tom harrison

An amusing way to spend five minutes

I’ve been drawing like crazy this past week. I’m aiming to do a sketch a day and it’s going well. I’m rapidly working my way through my sketchbook and it feels like I’m improving considerably. Especially when it comes to more realistic portraits.

Grayscale Version

I was reading last weeks Independent Saturday Magazine today, and it had an interesting article on a young photographer who goes by the name of Eleanor Hardwick. She’s only 15 and has a rather impressive portfolio of images. Impressed by the ones I saw in the paper, I had a look at her Flickr page and there are hundreds of very nicely composed images, including some very tastefully done Photoshop alterations.

Anyway, reading about it got me thinking more about Photography again. I began to focus quite heavily on music photography, but since there hasn’t been too many gigs that are all that accessabe to me and my camera (the last few ‘bigger’ gigs I’ve taken it too, I’ve had to spend a lot of time and energy convincing the security there to let me keep hold of it), the whole music photography thing has gotten a little quiet. But I’d like to try experimenting with some other things. Portraits and work involving people and models has always intrigued me, as well as trying my hand at some classic black and white work.

Whichever way I go, I’ll hopefully start having some interesting photos to be uploading in the near future.

I’ve just spent the last ten hours in front of the computer. I fear my eyes wish to escape their wretched head prison >_<

There may be a brief period of downtime over the next day or two while I move hosting. Hopefully not though.

I’ve just been reading through my morning news feeds, and discovered that some publishers have announced they are planning to put “age bands” on children’s books. Come this autumn, children and teen books will be labled much in the same way as films by being labeled 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. This type of categorization is supposed to help the reader choose the most suitable book for them. From the looks of the article, I’m not the only person who thinks this is an absolutely ridiculous idea.

Currently I work in both a bookshop and a library and I often see people who spend a lot of their time debating how suitable a book is because it’s in the children’s section or the teen section. Books are placed in these areas because on the whole that section fits the target audience of a book. But it has very negative effects on who reads the book. Books like Philip Pullmans “His Dark Materials” trilogy is a book that is often put in the “young teens” section of book shop and libraries. However it has proved incredibly popular with younger children and especially adults. But for the adults who don’t look in the children’s sections, they would never find it. The same goes for the Harry Potter books and Terry Pratchett books. These books are enjoyed by a wide range of readers, from young children to adults in their sixties, seventies etc.

If books become labeled according to how suitable they may be, then a book that’s targeted at a thirteen year old may never find its way into an eleven years olds hands, despite the fact that the eleven year old has a reading age of fifteen. The same would work the other way around. Reading in younger generations appears to be on a decline; it’s lost favor to things like computer games and TV. I’ve seen plenty of people get laughed at for reading in their spare time instead of playing computer games, and this new method of “age banding” books is just going to make things worse. In the BBC interview Michael Morpurgo said:

“If you say a book is for a seven-year-old, the nine-year-old is going to be trying to cover it up at the back of the class.”

If children are seen to be reading under their supposed “age band” then they’re going to be a target for ridicule, no matter how good the book in question may be.
2008 is supposed to be the Year of Reading, it would be a shame to finish it off by implementing such a half baked idea, that is going to separate the books from their readers.

I’ve been working on coming up with a proper portfolio website, rather than the vague, half arsed attempts I’ve used as of late. After thinking it over, browsing a wide variety of online portfolios and deciding what kind of information I want to get across, I believe I may have come up with an answer. It’s very much in the works (both in creation and content) and hopefully I’ll have it done soon. I want to be able to get across information about a project, its development and its end result. So there’s going to be a lot of information and work to be put into this which is why it’s not up when I hoped (i.e. now).

So to the new layout. I really liked the previous layout. As far as a blog went I thought it worked pretty well, and in that it achieved what I set out to achieve. However as a template to be able to create the portfolio I intend, it wasn’t going to work. The main thing I want out of a website (any website) is consistency; and while the branding of the sites may have been similar, the layout of feel of the two sites (the blog and the portfolio) would have been drastically different. So i opted for a complete overhaul.

In doing this new layout, it’s allowed for me to add a whole array of features I would have liked to have in the old site but there simply wasn’t space. So now I have a list of a recommended sites as well as the Interaction Blogroll; I’ve also signed up to Twitter which will allow me to do brief updates in addition to these whole posts. Also I’ve changed the way post information is displayed. Things like categories and tags aren’t always needed by the end user, and can sometimes clutter up the page, resulting in information overload. So I’ve hidden all of that in a nifty like below saying “Toggle Post Details”. It’s simple, but it’s effective and I think it’s pretty cool. You should click it =P

I’ll be adding bits here and there as I go along, but the majority of the blog is complete and (hopefully) fully functional. Now to finish off the portfolio and I’ll be happy.

P.S. If you read this far and you have any suggestions or anything then feel free to say

I’ve been sketching and drawing a lot recently; I’m not really sure why, but the past few weeks have had me moving away from playing in Photoshop as much as I was, and spending my time doodling. I was having a look through my old portfolio (one of those massive A2 folders) and realised I don’t draw anywhere near as much as I used to. I guess this is an attempt to remedy that. I just sketched this up and was pretty pleased with the results, so I thought I’d post it here.