#...Ok now that all the regular blog-viewers are gone...

[the-rayman-show]

“ YOURE DATING RAMON?????? “

- Red 🌹

Red. He's a terrorist, of course I'm not.

[pjstafford]

I want to remember it the way it was. Review of The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat. Blog 61 of Disability in X-Files Series.

In writing a blog related to a disability focused watch of The X-Files, I knew I would find much to criticize about my favorite series ever on television. I, also, knew I would find episodes to be praised. In particular, I believe that the Darin Morgan episode Humbug which aired in the second season is likely the best hour of television ever produced to demonstrate that the perception of other is simply a mirror perception of what is normal to you based on your life situation. All “isms” are either a desire for power or a fear of or lack of understanding of the “other”. No episode of television that I have seen as aptly taken the viewer on a journey of changing perceptions to see the series main character as an “other” than Humbug.

Darin Morgan wrote exactly six of the 228 episodes. His series eleven contribution is funny, sweet, and thought provoking. It’s a beautiful good-bye. Always known for viewing the series with a critical eye, he successfully focuses on the series reoccurring theme (since the pilot ) of whether people who believe in the paranormal and the existence of aliens are delusional with psychiatric illness. He, also, reminds us in a sweetly, gentle way that the series sometimes used a disability as horror approach and that, while we are remembering this show in a nostalgic way, we should not forget the use of mental illness as a repeat monster metaphor. Scully’s last statement of this episode “ I want to remember it as it was.” is reflective of the fact that none of us want to look too closely at our precious memories of old. She chooses not to taste the jello at the end of the episode because she wants to remember the jello as she remembers it and not as it actually tastes.

The cold open of the episode is in black and white. The first line is “I know you think I’m crazy.” A lone customer in a restaurant is talking to the waiter about aliens. It is likely not lost on the regular viewer that the scene is filmed in the same set location and at the same counter where Mulder sat in Jose Chung from Outer Space talking to the waiter about alien abduction.

The next scene is Mulder wearing a bizarre outfit because he has been out “squatchin” and is dressed like Bigfoot. He is doing this to escape from the “madness” of watching the news and worrying that the country has gone insane. (Although how sane is a man who hunts big foot?). The inclusion of this scene serves to remind us of the extreme nature of Mulder’s fringe beliefs. He then notices an X taped to the window and he goes to his meeting place to meet with a man who seems to know him even though Mulder doesn’t know the man. In the course of this conversation the man ( Reggie) will say “There’s no way for me to make you understand without me seeming like a crazy mad man.” Mulder hears sirens and says “I think your ride is here.” Reggie informs Mulder that Mulder’s favorite episode of The Twillight Zone, The Lost Martian, does not exist.

The next scene is another scene which serves to remind us of Mulder’s more obsessive nature. Mulder is shown searching through his old videos and talking to Scully. He tells Scully that when this guy said the episode did not exist “ that’s when I knew he was a crazy person.” However, it is Mulder who, having looked through his boxed DVD sets, searched the episode guide books and searched the internet, is now looking through old VHS tapes and tells Scully he won’t be able to eat until he finds it. Won’t be able to eat “ever again.”

Reggie brings Scully into the case by giving her a box of one of her childhood memories, a box resembling jello, and telling her his fingerprints are on the box so she can help him find himself. In the first scene with Mulder, Scully, and Reggie, it is Mulder who appears the most out there, even as compared to Reggie, as Mulder brings up the possibility of parallel universes. In that scene when they hear sirens, Scully tells Reggie “It sounds like your ride is here.” At another point Mulder says, “Reggie, take it from a fellow nut.” At the end of that scene Reggie reveals that he used to be a FBI agent partnered with Mulder and Scully.

A later scene again shows Mulder acting in a way some would say is less than sane. He is puzzling in front of his bulletin board with strings to connect the pictures to a conspiracy theory that includes Ted Cruz and Bob Dylan and soy bombs. But Mulder says the world has become too crazy for even his conspiratorial powers.

