Digital Watercolour Painting

Krita, GIMP, and Inkscape have all undergone some major improvements lately, to the point where using them exclusively in a professional workflow is not unthinkable.

Krita's latest update included a whole new set of watercolour brushes, which I've been having a brief play with. The canvas texture and the vignette were added in GIMP (which, along with pretty much every other graphics app in existence, still doesn't recognise the native .kra Krita file format).

It's hardly a masterpiece, but then it was only about ten or fifteen minutes work. I'm not all that confident with actual watercolours really, but the digital version is a bit easier to work with (though much more limited, of course).

EDIT: I've just discovered that it's not actually possible to print direct from Krita, which I have to confess surprised me more than a little. You have to export the image to another format (.jpg, .pdf, or whatever) and print it via another application. That, to me, is a pretty big shortcoming in any graphics app these days.

Greater Lovecraft Hath No Man

I don't get the enduring appeal of H. P. Lovecraft.

There is no doubt that he was highly influential, but I find his own writings turgid, overblown, and not in the least bit frightening.

Plus, he was a terrible, awful human being. Not that an author has to be a good person to be a good writer, but it's helpful if you can read their work without thinking constantly about their appalling attitudes. Also, it's helpful if they're actually a good writer.

The Book of Ten Thousand Things

Today we encountered a car-boot sale, where we picked up this book for a dollar: The Book of Ten Thousand Things, edited by Arthur Mee, famed editor of The Children's Encylopaedia and the Children's Newspaper. This is a supplementary volume to a series of twelve books called The Children's Treasure House.

Ten thousand things for a dollar is pretty good value for money, I think.

Arthur Mee was active at the end of the 19th century, and the first part of the 20th. He was quite unabashedly a British Protestant exceptionalist, and his children's books were full of inspiring patriotic and moral tales to make the youth of Britain ready for the administration of Empire.

He was not at all averse to explaining just how all the non-Christian, non-Protestant religions of the world were wrong and bad, and that Catholics (for example), while many of them good at heart, were basically poor deluded fools, while Buddhists, Hindus and the like were barely better than animals.

Although he didn't say so in so many words, one got the sense that he felt pretty much the same about anybody who had the misfortune to be non-British.

Anyway, here's a little sampling of this particular gem of a volume.

Fifteen BAD things

Beware of the hidden celluloid menace!

Carriage spotter's guide

A selection of colonialist exploiters

25 uses for asbestos (!)

Some science experiments for children

How things got their names

British Medals of the Empire

Badges of the Scouts and Guides