.

This one is ok, although I don’t like it as much as the yellow rose. I like the green background – I tried to make it abstracty and blurred so that it gives the impression of leaves but is just a coloured background.

The flower isn’t as detailed as I’d have liked, I think that’s partly because I was quite tired, plus the picture I was working from wasn’t the best quality in the first place. But I like the colours.

I like doing the same subject matter over and over again, means that you get in good practice with it – you kind of train your eye into a certain way of working.

digital painting

I’ve got the art bug back and it’s painting that’s lit my fire.

During my time at college I only did painting. I did modules in other things too, but it was always painting that was at the top of my list. I never liked any of the 3D things we did (apart from ceramics), and actually actively Avoided textiles and print making.

But then last year I started doing sculpture with polymer clay and loved it! So ever since, I’ve kind of put the painting on hold and concentrated on that. Plus I made beads out of clay too, and wire jewellery.

Now I’ve discovered Corel Painter, I’m hooked right back on the painting again!

I don’t have a very ‘3D Brain’ I don’t think...I find it quite hard to do art in 3D, because of the things I mentioned here – the extra planes is the big thing, with painting there’s only one to worry about, with sculpture there’s actually infinite numbers.

It’s partly being a woman, it’s a biological fact that woman aren’t as good at 3D perception. There are tests for it I’ve done, they are sometimes in I.Q. tests, like being shown a net of an object and being asked which 3D object out of four it represents – it’s difficult for a female brain to work it out for some reason – I believe it’s the ‘hunter-gatherer’ part of us, the male has to spear down a wilder beast so has to know about depth perception and 3D things, the females need to know about nurturing in the cave.

Now I'm not saying women can't be sculptors, I'm just stating biological fact here - don't shoot the messenger. I do find painting easier than sculpting (not that either is ‘easy’), I'm not going to choose between them or stop doing either, but I think deep down I'm more of a painter than a sculptor.

Anyway...here are some of the things I’ve come up with the last couple of days using Corel Painter (I've also made two bracelets using that >> book as a reference).

This is a charcoal drawing on an oil painted background – I wanted the flower to be quite rough and to obviously have see through bits to show the background. I also wanted to keep the foreground subdued while the background blared out with brightness.

This is an oil painting of the same rose, except using realistic colours. I wanted this one to be as real as I could get it, but also still a little abstract in that I haven’t included every tiny detail and fold of the petals, I have left most of the detail to the viewer. All I wanted was it to be yellow and real enough that someone could say – ‘that’s a rose’. I also used a great complimentary background colour, with white in the centre to make the rose glow ;)

I’m just about to do another painting which I’ll post tomorrow when it’s done, possibly of a rose, possibly of the Same rose again, I don’t know. I have plenty of stock photos from my college days and other stuff I’ve picked up over the years stashed on my computer for artistic reference :P

things I’ve learnt while on the nightshift

- Children walk to school in the late evening when I’m getting ready for bed.

- Plumbers come at 2am, stay til 6am, wander off for half an hour and don’t give a second thought that you might want to be in bed.

- Shops are never open.

- If you go to the supermarket there’ll be no-one on the roads, and you’ll share the shop with surly nightshift workers or overly helpful and apologetic staff who aren’t used to dealing with customers.

- 1pm (2am) has an eerie orange glow of light pollution, that can make it seem like just a very cloudy day...

- You’ll never get a parcel delivered into your hands again, it’ll always be waiting for you next door.

- Seven coffees a day is normal, although it’ll just prop you up and not make you feel awake.

- It'll really annoy you when people want sympathy / praise for ‘staying up really late, like until 4am’.

- You get so used to it being light when you sleep that if you do go to bed when it’s dark you’ll leave the light on on purpose.

- If someone not on the nightshift asks you to, you might go to the theatre at 5.30am.

- You'll never know what the hell time it is, when to sleep or eat, because it's dark at 1pm, and light at 3am!

- For some reason it’ll suddenly be acceptable to drink in a morning, and taboo to drink in the evening...

- People never update anything on Facebook or on forums, but then while you were sleeping suddenly everything on there has changed.

- You’ll probably eat Chinese / Pizza / Roast Dinner / Fish and Chips for breakfast sometimes.

corel painter X

I’ve today discovered the wonder that is Corel Painter X!

After using it, it’s a wonder anyone uses real paint anymore. It’s an outstanding program, which must have been written with the explicit help from real artists because all the tools I’ve tried so far are dead ringers for the real thing.

I’ve studied art for a while now, and I’ve done quite a lot of painting in my time. I love painting, but it does have it’s downsides....it’s messy, oil paints are smelly, you have to set up and put away, sometimes cleaning up takes just as long as the painting did. There’s always the possibility of dipping your brush in your coffee or drinking your paint water...

With this program you can have all the fun of painting and none of the mess. It really is the ideal substitute for real paint (and drawing etc.). I’ve tried the oil paints, watercolour and charcoal so far (plus had a mess round with some other stuff to see what it does). If you use the oil paint on Impasto setting, you can actually See the brush strokes AND they stay put no matter how much blending you do afterwards!! When I tried the watercolours, they do blend together and dry before your very eyes, and if you put too much in one place it also gives the effect of overloaded paper, amazing!