Scully finally discovers that Reggie has had a series of bureaucratic government jobs including his longest stint listening to phone conversations. He seems to have enjoyed listening to Mulder’s and Scully’s. About a year ago, he suffered a nervous break down and was admitted to a psychiatric facility. As usual, Scully is judgmental and Mulder sympathetic. Mulder explains Reggie’s nervous break down in a way that might explain why he is so sympathetic. “ it’s merely the culmination of disillusionment of a man who simply wanted to spend his life in the service of the country that he loves”. (Could that explain Mulder’s own diagnosis of depression?)

After Mulder’s speech and the sound of sirens, the ambulance from Spotnitz sanitarium arrives. Reggie says “ It looks like my ride is here.” In a nod to the way that X-Files has so often portrayed persons with mental illness in other episodes. Reggie reminds the driver of the ambulance about what it takes for him to come peacefully. The driver holds the straight jacket and says “it demeans all of us”. Reggie says, “ no, it gives a touch of classicism.” As Reggie is placed in a straight jacket and an attendant holds a large net, Reggie says “remember how crazy people used to be portrayed as believing they were Napoleon?” He tells Mulder and Scully to stay safe and stay sane.

Twenty eight years after the pilot of The X-Files aired, new and old fans are still watching, reviewing, podcasting and debating the series. There are other episodes of season 11 left to review, but none says goodbye in such a bittersweet way as this one because no one else is as adept at discussing the subtlety of the “isms” than Darin Morgan. While this is a disability focused blog and this is an episode about mental illness, Scully’s statement can be applied to other categories. For instance, people who remember The X-Files as creating a feminist icon are surprised that sensibilities of our culture in the 90’s meant that rape could be treated casually in several episodes. We can appreciate the show being ahead of its time and as groundbreaking for women and still say, but by today standards it is not always reflective of feminist standards. Then we add in no decade’s standards should the casual treatment of rape have been ok. Yet, in most of mankind’s history it has been. In taking a disability focused watch, I have found more to criticize about the series than praise, but I don’t find it less than normative in the standards of its time and, in what I find to praise, it sets a standard few if any series of even today have matched. The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat gives me permission to love the series with all my nostalgia, but with a caveat not to think, in how it portrayed issues of mental health or disability, that it was without fault.

[trentteti]

A Requiem for the Must Be False Question

We all know the people who write the LSAT have very little chill, dedicating their life’s work to constructing what can sometimes feel like an obnoxiously difficult exam. But did you know they were actual MURDERERS?

OK, don’t take that literally. They’re not murders in any legal sense (as far as we know … ). Technically, they’re not even murders in the figurative sense I’m getting at. But, after pouring over the Logical Reasoning sections of the last few LSATs, like any good gumshoe detective, I realized that the writers of the exam have left one Logical Reasoning question type on life support: the once mighty(-ish) Must Be False question. This question type, a common presence on the LSATs of yore, has all but vanished from recent exams. It may not be truly gone yet, but the EKG it’s currently hooked up to is beeping, and it appears as though flatlining is imminent. There isn’t a body count yet, but there will be soon. While we’re gathered here, let’s pour a preemptive one out for the Must Be False question.

via GIPHY

Over the past six published LSATs, the Must Be False question has only shown up twice. This makes it less common than Crux questions (which have appeared four times over the same period) and Agree questions (which have appeared thrice) — two question types that are almost complete afterthoughts for those studying for the LSAT. The Must Be False question was never the most common question type, but getting one or two on an exam was fairly standard until recently.

Perhaps this is good news to you. Perhaps your heart, made momentarily cold by having to study for this exam, is indifferent to the plight of an insentient question type on the LSAT. Perhaps you wonder, whether there is any utility in being able to make a deduction that contradicts a set of facts. When might this be of practical use as a law student, as an attorney, or anytime else in life? To that we say … well, those are good points.

But Must Be False questions were nonetheless one of my favorite question types on the LSAT*, so excuse me as I spill some digital ink over its demise. Some of my favorite questions were Must Be False questions. May I regal you of stories of a question from the June 2000 exam, about a group of feminist revolutionary salamanders who figured out how to self-fertilize, toppled the presumably oppressive salamander patriarchy, and created female-only quasi-utopia in its stead? That question was basically the first twenty minutes of Wonder Woman, but with salamanders. It was beautiful and inspiring. May I spin a yarn on the question from the September 2007 exam, which made a compelling case for smoking a lot of cigarettes as a means to boost memory? This question showed how, in a way, maybe the people who write this test are murderers, albeit very indirect ones. Or, for the 90s heads, how about a tale of the question from the February 1993 exam, about a group of renegade advertisement agencies that decided to make super offensive advertisements solely so those ads would get covered by viewer-starved news outlets and admonished by pearl-clutching politicians, all so the brands can get a little free air time?

