Dawn silliness

As I wandered round the fields with Hugo this morning I decided it would be fun to take a large panoramic πŸ˜‰ Of course when I was back home stitching it together I thought it would be fun to play around with it a bit… As I was looking at this polar shot on the screen I decided that it would make a good eye… There’s a zoomable version of the panoramic here.

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Under the stars

I’ve had a few ideas for star filled paintings recently, mainly they’ve been science fiction with sleek space ships zooming around. However the other day I returned to a Tolkien theme of Hobbits wandering under a star filled sky. The main aim was to make the Hobbits just visible enough to be in the painting yet make it believable that they were wandering under the stars with little to no Moon to illuminate the scene. Another aim was to use real star positions rather than just splatter the painting with…

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Conquaerere

I decided to take a couple of ‘conker’ photographs today, and as I was playing around with the camera I wondered where the name conker originated… Conkers (n.)Β  “child’s game played with horse chestnuts,” originally with snail shells, 1847, probably a variant of conquer. The goal was to break the other player’s item by hitting it with yours. Conquer (v.)Β  c.1200, cunquearen, from Old French conquerre “conquer, defeat, vanquish,” from Vulgar Latin *conquaerere (for Latin conquirere) “to search for, procure by effort, win,” from Latin com-, intensive prefix (see com-),…

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