Archive for the ‘illustration’ Category

Hungary Hungary Hippos

Seeing as though BBC News 24 have been ram­ming this story down my throat all day, I decided to do some­thing top­i­cal for a change. (In the cur­rent affairs sense of the word, I didn’t apply any­thing to my skin)

This was tech­ni­cally achieved by a print process in that I applied the ink to some paper using pres­sure alone, the pres­sure in this case pro­vided by the weight of my pen. I like to get a bit pedan­tic when it comes to print.

FFFFresh beetroot!

Well I’ve had a pro­duc­tive day. What started out as me hav­ing a nos­tal­gic trip across the wide expanses of youtube, resulted in a marathon pho­to­shop and illus­tra­tor ses­sion to pro­duce this:

Fresh beets

SNNNAP!!

Original photo used for com­po­si­tion  cred­ited to Darren Baker

Beets are cul­ti­vated for fod­der (e.g. man­gel­wurzel), for sugar (the sugar beet), as a leaf veg­etable (chard or “Bull’s Blood”), or as a root veg­etable (“beet­root”, “table beet”, or “gar­den beet”). Major root veg­etable cul­ti­vars include:

 

  • “Albina Vereduna”, a white variety
  • “Burpee’s Golden”, a beet with orange-red skin and yel­low flesh.
  • “Chioggia”, an open-pollinated vari­ety orig­i­nally grown in Italy. The con­cen­tric rings of its red and white roots are visu­ally strik­ing when sliced. As a her­itage vari­ety, Chioggia is largely unim­proved and has rel­a­tively high con­cen­tra­tions of geosmin.
  • “Detroit Dark Red”, with rel­a­tively low con­cen­tra­tions of geosmin, and is there­fore a pop­u­lar com­mer­cial cul­ti­var in the United States.
  • “India Beet” is not as sweet as Western beet. However India beet is more nutri­tious than Western beet.
  • “Lutz Greenleaf”, a vari­ety with a red root and green leaves, and a rep­u­ta­tion for main­tain­ing its qual­ity well in storage.
  • “Red Ace”, the prin­ci­pal vari­ety of beet found in the United States, typ­i­cal for its bright red root and red-veined green foliage.

    • “Blood Turnip” was once a com­mon name for beet root cul­ti­vars for the gar­den. Examples include: Bastian’s Blood Turnip, Dewing’s Early Blood Turnip, Edmand Blood Turnip, and Will’s Improved Blood Turnip.

    Check out the video after the break if you have no idea what I’m on about.

    (more…)

    Zebraaaaa

    This has prob­a­bly been done before, but I don’t care.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica on Zebra:

    any of three species of strik­ingly black-and-white-striped mam­mals of the horse fam­ily Equidae (genus Equus): Burchell’s, or plains, zebra (E. burchel­lii), which is found in rich grass­lands over much of east­ern and south­ern Africa; Grevy’s zebra (E. grevyi), which lives in arid, sparsely wooded areas in Kenya and a few small areas in Ethiopia; and the moun­tain zebra (E. zebra), which inhab­its dry upland plains in Namibia and a few scat­tered areas in west­ern South Africa.

    Typographical Zebra

    My typo­graph­i­cal study of a zebra

     

     

    readme.txt

    Wikipedia on “README”:

    A readme (or read me) file con­tains infor­ma­tion about other files in a direc­tory or archive and is very com­monly dis­trib­uted with com­puter soft­ware. Such a file is usu­ally a text file­called README.TXT, README.1ST, READ.ME, or sim­ply README, although some Microsoft Windows soft­ware may occa­sion­ally include a README.WRI, README.RTF, orREADME.DOC. The name is cho­sen so that users unaware of the exis­tence of this type of files would be drawn to read it. It is tra­di­tion­ally writ­ten in upper case so that on case-preserving envi­ron­ments using an ASCIIbetical order­ing, the name will appear near the begin­ning of a direc­tory list­ing (since upper-case let­ters sort before lower-case let­ters in ASCIIbetical ordering).

    This is my pic­ture of README.txt:

    readme.txt

    This is readme.txt

     

    Got the photo from this month’s Computer Arts free CD, I always like to do some­thing with the free stock pho­tos they put on there!

    What Eve said to Adam…

    The other day my house was vis­ited by 2 Jehovah’s wit­nesses. They showed me a leaflet with an image on the front page of a dev­as­tated city (after a nat­ural dis­as­ter or ter­ror­ist attack) with a woman and child injured and weep­ing. Across the page in bold type was the ques­tion “HAS GOD LEFT US?”. They then asked me if this was a ques­tion I’d thought about, and I said “As an athe­ist, no!” They were quite nice peo­ple, and we had a lit­tle laugh before part­ing com­pany and they left their leaflet with me.

    I am an athe­ist, but attended church when I was younger and am acquainted with much of the bible , and after the Jehovah’s wit­nesses left I started to think about the fun­da­men­tals of the Christian faith and had a chuckle when I remem­bered about an idea I had for a sketch a while ago about Adam and Eve.

    Don't be ridiculous, Adam!

    Adam & Eve: The untold story.

     

    The Walrus

    The BBC on Walruses:

    “The wal­rus (Odobenus ros­marus) is a large flip­pered marine mam­mal with a dis­con­tin­u­ous cir­cum­po­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion in the Arctic Ocean and sub-Arctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The wal­rus is the only liv­ing species in the Odobenidae fam­ily and Odobenus genus. It is sub­di­vided into three sub­species: the Atlantic Walrus (O. ros­marus ros­marus) found in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Walrus (O. ros­marus diver­gens) found in the Pacific Ocean, and O. ros­marus laptevi, found in the Laptev Sea.”

    Note how the plural of “Walrus” is in fact “Walruses” and not “Walri”. This is because the word has mod­ern ger­manic roots and not clas­si­cal latin.

    And now, the Walrus of Space:

    Walrus

    The Walrus of Space

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    See also: The Whale of Time.

     

    John Travolta, Ducks

    Anatideaphobia:

    “Anatidaephobia is defined as a per­va­sive, irra­tional fear that one is being watched by a duck. The anati­dae­pho­bic indi­vid­ual fears that no mat­ter where they are or what they are doing, a duck watches. Anatidaephobia is derived from the Greek word “anati­dae”, mean­ing ducks, geese or swans and “pho­bos” mean­ing fear.”

    Now feast your eyes on this:

    DUCK

    A duck play­ing in a saucer of milk, painted with 2 red stripes, car­ry­ing a mars bar in one of its wings, with a man of 56years old watch­ing him.