(*Yes, when you teach and blog about the LSAT, you become fully engulfed in this LSAT life, and you consequently develop things like favorite question types. As the mustachioed madman Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself don’t become a monster … for when gaze long into the LSAT, the LSAT also gazes into you.” Needless to say, I did not heed his advice.)

But aside from the sort of wild topics these Must Be False questions often discuss, these questions had enormous pedagogical value for students. In general, when you take your first LSAT, everything seems incredibly murky and impenetrable. The difference between right answers and wrong answers is practically non-existent. However, after you begin to immerse yourself in the LSAT, and learn the proper way to work through these questions, and begin thinking about them in the right way, everything becomes a little less foggy. Eventually, as you master these questions, they become clear as crystal, bathed in the light of hard-won knowledge and experience.

Learning how to do Must Be False questions threw this transformation into stark relief. On no other question could this transformation occur more quickly or dramatically. When students start doing Must Be False questions, they spend a ton of time overthinking the question. It’s very hard — in part because in real life we almost never have to make deductions that contradict a set of facts — to try to figure out what the difference between what must be false and what merely could be false. Eliminating a lot of incorrect answer choices relies on thinking about info in counterintuitive ways.

But there’s a trick to these Must Be False questions that completely obviates the need to overthink these questions. Using this technique you could anticipate the correct answer to nearly every Must Be False question. In order to anticipate the correct answer to a Must Be False question, you just had to find a really strong statement in the stimulus, and then “negate” or “falsify” that statement. Usually, that strong statement was conditional. In that case, all you had to do was look for an answer choice that included the sufficient condition of that conditional statement, but negated its necessary condition.

Take, for example, that cigarette question from the September 2007 exam. In that question, there’s a statement, right at the beginning, that “a regular smoker who has just smoked a cigarette will typically display significantly better short-term memory skills than a nonsmoker.” That, right there, is a conditional statement. We could diagram that as “If a smoker smokes, then short-term memory typically better than nonsmoker’s.” There’s a bunch of other info about whether or not the nonsmoker had a cigarette and how long the effects of a boosted short-term memory would last — but we could ignore all of that. To predict the right answer, we’d just falsify that conditional statement by keeping the sufficient the same and negating the necessary. So we’d just look for an answer choice that said “If a smoker smokes, then short-term memory is NOT typically better than a nonsmoker’s.” And lo and behold, that’s precisely what the correct answer states.

Once students realized this “trick” to Must Be False questions, what was previously a difficult question type would become significantly easier. The journey from confused neophyte to wizened expert is completed in, like, a few moments. And this would bring hope that the same could happen for other parts of the LSAT. The occult mysteries of a necessary assumption could be made similarly understandable. Logic games — those intricate puzzles of constantly moving pieces — could be unlocked. It was all possible after seeing how easily conquerable the Must Be False question was.

Perhaps this trick is ultimately what doomed the Must Be False question. Once enough test takers realized the trick to doing them, these questions were no longer useful in separating the strong test-takers from the pack, and thus less useful in setting the LSAT’s “curve.” The LSAT has flirted with using what we call “Soft Must Be False” questions instead (which ask you to select the answer choice that the stimulus “provides the strongest evidence against” or that can be “most be justifiably rejected” on the basis of the stimulus), but hasn’t quite committed to those questions. On those, you have to do a bit more legwork — you have to make an inference that would be almost certainly true, and then falsify that.

So now, the trick to defeating these Must Be False questions, and the beacon of light it represented to students, isn’t terribly relevant. While learning the trick to the Must Be False question is nice, it’s unlikely to yield m/any points on the real test. Additionally, being able to put this trick into use on the actual LSAT would boost the confidence of test takers, affirming that they know how to handle these questions, and minimizing the chance that they abandon productive strategies or engage in harmful second guessing. It’s not the biggest deal, but test takers will now have to find this boost elsewhere.

