This morning at work there was a jumble sale. The company that run the visitors cafe and the conference and event facilities had a clear out of their cupboards and was hoping to shift a lot of tableware, containers, display plates and stands, kitchenware and other bits and pieces, that they no longer use, to the staff and volunteers. Naturally I went along to have a look and came away with some goodies for my home and for my art merchandise displays, so I was very happy. All that was required in return was a donation to a cancer charity... worthy cause for some lovely handy bargains.
Once the excitement of that was done I settled down to paint the rockpool, working on the cutaway rock face. I painted several layers of dry brushwork in varying tones of stoney beige colours to hopefully get a rough textured feel.
Once that was done I started painting in the rock faces at the back of the rockpool and adding various seaweeds exposed above the waterline. This took me a good part of the morning and a bit of the afternoon.
After lunch I helped my work colleague Anna, graphic designer, to put up some sponsorship boards with the dinosaurs. This involved unscrewing the ID board from a wooden post and screwing in the sponsorship at the top of said post and then rescrewing in the ID board at the bottom... lovely and straightforward.... you'd think! First the string ties that were there for aesthetic value were made up of many strands of rough twine clumped together and tied securely. But with all the rain we have had the string has expanded and the knots were very tight and tough to undo. We resorted to shoving a screwdriver in to wiggle and loosen the knots before we could get our fingers to work the knots open. Under the twine were the screws that held the boards to the posts. Second hitch was that the screwbit Anna had brought with us was the wrong size and being too small just wouldn't grip the screw head. So I held the fort whilst she nipped back to the studio to get the little box of bits. On her return we soon ran into our third problem. Our cordless screwdriver was low on charge and barely got two screws out! So whilst Anna held the fort I nipped back to the studio to get the second battery pack for the screwdriver. Only... it wasn't yet charged up!
So after tracking down someone in maintenance I crossed the zoo to pick up a screwdriver from them. I had a slight delay there as I couldn't see the signing out book for equipment, but was eventually pointed in the right direction. I then hot-footed it across to Anna waiting by one of the dinosaurs... she had just rang the studio on her mobile wondering where I was... my little excursion had taken longer than planned.
So now armed with a super dooper DeWalt cordless the screws flew out and in in a flash... quite a contrast to our poor cheap screwdriver that has to work really hard, even when charged to get a job done.
We had three sponsorship boards to put up today and once we had ironed out our little series of hitches, we finished the task fairly quickly.
Then it was back to the studio. I had an email from Lucy, in PR, asking if I'd like to put something forward in response to an email she had from The Bristol Magazine. They have their 100th issue coming up later this year and are looking to do a feature on Art relating to the city of Bristol by Bristol artists. Of course I jumped at the chance. So I then spent a little while toing and froing emails with Lucy on ideas, sorting out and sending a short biography to her and finding some interesting images of my illustration work at the zoo.
I have one or two images of paintings that I have done as a wildlife artist that might be of interest, being of prominent zoo animals.. so job for this evening is to sort out some copies of those to send to Lucy too.
No comments:
Post a Comment