I know your face…

 

Have you ever had someone say that to you – usually accompanied with a quizzical look as they try to place where they have seen you before. Or maybe you saw someone vaguely familiar and are trying to remember their name (before you embarrass yourself by calling them Bob. Or John)

This test wonders if you can spot a familiar face – namely criminals!. Greenwich University is looking for “super recognisers”  together with Metropolitan Police, who need more people who can recognise criminals from CCTV or blurry photographs, and the test is the first step towards a promising career in spotting faces.

I, sadly, am not not one of them. A spotter, that is – not a criminal, ha!

Hubby and I tried and scored 8 out of the 14 available mug shots. Of course, I would have done much better if he hadn’t kept saying “no, no, not that one, its him…click it, click it!”. What happens  on the test is you spend a few seconds studying the face, then try to spot it in a group of other faces. Its actually really really hard…..

How do you recognise someone?

Is it that they wear glasses? Their hair? The fact they have a large nose? I mean, most distinguishing features can be altered, removed, added (perhaps not the large nose)….even wearing a hat can totally change someone beyond recognition. Hmm, food for thought. I once wore something in the summer, and nobody recognised me. My face was the same, my hair was the same…..just that I wore a different style of clothing than I normally do, and people I knew walked by me without a word of hello. Very strange. Anyway, take the test and see if you can do better than 8 🙂

The cost of a library…?

This is a little rant post about the amount of libraries and art galleries that are closing around the country. I just read in the news this morning about another town in which 15 out of the 16 libraries in the area are earmarked for closing, in a bit to “save” £2.9 million pounds a year. Now all these local libraries are pivotal to the community. Children right through to the elderly use the facilities for all manner of things – not just borrowing books. Libraries are used for group meetings, hobby courses, speakers, using computers, and many other activities that are important to a local community.

The very definition of community, in any dictionary, has the words “group”& “together”  in it.

So lets just say this particular council is successful in saving its 2.9 million pounds. Where will that money go? I’ll tell you where it will be needed…..mental health services. The older people who have nowhere to go will now spend all their time stuck inside their houses, wishing there was someone to talk to. Same for the disabled people who relied on the services of the library and the sense of community it brought. The children will have nowhere to go and nothing to do because they are stuck inside all evening after a day in school (where they competed against 32 other kids in the class for one teachers attention) The parents will be frustrated because they have bored unhappy children playing computer games all day, whereas before they read books and met up with their friends at the library. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of people whose lives will be adversely affected by these national proposals, but its very early in the morning as I write this, and already I can feel my writing is infused with emotion, instead of calmness. But I make no apology – this whole matter of “saving money” is an injustice, because frankly it won’t put more police on the streets, it won’t help the local schools, it won’t raise the hourly rate of those on zero contract hours, it won’t do anything but make people miserable and angry at how our communities are being eroded into nothing……

End of rant. Going to make some tea and art.

 

 

Collage & Geekery

I had a clear up over the weekend and lost 4 collage I had made during the week. Pretty gutted about that, but I made two more. These are space ones (again, yes I have a lot of space backgrounds to use up, sorry about that!)

 

I quite like this one because the lighting worked out well against his face.

Not too sure about this one…..I like the planets I added at the side, and the turtle, but I feel like the boat is all wrong. The idea is quirky, but just the wrong type of boat. Ah well, its all about the learning I suppose. 🙂

Geekery stuff – well I finally caved in and got myself a new computer. I have wanted one for years, and this old macbook I am working on now is over 7 years old, and was a refurbished model to boot . Its been a regular little workhorse, mind you, and has coped with pretty much all I have thrown at it, until recently it began freezing and stalling and basically refusing to do anything its told while off the mains charge. The battery drains ridiculously quickly, and, well its time to retire it…..kind of. I’m thinking I could use it as back up until it really does die on me. What the new one will allow me to do, is work smarter and faster, without all the rigmarole of emailing myself information and pictures and being chained to the worktable to actually get some work done. So thats a good thing.

Now all I need to do is work tidily….if only there was an app for that.

Fun with collage

So I wandered down to the second hand charity warehouse place about 40 mins away. I haven’t been there before, and had no idea of the amount of books it had! Its a veritable goldmine for paper addicts! I collected a few old books and magazines (that were actually destined for landfill, because they had been lying there so long that they were taking up valuable space – can you imagine!! Throwing out books – what??)

I made these two collages with Nat Geo magazines and a foreign book from 1960 on Latvia, (apparently)

I like the look on this guys face “I’m just out for a spot of fishing, love, what d’you think you’re playing at, being all come hither?! I’m a married man!!” (only in Latvian, not like the Peter Kaye voice I had going on in my head!)

I also have a couple of works in progress going on. I discovered that if you put eyes on something, it takes on a whole new life……

Amazing what eyes on an apple and a glass of wine can turn into, eh?

Some collage

Recently I have become a bit obsessed with collage……

It hasn’t been something I have done at all in my creative life – I was always very much an idiot someone who believed that using other peoples images was wrong and you would be sent to hell, blah, blah, blah. But then after playing around and realising that the very meaning of collage was to repurpose other images (especially those destined for the rubbish bin) and make them your own, I relaxed a bit.

It became quite amusing to see what I could come up with……

The whole surrealism of placing images next to others that have no connection with each other really appeals to me, although the actual cutting out of said images is quite an ordeal. You have no idea what my floor looks like……actually you probably do, but for newbies to the blog – (Hello and welcome!) its a world of chaos right there on its own.

So yes, I’m feeling fairly pleased with myself about now. This might be a new obsession…….