But, no matter what that old Must Be False question told you, don’t try to get that boost from cigarettes. Those will kill you.

A Requiem for the Must Be False Question was originally published on LSAT Blog

[airsay58259]

Hi! How do you feel about the finale?? Did you like it?? I thought it was great in some parts, but okay over all. Though I wish we could get back to the days of Cisco, Barry, and Caitlin. One of my complaints is that Team Flash is way too big. I want the original team flash back. Also sadly, Iris and Barry are becoming too much like Olicity and taking over the show. I like romance, but I want to see other things than Iris complaining or Barry changing the future/past to save Iris.

Can’t say I liked it very much as a conclusion to this season. I was wondering how they’d resolve so many plotlines and answer so many unanswered questions… their solution was to just drop it all, lol. Savitar’s origin, scars, connection to the speed force, shenanigans with the stone and Alchemy, restoring powers from Flashpoint (aka all of S3A), those damn 6 husks, time traveling in the past to create his own myth Jay told us in 309, his plans for Jesse Quick… what was that all about? He needed Wally to have powers to escape the prison, ok. He needed KF to defeat Black Flash, ok (and why didn’t Black Flash show up much earlier? or time wraiths?). But if Wally lost his powers when Savitar lost his memories, why didn’t he lose them when he was, ya know, erased from existence? In S1 (and the S2 premiere), a singularity was about to swallow the entire universe because Wellobard was erased, thus erasing everything that happened post 2000 and Nora’s murder. The team stopped it and they were living in a paradox, ok. Where was that now? 

The writers introduced the quite complicated time loop concept, set some rules in episode 21, and contradicted them in 23. I’m all for sci-fi, fantasy etc but consistency is still needed within your own universe. An evil Barry Allen storyline in the Flash TV show should have been one of the biggest stories ever, not ~15 minutes of screentime total with a lame conclusion.

That said, I liked a few things in the finale. Despite the holes in Cait’s story throughout the season, the conclusion to her inner fight was cool. Savitar wanted Caitlin gone, team Flash wanted Frost gone. Cait seems ready to embrace both parts of her -with some work- and wants to do it on her own, go girl. That’s maybe the one storyline I am really excited to see in S4. Cisco and Cait saving each other is my aesthetic too. The woods fight with all the speedsters was epic. HR and Iris playing each other was awesome. HR btw, I am still mourning but bby brought joy and fun in this dark season so bless him. I hated how the team reacted to HR tho and how they pushed Tracy to help his murderer, while we all know very well how Barry would have acted if Savitar had killed Iris (hell, we even saw it in ep 19 and that was not the same reaction). Sending Harry to convince her for the sole reason he has HR’s face was fucked up. 

So yeah, finale proved once more Team Flash is highly dysfunctional and Barry’s characterization is the biggest issue. I want my superhero Barry back. Hopefully some months in speed force peace will return him changed.

As for what you said, I think the team can be big if everyone gets to use their skills. We don’t need ten people standing around in the Cortex all the time. Bring back CCPD and CSI Barry, let Iris do her job (her blog used to fit in the story just fine), I think Wally missed his entire freshman year of college???, etc… I personally don’t want the fandom to start with the OTA stuff that happened elsewhere. “Original Team Flash” included Supervillain Eobard Thawne and Joe from the start, Eddie joined after 15 episodes or so, Firestorm was an honorary member etc the team was always changing and growing… Agent of Shields works great with an even bigger team and they use them all (and still have time to have them all reunited from time to time). Team Flash is huge, basically every regular and recurring cast member is part of the team. That’s a challenge for sure but not an impossible task. 

About romance, I am game for anything that doesn’t take over the entire story - I prefer my pairings non canon anyway on that network, it’s safer and more fun. Barry and Iris in S3A? Cool. Same for Oliver and Felicity before last year’s crossover. The moment writers decide drama > romance though, I am bored/annoyed. There are many ways to keep viewers interested in a relationship after the couple gets together, sadly the CW only seems to know two: forced drama or premature death. With Barry telling Iris to “keep loving”, I’m half expecting her to date the Thinker/Devoe in S4 tbh.

