Staple Hunting in Derwent drawing pencils

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is reflection. I figure that Tom (yes, that's right. Tom Cat is his name) deciding to hunt a staple that he found amongst some packing materials -- and which was immediately taken away from him because I'm no fun --  is kind of a reflection of his wilder relatives stalking actual food.

Tom's not actually a longhair, by the way. I was just feeling scribbly.

Turkey Brothers in Derwent drawing pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is sleep.

You can't tell me that anything does sleep better than a cat. Unless it's two cats, that is.

This is a really (really) quick doodle of Tom and Bob. Yep, that's right. Tom Cat and Bob Cat. They're brothers, and they're turkeys. Thus, Turkey Brothers. If you want to see them in real life, just look for the label Turkey Brothers on my other blog.

Incidentally, I'm liking these Derwent  drawing pencils rather a lot. Smooth, soft, and much less fussy than Contes. In my limited experience, that is.

Emphasis on limited.

A couple of photographic abstracts

 Just playing here, really. I took a few shots at a low shutter speed while moving the camera, then ran them through some filters with a simple photoeditor. I do it fairly frequently, actually, but these ones turned out kind of neat so I thought I'd post them.

I'm of two minds about things like this, to be honest. On the one hand, I made choices here. I decided where to crop, I decided what and how much colour I wanted, how many layers there were going to be, and how much of the original photo was still identifiable. But... does that make it art?

I suppose it does under most definitions, but it just doesn't feel like it to me. Manipulating photos, at least the way I do it, just seems too... I don't know, easy? effortless?... to count. I mean, don't get me wrong. I am definitely not saying that digital artists aren't artists. Not everything everyone does is to my tastes, of course, but I'm not trying to imply that there's not art there. There is. For me, though, when I do things like this I don't feel like I'm making art.

I'm playing. I'm seeing what happens when I press a particular button. If I don't like it, I try another button until I find what I want.

But doesn't that make it art, then? Do I really need to be holding a pencil in my hand to give myself permission to think that the end result could be considered art?

By the way -- for those stumbling onto this blog for the first time, I should say that when a post is nothing but questions it generally means that I really don't know where I'm going with this...

Anyway. I know that many people out there wrestled with this question ages ago and came down on whatever side suits their philosophy best, and that I probably seem pretty late to the party. I'm not; I think about these things a lot. I just don't usually post the things I'm playing with while I'm thinking of them, that's all.



Maybe I should do it more often.

Noise in tri-tones

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is noise. The scanner lost a lot of this one, but it was just a scribble anyway.

I work as a naturalist, as my profile says. I'm sure it's not surprising that I find much of our modern noise annoying; including, by the way, our habit of plugging ourselves into mp3 players or phones so much of the time as opposed to hearing what's happening.

I probably don't need to say much more about that except to wonder why we work so hard at cancelling out the non-noisy sounds around us...