Sunday 19 July 2009

After a bit of general Saturdayish pottering-about in the morning and afternoon I only really started attempting to make some BBC3-style plasticine blobs in the evening, despite having been mildly fretting that someone else would do something similar and that I'd have to think of something else. It was always the intention to take the photo after midnight and post it for Sunday on the proper anniversary date but hadn't anticipated how long they would take to make. Were it not for the potential extra hassle of extra photoshopping I might have just built one base and three mouths and merged some shots but suspected the candles and their haloes would be painful to merge. The first took the longest as it involved the time taken to establish that building the eye-stalks and lips separately was the only feasible method. The one in the middle with no teeth was considerably quicker to do (especially given the size) but the third (with the tongue) was slightly quicker for having a slightly-established plan to follow, though by the time it was finished I was working by the light of the screen on which the internet's finest source pictures were dispayed so that I had something to copy. Had I had more time I'd have made the teeth slightly more gormless rather than threatening (they're definitely a bit too long) and given each of them a little camera on a strap around them. A considerable amount of time was taken up with washing all the pigment off my hands after doing anything with the black plasticine which was very keen to stain the fingers to the extent that the middle and right blobs have very visible smudges under anything but candlelight. The cakes didn't take too long though I did give up attempting to make a guest piece of Blu-Tac look like icing. The tongue was a last-minute addition and was photoshopped to be pink as I only had white, black and orange source material (and they only had red rather than pink in the shop which would probably have been more finger-staining than the black).

Sunday was mildly more relaxed... ate some breakfast, read some of yesterday's newspaper, watched some downloaded television and eventually got round to walking down to TreeFest in Inverleith Park in order to get a pasty seeing as the pasty-wagon had been absent from the Meadows Festival. They were there, but the spicy vegetable wasn't as good as two years ago and the tentful of wooden furniture was much-reduced compared to earlier visits with hardly any laughably expensive wooden thrones, though there was a stall selling sections of branch as "coasters: 6 for £1.50". After a relaxing walk back and some relaxing pottering I went for a relaxing run later on only to be remarkably unrelaxed by a bagpiper practising at the end of the tunnel where the reverb was masking how shite he was (but also deafening him and anyone within twenty metres). He was facing the wall so probably didn't notice that I ran past with my fingers in my ears.