[justonemoreepisodeuk-blog]

Love Island

So, here we go; this is the big one.  No pressure, but there probably isn’t a bigger show out there right now.  I’ve got to get this right.  It’s an island, yeah, and there’s love on it.  Any questions?  I’m glad I started blogging about TV as now I get to put all sorts of pressure on myself to do justice to my favourite shows.  Love Island is so significant to 16-34s (TV buying language for young people) that, for the first time, I’m a bit worried that Just One More Episode might fall short of the mark.  Every other post has been sublime, as the very consistent read counts show (detect the sarcasm), so I’ve given myself a stiff talking to and on we shall crack.

In marketing (the broadest term for the industry where I’ve spent ten years making up the answers to questions), the year is divided up into Christmas and non-Christmas.  This is because December 25th is the biggest cultural event in our calendar (in a world where cultural means commercial).  But now there is a second coming, catching up with the birth of baby Jesus at an alarming rate: Love Island.  Series four has just exploded across our summer screens like a bottle of sun cream where you didn’t realise so much was going to come out and now you’ve got an embarrassing surplus of white liquid on you and you’re trying to rub it in before anyone notices the mess you’ve made but everyone’s already seen and you’re trying but failing to style it out.  Clients started asking about hooking up with Love Island as soon as 2018 began.  Where people go, brands will follow.  So, join me, as we journey through the series that have led us to this moment.  Then we will investigate the emotions you experience in an average episode.  Then we will all just be, like, bonding over our love of Love Island.

2005 and 2006

Everyone has an embarrassing progenitor.  I have two (love ya, mum and dad).  And so does Love Island.  There were two series of the old format, which cast only celebrities in the contest to form couples in the sun or face deportation.  For some reason, I didn’t watch any of it.  I think I was living abroad.  It doesn’t matter, most of the contestants have since appeared on Celebrity Big Brother (still the most-read post on this entire blog, surprisingly), so I don’t think I missed out on anything.  The format then lay fallow over at ITV Studios for the best part of a decade, until…

2015

ITV2, one of the cheekiest channels in the UK, filled its summer schedule with a reboot of fondly remembered Love Island.  Gone were the washed-up celebs.  In strolled normal, real people.  You know, impossibly attractive characters that, if you came across them in real life, you’d stop and stare, just like people do at you and me, all the time.  Around half a million of us tuned into each of the 29 episodes, watching Caroline Flack look slightly embarrassed to be sorting through 23 different islanders until the winners finally emerged (with one ending up on Ex On The Beach, so winning can’t be everything then).  Everything just worked.  It was reality TV, but with beautiful people.  The tension was generated by the simple concept: get in a couple or get out.  Its Majorcan setting was like an ersatz-holiday.  The islanders felt like your friends, only better looking.  The casting was so careful that, instead of drunkenly duvet twitching like in Geordie Shore, there was a charm and classiness to the awkward dating and cracking on (before it led to duvet twitching).  I felt like I was the only viewer, as nobody talked about it.  My housemates at the time wouldn’t even let me watch it, so I caught up a day behind on Sky Go, hoping someone at Sky HQ would remember to upload the previous episode, which they didn’t always.

2016

Summer came back, and 26 islanders jetted back and forth to the same villa in Majorca.  I remember being surprised about how many young people smoke (though this is banned for 2018), but it must be stressful holding your tummy in for days on end.  The villa left nowhere to hide, with a sun-drenched terrace, outdoor kitchen (which we all want) and a very large pool.  Sadly, no ginger contestants could take part due to the risk of sun burning in the shade-free grounds.  This didn’t stop an additional million viewers per episode tuning in, with extra weeks tagged on before the finale.  Again, the casting was genius, with the bikini and swimming short-clad specimens achieving just as much in the field of personality as they had achieved in the field of making your body look banging for Instagram.  Your enjoyment of their relationships was only slightly dampened by how awful you are as a human mess in comparison.  Series two also finely tuned the regular tasks and twists to stress-test all the coupling up in order to surface the drama we had all gathered round to view.  There was even a same-sex pairing, a small baby step in Love Island’s journey to any diversity at all.  A handful of my office chums and I sniffed each other out to discuss each evening’s goings-on.  It was now our secret.  Apart from the one time at the gym when I ended up in a conversation with Henry Cavill and someone asked if he had seen Love Island.  He hadn’t.

