Skies

Most of the time, if I'm stopping to take a picture of a nice landscape, I'll stop and take a picture of the sky too. I find skies particularly pretty. There is so much variation, and you never see two skies that are the same.

Below:

- Starry night sky at holiday cottage

- Fair weather over Blythburgh

- Southwold (or thereabouts) getting a soaking

- Cloudy sunset at holiday cottage

Marsh Harriers

During our holiday in Suffolk, we visited a large amount of nature reserves and marshland. Almost every time we visited one of these places, we would see Marsh Harriers. We also saw them very close to the cottage we were staying in at the time, and would sometimes hear a pair calling.

Since we only really saw these birds as distant flying blobs, I don't really have any award-winning photos. However, the ones I do have give a vague idea of what the bird looks like from below.

The first picture is a male, as you can tell from the white patches on the underside of his wings.

The second pictures is a female. The female is a much darker bird, but with a pale forehead.

Dragonflies

Due to being away, being busy, and then being somewhat distracted, my blog seems to have been rather neglected of late. So, today, I have made myself a cup of tea, and now I am going to blog.

Now, onto the post!

Whilst I was away, during the first two weeks of the summer holidays, we went for a fair few walks around nature reserves. We found that most of these areas were heavily populated with dragonflies and damselflies. These were two of the main things I took (or attempted to take) photos of, and I developed a certain interest in them. After buying a little fold-up guide to dragonflies, I am now successfully on the way to calling myself a Dragonfly Geek.

Below are a female Common Darter, a Blue-Tailed Damselfly, and a male Common Darter.

Drawing again!

With it being work experience next week, I finally had a free weekend! So, immediately, the pencils came out...

I've done a total of 3 portraits in the past few days, all from requests people have given me.

Some were a little rushed, and could probably have been a lot more polished if I'd have spent more time, but I didn't really want to spend ages on them. Portraits like these tend to take me between 2 and 4 hours.

I've had fun drawing these, and it's nice to be able to find something that is productive AND relaxing, two words rarely used in the same context for me!

In case you're unsure:

1. 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and The Master (John Simm)

2. Gerard Way (singer from My Chemical Romance)

3. Florence Welch (singer from Florence and the Machine)

Anyway, any opinions or feedback on these is welcome! Thanks for reading... :)

Exams are over...

Finally. This summer, I've had 7 GCSE exams, and it's certainly been tiring. Sorry I haven't been posting recently... there hasn't been much of a gap between revision and having no motivation to do anything.
Although I still have controlled assessments and coursework to do, I think I will definitely have some time off now to blog, and do some other things I've been itching to do.
I've had a fair few drawing requests, which I might try and do over the next week or two, which I will post on here.
I've been writing a little too, mainly focusing on little projects like short stories and poetry. I've also been doing a few video editing projects, which has been fun.
Next week, I've got work experience, which should be an interesting change to the daily routine, and after that I begin my Year 11 school timetable for the last two weeks before the summer holidays, just to check no timetable changes need to be made for next year. I'm counting down to the 6 week break now, where as well as going on holiday for two weeks, I should be doing a couple of big projects. I've written a short horror film script, called Divided Souls, which I am hoping to get together with a group of friends to film... as well as being a director, I am going to edit and produce it on DVD. I don't think I'm going to put it on Youtube when it's finished, like I do a lot of my stuff, but I might post a few previews or trailers here and there.
I will make sure to update soon, so watch this space! :)

New Microphone!

This week, I was welcomed home by a big exciting cardboard box.

It turned out to be the Samson CO1U USB Studio Condenser Microphone that I had ordered from Amazon... and here is it set up with my laptop in all it's glory.

It being only around £70 for a proper professional microphone, I honestly didn't know what to expect from it, but I'm actually really impressed. Assuming you're close enough to the microphone, or the noise you make is loud enough, there's barely any background hiss at all, despite all the horror stories I'd heard. It makes sense I suppose- if you have to increase the volume of the singer, you have to increase the volume of the background noise too.

Renee and I also covered 'You're Gonna Go Far Kid' by The Offspring using the new microphone on Friday, which you can find on Youtube here. Beware, there's a fair amount of bad language in this song!

Another bit of band news, we've started talking to a couple of other people about forming a proper band (as in singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer) and we may be starting something on that front- but it's still probably a long way away.

