bitsofbobs

Well it’s all busy busy at the momment. Been trying to design my wedding invites so haven’t had much time for anything else between that and work. So Friday I got in from work put my feet up, got all my arts and crafts gear out and did a bit of painting, didn’t feel much like dinner as I’d had a huge lunch. Saturday morning up at 0440 barf-a-rama, nasty. This continued through most of Saturday and left me just grumpy and run down on Sunday. I’d had food poisoning before but this seems to have just come and gone in enough time to remove my weekend and have me just fit enough to get back to work on Monday. So as a fingers up to illness I took it upon myself to do something constructive. After the loss of the awesome fontCapture website I found an alternative. It’s called scanahand and is part of FontCreator. So basically you hand draw each individual letter on the given sheet then scan it in, The app seems quite simple and does do what it says on the tin but it does look to have alot more functionality in terms of kerning and letter spacing. The wee app is $49 and seems to do the business. I did look about for free alternatives but it seems they don’t want to play and want you to pay instead.

So here it is if you want it my no frills, no fuss, food poisoning inspired font…running on empty. Enjoy. Some more up on Dafont this one will be soon.

I’m a massive fan of twitter, I like the nonsense that goes with it. This little doodle was part of a little flickr group setup called skull nation It’s great to see loads of others people takes on it. This one took me a while a turned out to be a bit of a beast. I normally doodle on the train to and from work but I got quite into this one and the train proved pretty difficult, worse though was the reactions of others on the train thinking they were clearly sitting next to a nutter. There’s a bigger one on flickr.

Been so busy of late trying to sort my wedding invites It’s been difficult to make time for anything else. They should be sorted soon though so there will be a splurdge of activity. I’ve been making toys with my sewing machine and also have about 8 doodles on the go at the momment. This one I kind of forgot about, started it ages ago. Loads more of it up on flickr. I keep this doodle book in my camera bag, luckily I keep scans of all my stuff, some rain water crept in and splodged a good bit of my older ones. Bigger one here if you want to look.

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL! Hope it was awesome and everyone started 2010 as they meant to go on? I’m not assuming everyone is going to be drunk all year round. I had a great festive period, travelled about between Stonehaven, St andrews and Glasgow. I had a magic Christmas haul including a great book on making stupid sock creatures, ALL the where’s wally books and a SEWING MACHINE! Not been blogging much just been taking it easy and generally sitting about in my pjs constantly eating, drinking, drawing, watching films and playing board games.

First day back at work today and it is very much a shock to the system, breakfast…not a time I’ve celebrated much in the past few weeks. Need to get back into routine, 3 meals a day instead of just constant snacking. Lots of things to look forward to this year, biggest one is getting married. Not long either…April…zoiks. Is it wrong to be looking at holidays on your first day back?

This doodle has been ages in the making. Started back last september when I had just bought my holga. It’s not actually taken me that long to do, just every couple of months I had a new camera to add to it. The final piece is on A3 and was drawn in pencil before ink. Scanned it then added a wee splash of colour in photoshop a nice shade of fudge. There’s a bigger one here if anyone wants a looky.

I’ve still a few other doodles in the making that have just been floating about a while, will get them finished at some point. It’s all been a bit hectic of late.

Morrisons deep filled mince pies. 6 for £1.19 or 2 packets for £1.80…I wasn’t fooled, I only bought one pack. Packaging was particularly chirstmas tacky, stars, christmas trees etc and the pies themselves on the cover didn’t look that great. Now these pies claimed to be deep filled, not the case as the pies turned out to be mostly…case. These were hard work and really dry, needed alot of tea to get it down. I gave most of these away at work…just because I couldn’t endure the pack. I still have a cheeky tesco finest one at home, still on top at the moment.

Overall a disappointment pay the extra 4 pence at tesco as it stands. I was going to give these pies 3 out of 10 but for some reason they’ve annoyed me while writing, so now they’re only getting 2.

I’m a big fan of our local tesco it always does good stuff at a reasonable price. These were there finest…apparently. I just assume they slap the word finest on everything just to bump the cost up a bit, these however only cost £1.23 for 6. Even at finest standard, a bargain compaired to starbucks solitary butter beast. First impressions were good, nice box, not overly christmassy. Non offensive.

Taste wise pretty decent, could have done with a bit more filling. The pastry was bang on and had a nice coarse sugary coating. This pie had been laced with cognac, not too much but a nice hint. Nicest one so far and at a decent price. I give it 8.5 pies just because tesco have so many different kinds of mince pies and can’t believe that for their finest these should be that cheap.

Tis the season and all that. I love christmas…everyone does, but it’s this time of year everyone goes nuts. All the ridiculous decorations go up, the annoying christmas music is piped everywhere, those crap shops that sell tacky christmas stuff turn up and the average shopper on the street turns into crazed must finish my christmas shopping today maniacs. But definately the best thing about christmas is the food, why does all the good stuff hide the rest of the year round? last year I went on the hunt for the ultimate christmas sandwich..any excuse. This year I thought i’d keep to the same theme but mix it up a bit. So it’s on…where can I get the best mince pie?

It’s not even december yet but I couldn’t wait. Straight off to starbucks for my cheeky gingerbread latte…the dark cherry mocha is by far the best. The order was in £1.45 for my all butter mince pie. First impression was good, it looked pretty hefty. Nothing particularly exciting about the filling if i’m honest it was pretty deep, I was a bit let down by the top however, too buttery almost like shortbread. Always difficult to get the ball rolling when you have nothing to compare it to.

But i’ll give it a 6 out of 10. Just because it’s pretty pricey and I could get a whole box from my supermarket for that.

Been fulling up doodle pads all over the place recently. Think I have too many on the go just now, some real big ones that are nearly finished. I have been filling my little sketchpad on the way to work with some nice drawn fonts which is turning out to be quite hard work. Not been adding any colour to the pad but scanning them in and photoshopping them up, I’m really happy with the results.

Quite funny the looks you get from people if you sit doodling, you just catch their eye then they do that thing where they don’t move their head but just their eyes in a quite obvious action man…manner. I was semi tempted to have a go at drawing people but I only really get about 10 mins on my train each way. Might try it with my next pad. More coming soon…some big uns.

Doodle-tastic. I had all of these. Still got most of them tucked away in my mum and dads loft. Had this doodle kicking about a while. Started off on paper…temporarily lost it, then resurrected it after I bought a nice shiny new portfolio a3 book to keep all my abandoned doodles in. Filled it in with colour in photoshop, quite like the result. Bit of shameless plugging here but for the colours I used fellow work mate daves colorToy™ app available for your Iphone.

I’d rather not stop and think how much over the years i’ve spent on video games. There were some real nasty controllers for some of them, worst probably being the orginal xbox controller, It was massive. My favourite would probably be the N64 one, It came along at just the right time. Nintendo always get it right…certainly where sega got it wrong.

Also converted this doodle into a natty little Iphone wallpaper. You can Nab it here if you want. Or have a look at the bigger doodle here, and do what you like with it.