2017

This is when we implemented the policy of don’t even come into the office if you haven’t watched last night’s Love Island yet.  Some people called it agile working and said it was a response to us running out of seats, but I know it was all down to the Flack.  Viewing figures had now almost doubled, with 2.5m of us tuning in.  You had to have an opinion on every argument.  You had to be able to quote every expression the show was contributing to the English language (“100% my type on paper”).  Luckily, you didn’t have to look like the islanders, as there were free donuts in the office and we needed some sugar to numb the pain of our worthless lives.  The show came into its own with a new villa (allegedly the old villa’s neighbours had had enough of the constant noise and mugging off) and this was even supplemented with a secret second villa.  I know now that Love Island’s production crew shack up in a sweaty cabin in between, planning when to drop bombs in order to set off fireworks among the budding romances and bromances.  Through work, I was lucky enough to attend a Q&A with the show’s producers.  I won’t go as far as to call this a career highlight, but nothing else I have achieved even matters.  I even won a Love Island water bottle with my name on, because I knew the answer to a trivia question was Tyne-Lexy.  I’ll assume you’re impressed.  Either way, the awkward stalking continued when I had a wee next to Theo.  Most of the 2017 islanders were at the ITV Gala that winter.  Trying to find my team at the hotel bar we had arranged to meet in, I accidentally found myself in a room where everyone was ridiculously good looking.  I was a steaming troll somewhere I didn’t belong.  I then realised this was the holding room for the Love Island cast and scurried away to find the normos.

2018

I left work early on Monday to make sure no transport issues could scupper my chances of getting home in time for the 9pm kick off of series four.  I was home by 5, so that was fine, but better to be safe than sorry.  It felt like Christmas Eve.  Whatsapp discussion groups crackled with hilarious observations.  The islanders completed their first pairing up.  The drama began.  We’re still in the early stage where the cast is too excited about being on the show to calm down properly and stand a chance of forming a relationship.  But, patience, we must allow this fine wine to mature.  Should be ok by Friday.

So there’s my blow-by-blow account of the series so far.  But what’s it like to watch an episode?  Let’s find out.  I’ve picked out some of the most common sentiments you’ll come across in your viewing.

Why would the sponsor have such bad idents?

Nobody knows why.  Superdrug have hung on the property since series two, after Match.com picked up the first.  The 2016 series remains a best-in-class about how to annoy viewers with irritating ident casting and then how to compound that by having them on a frequency of about a million.

The voiceover seems to hate everyone.  What is he doing?

He’s just enjoying himself.  Iain Stirling is the main instrument Love Island has in preventing everything from being taken too seriously.  You can tell it’s all from an affectionate place, and that he isn’t actually really fed up that series two’s Zara couldn’t stop mentioning that she’s Miss Great Britain or that Marcel from series three used to be in the Blazin’ Squad, innit, but don’t tell anyone.  It’s all a bit of fun, especially when some of the contestants are too young to remember Blazin’ Squad.

I should go to the gym more.

You probably should.  Islanders must do little else once they find out they’re on the show, with most of them carrying on with the calisthenics and curls at the in-villa gym.  Yet you’re still on your sofa just watching them.

They all seem like such good pals.

This is one of the best parts of the show.  The friendships.  Best known of these was the de facto civil partnership of Kem and Chris from last year.  Matching outfits, inside jokes, rapping together: this is what pals do nowadays.  Love Island lets you feel like you’re part of the friendship to such an extent that, when the series is over, you suddenly feel like your social life has contracted.  The reality is that it really has, as you’ve been sacking off real-life social engagements in order to watch it.

I’m cynical about whether they really are in love.

Well yes, you root for the ones that seem to belong together, or just for Camilla from last year to stop crying, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, for most of the day, they’ve got nothing else to do but work on their relationships.  The show has to construct situations where romance is accelerated so you can reach the arguing stage of being a couple as quickly as possible.  Arguing equals entertainment and we must be satisfied.

Why are people using hashtags in their texts?

I don’t know.

I want to go on holiday.