The charcoal is my next stop along the way of my experiments, I had a play and think it’s ace!! I’ve done a couple of paintings with it so far, just playing...it all started with Facebook Graffiti and Animated Graffiti.

I love FB Graffiti, although it’s really hard to do anything really good on it because of the limited tools BUT some people have created real masterpieces on there, and I have been trying (one of my efforts is there > ;))– it is quite good to be limited sometimes. But it’s given me a real desire to do some digital art.

Along with looking at some of Rachel Anderson's stuff (I’m doing a cross stitch of one of her pictures, ‘Queen of Hearts’ at the moment).

With programs like Painter, painting and drawing on the computer really is the future, because anything you can do on paper or canvas you can do on here just the same except with none of the mess and clean up, not to mention storage space for all the canvases and art materials!! All you need is a computer, a good amount of RAM and a graphics tablet and you're set for all the art your imagination can muster. You can even throw out your trusty 2Bs ;).

If you’re an artist, acquire a copy of Corel Painter X right NOW!!

art and bri

I’ve spent most of the evening re-tagging my blog, and reading over some of my old stuff (I started at the beginning and worked forwards).

It’s made me realise something – looking at the numbers next to the labels, it looks like I don’t talk about Art or Bri nearly enough. At the moment the largest number of posts has been about uni, then friends, and then randomness.

I should be talking, and thinking about art more often. It’s called Elizabeth’s Art after all. I just think that I lost it a little bit during and after uni. At college I was passionate, working hard and loving it, but then uni and the uni tutors sucked all the life out of it and Stifled me so much!! I want to get that passion back, to have a project and give it everything. I think that’s going to be my business plan, I’ll work as hard as I did on foundation and make it work and be great!

As for Bri, well I think it’s probably because we live together, plus at the moment there’s not a lot of excitement in our life together, so not a lot to talk about. I’m sure that happens in the lives of every couple. The silly night shift is a big part of it – no evenings and being tired a lot. Giving ourselves artificial S.A.D ugh.

But, doesn’t mean he isn’t more important than the 21 posts he only has credit for grr that’s not enough! He should be the top of the list!! I’m going to try write some more about this stuff, I think it’s important for myself and for us together. I think I’m a bit closed off sometimes.

Anyway, I’m tagging this with both art and Bri, so at least that’ll be two more notches on them hehe!

a name for the business

As this has now become my Not Conceived Yet baby (she’s just a gleam in my eye wink wink ;)), I think I need to be doing the job of any prospective mother and making a list of baby names.

My first ‘company’ is called ‘Arts and Crafts Heaven’, a name I came up with about 5 years ago and has kind of stuck with me as a nice and to the point company name. I also have my ‘Elizabeth’s Jewellery’ business side, an obvious and to the point name for my hand made jewellery.

I don’t really want to call my jewellery making shop ‘Elizabeth’s Jewellery’, simply because it’s a bit Too obvious, and I’d like something snappy like some of the places I’ve already seen and shopped at. Some of my favourites for their snappiness are ‘Bead-a-holics’, ‘Bead Diva’, ‘Princess Jewels’ (!!! gets Very excited about that one ;)), ‘ArtClayUK’ (love the rhyming there, just flows off the tongue), ‘The Craft Pixie’, ‘Sleepy Kitten Crafts’, there are plenty of others that I just can’t think of right now...

Anyway, the type of name I want has to have the following characteristics – Snappiness above all, it has to be short and to the point, to stick in people’s minds and so I’m remembered and that people will come back again and again. Also along these lines it has to be easily searchable on the web – so it needs to be something easy to spell etc. as I want an internet base for the shop (a .co.uk) as well.

I also want Cuteness! Sleepy Kitten Crafts?! Oh come on! *faints from the cuteness*!! I’d love to have a name incorporating fairies or pixies or something, but everything I seem to search for on the net already exists (bead fairy, bead pixie, pixie jewels, stuff like that – most are taken).

The name Has to be unique, even if the name has been taken in another country, I don’t want it. Being un-unique means you can easily be mistaken and you might drive your customers straight to your competition.

I’m not too worried about the ‘Jewellery vs. Jewelry’ thing, because I doubt I’ll be selling to America (at least not the jewellery making supplies, I’m sure they have plenty of outlets already). I want to use the word Jewellery, because that is the correct English spelling, simply as.

Bri suggested ‘House of Jewels’, simply because I share many characteristics with House M.D. hehehehe mainly that I don’t suffer fools gladly and like things simple and to the point :P no Bimbling Around!! But apart from the silliness, I don’t think it’s a bad idea – it’s going on the list anyway.

The things the name has to incorporate are the jewellery making side and the jewellery side, or maybe somehow both at the same time.

So I’m just going to list some names and see if any new ideas form:

Fairy Jewels
Pixie Jewels
House of Jewels / House of Jewellery?
House of Sparkles
E Beads
E Jewels
Bead-E-Craft
Jewellery Making Heaven
Jewellery Making Paradise
Sparkly Jewels
Sparkle Heaven
Sparkly Things
Make Your Own Jewels
Make Your Own Sparkles
Bead Craft Heaven

Any Suggestions?