Thanks for reading!

Editing Stuff

One thing I find really relaxing and rewarding is editing photos. I often accept requests from friends asking me to edit photos of themselves for Facebook, and I do my own too, but as well as that I like to edit drawings, and existing pictures from the internet.

I use a combination of PicMonkey and Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 (and occasionally Paint, because it's actually a pretty useful programme!).

On the left is one of my drawings, which started life as a rather messy scanned image. After a fair bit of work erasing mistakes, fixing broken lines, improving colours and exposure and cutting out I got it to something a bit more like what you would expect in a manga comic. Not an award-winner, but it was pretty rewarding nonetheless.

Making Music

I've played acoustic guitar since primary school, and have managed to keep it up. I started learning classical guitar in Year 7, and despite the fact I should practise a lot more, am trawling through Grade 5 (which I might even be ready to do the exam for, one day) and I think I'm certainly improving, little by little.

As well as classical, I've always enjoyed casually strumming a few chords and singing along to various songs. Occasionally, me and a friend of mine (called Renee) record the odd cover here

and there and upload to Youtube, with the band name 'Ruthless Mindz'. Since there are only two of us, it's all acoustic, and it's all recorded with a pretty bad microphone- but, here are a few link to a couple of songs we've covered anyway:

The Importance of Being Idle by Oasis

Just Tonight by The Pretty Reckless

We're trying to form a full band with a couple of other friends, but it's not going particularly well. We go to different schools, and have nowhere to practise together. On top of that, our drummer doesn't really have access to his drum kit.

Oh well, maybe one day we'll get our act together, stay tuned!

Neither of us have a massive knowledge of music theory, and we haven't managed to string together any original songs as of yet, but we're trying our best!

I was also given a photo shoot voucher as a Christmas present, and did a shoot with RLS Arts for the band. Here is one of the results, and if you want to see anything else about the two of us you can look at our Facebook and Youtube accounts.

Sketches and Manga

Every so often, I like to pick up a pencil and draw. Sometimes I give them as presents, sometimes I sketch for personal projects, and sometimes I just mindlessly doodle. As well as drawing portraits of real people, mostly celebrities, I like to draw Manga. I'm a big Anime and Manga fan, and am trying my best to develop my own drawing style. If I'm good enough, one day, I'd like to start a proper Manga series for people to read!

I thought I'd share my drawings of Colin Morgan (Merlin) and Simon Baker (The Mentalist) with you. Portraits are really relaxing to do, and the sense of achievement you get when it resembles the person you were drawing is very satisfying! I'd certainly recommend having a go - you don't have to be really skilled or an expert, these are only 3rd and 4th attempts at drawing portraits.

If you want to see any of my other stuff, feel free to check out my DeviantArt Page - there's some manga on there as well as my portraits and some photo editing stuff.

Introductions and Apple Toast

Good Afternoon, Bloggers!

I used to have blogs, but every time I make one it just seems to fall to the back of my mind and never get posted on. Now, however, I think I have some motivation, and have been urged to make a blog by my good friend Steph, and my Mum (both blogs definitely worth a look). I intend to share news and creative pursuits, and sometimes thoughts that simply come to mind.

As a person, I'd say I have a rather large sense of adventure, and I love to be spontaneous and experiment. Speaking of my experimental nature, I love to experiment with food, trying unusual combinations. Although I do have some drastic failures, sometimes some really nice things can come out of it.

One of the more successful ideas would be Apple Toast.

Something that's definitely not an original idea, but people seem to think is rather strange. Trust me when I say that it makes a pretty tasty breakfast or after-dinner snack, and it only takes a couple of minutes to make - it's literally just stewed bramley apples on toast, with sugar and cinnamon- and it looks a bit like this:

Taken with my trusty camera (Canon Powershot SX220 HS) it probably gives you a good idea of why I love apple toast. I almost want to make some more right now...

Anyway, this brings me on to another of my hobbies, photography. I don't own an SLR, because I like to take spur-of-the-moment pictures, and having to faff around changing lenses just isn't practical for that. Maybe by using a compact I lose some of the quality in pictures, but I really like my camera and have always been happy with what I achieve with it. It certainly takes excellent pictures for a compact!

Thanks for reading, I will update as soon as something you might find interesting pops into my head. Follow or comment if you're interested, and I will be happy to follow back!

- Megan