Having this week purchased additional gear to make the most of drawing and sketching on-site (as opposed to snapping photographs and sketches then working purely in my “studio”), I set out in the glorious sunshine to visit a few locations tagged earlier as “possible places to draw”. ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

First it was the roads

I am sure Britain’s drivers were conspiring against me. No matter where I tried to end up, something would spring up to bar my way. Inconsiderate parking, traffic queue, or simply no access to the particular area without a long walk (by long I’m talking a mile or more).

Two near collisions in the car later (people were mad this morning!), the sprinkling threat of rain showers, and the total obliteration of the initial good sunlight, forced me to head home in a stressed huff.

When the roads improved, the weather did not

I tried again later. This time heading to a particular church which now was in the closing stages of a wedding, with the accompanying hoards of cars removing all hope of gaining access. The light then failed once more.

This time, however, I did stop back at Maidenhead bridge for a little – and I have to say desperate – look around. Sadly, I could not “see” the drawings there, either. Perhaps all hope was lost on the day, so I returned home, in a double-huff.

Let it stew

I needed a task that was so straightforward that I could leave the day with having achieved something, anything. I opted for “watching some television”. I succeeded.

Determination (read: bloody-mindedness) kicked-in and I began pondering once more about those places I had visited. The detachment of time and geography allowed my mind to filter out the details and work purely on visual composition, contrast, and the image as a whole. A few spontaneous scribbles later and I had three strong potential compositions of and around Maidenhead bridge.

Too much information

I have this problem in supermarkets where on being sent to forage for a particular item, I fail to spot it in the cacophony of colours, shapes, and words. My brain struggles to filter out the noise to find the one detail I need.

Visiting a location to draw, I think I must have the same problem.

I should explain for the non-initiated: Rarely does a scene make for a good piece of art entirely as it stands. You know the phrase “artistic license”? Our minds work differently when looking at art compared to photography. Somehow, we understand a photograph represents a true capture of the scene. But far more consideration, particuary to composition, must be made in order to draw the same scene with success.

One must move a tree a little – for example – or remove it entirely. Perspective must be distorted, tonal values altered to increase contrast and represent depth. Thought must be applied to the focal points of the drawing, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. Without these considerations, one might as well just have a photograph.

This is what I have learned today: I cannot simply turn up at a place and immediately “see” the means to render it artistically. I must visit, look, sketch, photograph, then allow all that information to simmer, allowing my mind and memory to let go of the details that are irrelevant to the scene, while enhancing those that matter (to me).

I suppose the devil really is in the details.

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Browsershots to the rescue! This is a free service which offers screen capture previewing of your web page across pretty much every browser and system in general use today. Free does come at a price, however, as when the network is busy, it can take well over half an hour to generate the screenshots. In the UK we have a time advantage. Using the service before the US web machine wakes up means generation of a single screenshot can take as little as three minutes when the network is not busy.

The time estimate given on your screenshot generation page is usually pretty accurate, but regardless of the generation estimate, your request will timeout after 30 minutes. At busy times this is nowhere near enough time. You get around this by extending the timeout by clicking a ‘extend’ button, which effectively restarts the timeout period for 30 minutes from the moment you pressed the button – your estimated screenshot generation time does not change. So if your estimate is 40 minutes, and your timeout 30 minutes, just wait 25-20 minutes, pop back to your screenshot page, and push that ‘extend’ button.

If priority screenshot generation is important for you, for 10 Euros you can have yourself the joys of priority generation for a whole month. That is significantly cheaper than Browsercam.com – though browsercam.com does offer a significantly broader range of services including VNC remote access to specifically configured machines, which would be essential for testing more than merely the interface and for accessing password-protected sites for testing privately.

You should consider that your Browsershots generated screengrabs are viewable by anyone accessing the public screenshots page. But even when the network is fairly quiet, the queue moves pretty fast.

Incidentally, the screenshots page is an interesting place to visit now and then to take a peek at what people are building.

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