Category: Æsthetic

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The Confusing Colour of a Cover

Preparing the cover for Amiant Soul was a confusing and somewhat nerve-wracking business. It wasn’t just that I wanted deeper tones on the cover image, or even that I wasn’t entirely qualified to make those changes (i.e. completely ignorant of how to go about it, and succeeding only by means of some rather messy trial and error).

Illustration of silhouetted man facing desert dunes.
The original image.

It was the way the image appeared on the screen – or rather screens. I work with two screens, one built into the laptop I use, which is a more bluish toned screen, and one separate monitor, which is less blue. Naturally, the cover image appeared different on each screen. That I was prepared for.

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Modern Clothing: A Rant

I have been doing a bit of clothes shopping lately, and this has inspired a rant. Or, more accurately, a collection of related mini-rants, which – as I do not have a hotline to garment industrialists worldwide – I present here.

In the first place, there seems to be considerable confusion about the significance of length. If the wearer cannot bend over in a certain garment without flashing passersby, it is a top. Kindly stop charging extra for it under the pretence that it is a dress.

A model pauses at the end of a runway in a short-sleeved minidress which skims the tops of her thighs, and knee-high boots worn with over the knee socks.
From an Autumn/Winter collection, believe it or not.
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Ten First Flowers

I had a garden dream: an overflowing mass of flowering abundance, red and orange and yellow at one end of the front garden; blue and purple and white at the other.

But as the saying goes, the only place where success comes before work is the dictionary. At the end of autumn (i.e. May) I summoned my energies, such as they were, and built two garden beds in the front garden.

The results, it must be said, are not entirely what I had hoped for. For one thing, a heavy layer of cardboard and a few inches of garden mix were not enough to put off the weeds, which have grown back in profusion: creeping buttercup, convolvulus, dock…

But some plants did manage to make their presence felt despite the weeds. I therefore present you with the ten best blooms from late winter to early summer.

In the early days of expanses of bare soil relieved mostly by weeds it was a comfort to have the freesias (a thoughtful gift) spring up and give the impression this was actually a garden.

A cheerful cluster of small six-petalled yellow blooms rises above green foliage.
Freesia (Golden Giant? Golden Melody?)
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