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Alpacaoids at Coton!

Went for a muddy walk :) Think I went that way decades ago when it was a footpath behind the CMS, before a lot of the nice path was put in.

I cycled to West Cambridge site and walked along the cycle path bridge to Coton, dodging road works.

Near Coton church, looking very lively


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Cherry Blossom portrait!

I really love how this one turned out, I'm proud of it. The layered leaf effects on the tree look amazing. I like the background too, although I wish I could get it as realistic as the tree with a similar amount of stylisation.

Leather chair

I like the style, I aimed for something I could use for a lightly-stylised style for board game design for "assassins guild annual dinner" game or games with a similar tone, and I think that worked well

Next time I could do shadows better, but this has a good feel

Other art

The other drawings I've been posting this month are on twitter: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media (scroll back to see pictures this month, most are uploaded drawings) and facebook: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media I love the dinosaur sunset one, but the sketch garden, the basking coo, and the swirly blue ghost are worth looking at too.

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We went to see the Antony Gormley exhibit at Kettle's Yard.

If you like surprisingly evocative iron statues of Antony Gormley, you will enjoy a lot of his works, and there were a few more along those lines, including "man lying down with his feet touching the wall a foot above the ground" and "diving man depicted in bands of latitude and longitudes" and "man made out of spaced out jenga rods" (not the real titles).

There was also... three wires perpendicular to each other stretching through several rooms of the exhibition, which are surprisingly disconcerting when the rooms are mostly pure white.

But most notably, there was an infinite cube (I think that IS its real title). It's a glass box about a meter wide on a table, filled with a rectilinear lattice of wires and white LEDs. But the sides are slightly mirrored, so when you see in, you see these tunnels of glowing white lines OF INFINITE REACH. And if you peer down, you see the same thing as a chasm. And if you go too close, you see your eye with sparkly white dots floating in it (or green if you wear glasses for long-sightedness).

However you move your head, there's always these infinite tunnnels twisting to show you their depths. And you can walk all round it and see if looks the same from every dimension.

Like, you would swear it's the tesserect, or some other glowy advanced alien tech power device. I mean, usually the inside of art pieces is not infinite, but here it -- apparently -- is.
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All over Florence there are people on the street selling prints, mostly of the same half-a-dozen famous paintings. Which is interesting to see, because the first set you pass, you recognise a couple, but if you don't recognise the rest, you don't know if they're famous, you just notice which ones are nice.

However, once you've passed several sets, the duplication of the same paintings makes it clear they're a handy guide to the top five most famous paintings with any connection to Tuscany.

One of two marvellously quizzical cherbus (picture) was very striking, that looked like it would be around in the Florence galleries, but I didn't actually know what it was. When I came back, I looked it up.

Except the question of looking up an image isn't always trivial, and can be an interesting exploration of google skills, if you can find it without asking someone. I knew: what it looked like; it was of cherubs; it was famous; it had some connection to the renaissance or Tuscany.

I started by doing an image search for "cherubs painting", and it was famous enough to be near the top hit. However, that only find a picture from people who didn't know the traditional name and called it "Rachel's Cherubs" or "Raphael's Little Angels". A quick check of the titles of Raphael's most famous works didn't show that. However, searching for "florence raphael (angels OR cherubs)" gave the real title, and that was readily accessible on wikipeda.

What I didn't know was that it was the bottom of a large painting, Sistine Madonna, painted by Raphael in Italy, but now housed in the gallery of old masters in Dresden, but became independently famous.
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I read the paper at the weekend. A few things jumped out.

1. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1525134,00.html

Highscope was an experiment supposedly establishing that if you give small kids lots of help and support they're more likely to grow up... ok. Sure start is a new governemt program doing stuff for kids. Well, it's a good approach.

2. http://www.balticprojects.org/tunick/

It's funny how a few naked people are weird, but *lots* of naked people are art. Woo exhibitionism! :)

3. http://glassesdirect.co.uk

Some entrepreneur with bad eyesight noticed that (1) the price of glasses was inflated way over what they cost to make and (2) you can go to opticians #1, get an eeye test, take the prescription, and buy glasses from optician #2. So he cut out the middle men, and is selling online from £15+ for complete glasses.

I haven't looked for testimonials yet, but I was going to investigate for my next pair.

Of course, I don't know how much *eye tests* cost. If they're subsidised by glasses sales this company isn't going to be stable, but it might be good for now.