Yes, but you won’t look as good as an islander when you get there, so stay in your living room and view the show under cover of darkness.

I don’t think I could sleep in one big bedroom with all my friends, especially with people doing bits.

Another reason why you’re not on the show, then, and can just enjoy the experience vicariously through your screen.  Sleeping in that room is a small price to pay for the chance to front your own Boohoo.com collection once you’re out the house.

I like the look of the new ones they are going to add in.

Somehow, we still haven’t used up all the good-looking people in the UK, and there are yet more that can be brought into the villa to stir things up.  The show carefully trails these additions with gratuitous body shots so the perv in you can plan your viewing more precisely.

So there we have it, a bumper post, but this show is everything.  For an hour each evening (apart from Saturdays when you get fobbed off with a best of from the week before and, accordingly, nobody watches) you can be young, gorgeous, single and on holiday with all your new pals.  You’ll forget that tomorrow the alarm will go off and you’ll find yourself at your day job, but at least you’ll have Love Island to talk about. All together now: “I’ve got a text!”

[mredwinsmith]

A Smart Approach to Urban Sketching (and a Demo!)

Capturing Fall in Full Swing

One of our resident artists, Marc Taro Holmes, delivers a great urban sketching demo to us based on his jaunts out and about in Montreal, Canada. Enjoy the gorgeous fall colors of the turning leaves against crisp blue skies. Marc takes you for a fun “tour” and gives us all the insight we need on how to make the scenes we see come alive through watercolor sketching.

Take in all the sketching goodness and be sure to get our exclusive On-the-Go Sketching Collection, featuring many of Marc’s bestselling tutorials. Enjoy and cheers to your next sketch!

Courtney  

Sketching in Watercolor: Urban Sketching Tutorial

Fall is in full swing in Montreal. It’s getting brisk. Hats and gloves are coming out of the closet. Very soon it’ll be too cold to comfortably paint outside. It might be my last chance to take a day off work and enjoy painting the fall colors.

I recently headed out to Montreal’s Île Saint-Hélène. There’s a little stone tower called the Tour de Lévis marking the highest point of the island. It used to be a water reservoir. These days, it’s used for weddings and fancy parties. The view up top is supposed to be great, but I’ve never had the opportunity to see it. I think this simple stone structure will be a perfect anchor for a sketch that’s really all about the trees.

Above, left: Reference photo. Above, right: Marc’s finished piece. (Pin this demo for future reference!)

Time Is On My Side

In a field sketch like the one I’m sharing today, I’m usually finished in about an hour. It can go much faster if I’m working very small, or if I’m bold with simplification. I’ll aim to do it all in three passes of watercolor–one pass for the large shapes in lighter (transparent) color, then two over the top with darker accents for midtones and tiny dark shadows.

Skies the Limit

I’ll often start with the sky–it’s usually the biggest, lightest shape. And I can let it dry while I’m moving on to the rest of my first pass. By the time I’ve touched the whole painting once (depending on the weather), it will be dry and ready for more.

But before I paint, I’ll usually do a quick pencil sketch. In the image above, you can see my faint under drawing, with the first sky-wash in place.

In the past I’d make a very detailed drawing, but with more experience under my belt, I find myself wanting a simple outline: just the bare bones. If I let myself get carried away drawing, I know I’ll put in every little thing I see.

Forest for the Trees

This scene is almost entirely trees and foliage. I certainly don’t want to be drawing every leaf and branch. It’s not necessary to create the forested impression I’m after–and it might well distract from the central focus. Neither do I want to get caught up drawing the stones of the tower itself. At the small scale I’m working (10×15), it would get too finicky.

Compositionally speaking, I have a phrase: “The Three Big Shapes: Sky, Ground and Subject.” Sometimes a picture needs more than three shapes–but I try to do it in as few as possible. If I can fuse a forest of trees into one contour line, all the better!

Making Memories

As well, I’ve downplayed some intrusive light fixtures bolted onto the tower, ignored a set of picnic tables and some garbage bins, and many, many small leaves on the ground. We could get into a whole discussion about this philosophy of less-is-more. It might not be for everyone, but my goal is a memory of this place. To be able to say I was here, and I painted this, enjoying my time watching the leaves falling.

I don’t need anything more than this to look back on it later. Instead of making my sketches as a perfectionist, my preference is to keep moving and find another spot. Sometimes I can capture five or six sketches in a day. I’d rather have more experiences and more paintings than spend too much time making any one of them more “real.”

Edges and Shapes

I like to build each of the silhouette shapes in the composition with fused strokes of color, painted wet-on-dry. Wet color placed right next to a previous stroke–just touching–will merge into a single shape. Every few strokes I’ll adjust the color mix, aiming for plenty of variety within a passage. I want colors *inside* a wet shape to blend freely, but I want hard edges *between* shapes. I like to say the edges are the drawing, the shapes are the painting.

What to Leave

Within a shape, I’ll often leave small white flecks of paper. These will become sky-holes in the trees or glinting sunlight on upward facing planes.

I like to compare my three color passes to the liquids tea, milk, and honey. Each layer of paint uses more pigment, less water–going from transparent tea-like washes, to a pigment-rich milky glaze, and ending with almost pure pigment in a honey-like consistency.

So, here’s the first transparent wash complete – the Tea.

I have four, maybe five silhouette shapes here, depending on how you see it. The sky, the tower and two chunks of forest: the more distant trees on the right (with the flash of red leaves), and the wall of forest to the left–which merges with the foreground shape at the moment.

Supporting Your Marks

So, the next step is to look back at each of my silhouette shapes, and see how I can subdivide the basic design with smaller, darker details. I want to describe what’s there, while supporting this pattern I’ve designed.

I begin by building up smaller bushes and hedges with darker foliage, and bringing leaves in the canopy over the sky. As well, I’ll start breaking the yellow-green forest silhouettes up into individual trees. It’s important that the first pass has dried. Sometimes I’ll need to take a break, setting the painting in the sun. I want to use my richer pigment over top of dry washes so I can control the hardness of edges.

I still resist trying to paint every tree trunk or branch, but aim to create the impression with broken brush strokes, allowing the underpainting to show through the gaps.

In my three passes, each one touches less and less surface area of the painting. The “tea” floods everything. The “milk” is about 25% of the paper, and the final touches of “honey” are only tiny adjustments. In this manner the sketch is completed very quickly and each layer builds on what went before.

Parts to Savor

I’ve been waiting for a while to put in these raking shadows across the grass. They’re one of my favorite parts of the scene. The long shadows describe the slope of the earth, adding depth while at the same time making a subconscious set of steps leading up to the tower. I had seen these cast shadows when I first arrived on location, and had made note that I’d get them in, even if the light changed. It had indeed gone by the time I got to this stage, but if you look back, they’re lightly indicated in the drawing. Just enough that I’d remember them.

I did, however, downplay them–they were darker in real life–but I want the viewer’s eye going toward the tower, not to be drawn to the ground. So they’re a favorite part, but they can’t be over stated.

Now it’s just a matter of smaller and smaller details, such as looking at the shapes within shapes, and seeing where any tiny shadows can help define the foliage. These small touches are scattered all over. They’re only a tiny percentage of the surface area, but in a way they change the entire painting. Each one refines a silhouette edge or grounds a form with a cast shadow.

In the final painting the three (well, OK, five) big shapes have been enriched with details. There are now many overlapping forms, but they’re organized by that underlying plan. At the same time, the dark accents have been designed to reinforce the composition.

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The dark ridge line of bushes on the left and the diagonal passages of darks and lights on the right all direct the eye toward the front door of the tower. The tiny door itself is a bullseye pattern of concentric dark and light, placed directly over the rule of thirds–an unavoidable eye-catching target. Everything in this simple sketch has been building up my story of discovering this romantic stone tower in the woods. The perfect postcard of a blustery fall day.

Marc Taro Holmes is the author of the instructional handbook: The Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location. He has recently released four video demonstrations on ArtistsNetwork.tv about sketching on location in pen and ink and watercolor; Sketching Birds, Travelling with a Sketchbook, Painting Panoramas and Sketching Street Life.

Marc blogs at CitizenSketcher.com, offering regular free updates featuring painting demos like this one, interesting experiments with art tools and materials, art book reviews and stories from his own travels with a sketchbook.

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