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Showing posts with label Cornwall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cornwall. Show all posts

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Postcards from Miltonburg

Over on Karl's Facebook page I've been running a series of 'Postcards from Miltonburg'. I've included one or two on this blog from time to time to give some colour to recent posts. But it's not an easy thing to achieve living in a suburb of London, to generate a series of photos that would fit a theme of Ye Olde Worlde. You have to avoid modern housing and constructions, people clothed anachronistically for the period you want to represent, buses and cars thundering past, in fact anything that breaks the spell.

This really leaves me with very few options locally, just the local park, hopefully when there are not too many people about and a few holiday photos that reside in the collection that can be adopted and manipulated.

Parsloe's Park has become the edge of the woods around Miltonburg, photographed from very tight angles to avoid parts of the Becontree Estate in the distance popping up through the trees. Photos in the collection come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on how much I've had to crop. A visit to Cornwall gave me images of Bodmin Moor and Tintagel which have found their way into the collection along with The Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln.

That's all well and good, but not only is this world from the books Olde Worlde, it's also somewhere else in the universe, with a different sun, planets and moons in the sky and hence different light.

So now we need the additional tweaks - I need to adjust the brightness, contrast, colour depth and tone of the picture. A few years back that would have been quite a task. Getting the photos printed and then scanned and the amount of processing effort to get them adjusted based on what you had to work with in the first place would have been incredible. The photo editing tools were out there, but I find I could spend hours in front of the pc struggling with these tools not really knowing what was going on and not having the time to work through and comprehend some of the tutorials.



Now we have these mobile phones devices which do just about everything except make the morning coffee. (I’m not much of tea drinker.) They have apps, which are quite simple and quite powerful for image manipulation that would have taken some computers from my youth ages to achieve and process. There are quite a few of these apps out there but I’ve found PEStudio (Photo Effect Studio) does just about everything I need from cropping, re-colouring,  light manipulation plus the odd special effect thrown in for good measure. However I cannot find it the App Store any longer to tell you who made it, and there are no credits on the app that I can find. However I’m sure there are many others that can provide the same. And what’s more the image is transformed into a whole other world within a matter of minutes allowing me to post it direct to the page in question. So different from how things used to be.

Dungeon in Bishop’s Palace (Lincoln) becomes the Dungeon in Esmay

The Hurlers in the distance on Bodmin Moor (Cornwall) becomes Karl’s long walk home

Parsloes Park (Dagenham) with some cropping becomes secret way to Gerranthaul’s

View from Tintagel Castle (Cornwall) becomes a coastal climb for Karl & Spiker

Own model stone circle becomes gifted with special Solstice light

Monday, 14 January 2013

Monkey Business

In my last post I mentioned the influx of non festive post that I had received, along with the somewhat lacking level of customer service I had received. That level of poor customer service continues into the New Year, so don't be surprised when in the near future I rant again. However, one of the other letters I did receive was a begging letter from a monkey named Joey.
 
As readers of my semi-regular missive may recall I occasionally visit Cornwall, earlier last year I was down there whilst working on the Karl novels. During this trip I visited the "The Monkey Sanctuary", along with some friends who already sponsor a monkey or two there.

The letter I received was well written, in fact many humans could take a lesson or two from Joey's writing style, grammar and use of punctuation.

Joey, as seen on wildfutres.org

Joey is a Capuchin monkey who was taken from the wild at three months old, kept in atrocious conditions at a pet, which resulted in him being permanently disabled. He was rescued by 'Wild Futures' who run the Monkey Sanctuary in Looe where he was nursed back to health, but he will always need care along with many other monkeys that were rescued from similar fates and cannot be returned to the wild.

Stephen Fry tells Joey's story much better than I could here in the video recorded for the sanctuary, and available to view on their website.
 
I have supposedly saved myself a small sum of money from my recent move of services, (not a headline saving as some money advice sites would trumpet) but that was not the driving force for the move. So I've decided to use some of these funds for the adopt Joey scheme.

You can follow @wildfutures on Twitter

Sunday, 13 March 2011

Castle Ruins - Part One

Along with the coffee stick Ghost Town which I’m working on, I have also got several large pieces of castle ruins scattered around the house. 

These have come about as a result of another project, one for the GM of our current campaign – so I’m not going to give the game away by talking about that at the moment – but watch this space.

Part of that build included some ruins, but I’ve taken the build on a lot further, inspired by a couple of trips made last year.

Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010

Last year I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to visit Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and The Bishop's Palace in Lincoln. Some parts of the Bishop's Palace have been preserved better as actual structures, other parts are ruins.


Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010

Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010


Both are owned and run by English Heritage. Walking around these structures felt quite incredible - these old constructions had been witness to so much history and legend. These are perfect places to go just for the atmosphere and inspiration you can gain from them.


Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln Sept 2010

Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln Sept 2010

These are a few of the photos I took at these places. I decided to build some game table pieces inspired by these photos – not to copy them but to get pieces that reflect the style of these old historic landmarks. I’ve kept them for the moment without bases or any grass or other foliage so that any of these pieces could be used in our current campaign – which is a world with little greenery in it. (For more details on the world in question flick over to Big Lee’s Miniature Adventures.) Very much a world underground.




All of the pieces you’ll see in this project have been made in the same way. They are all pieces of polystyrene packaging cut up, covered in cheap ready mix wall filler and painted with just black and white acrylic paint. Getting the polystyrene from friends and family when they get deliveries makes this a very cheap project to fund, and quite often you’ll find they will be only be too glad for someone else to take their rubbish away for them.



The first two pieces I made were from packaging that came with my brother’s washing machine. One of them had two perfect round circular holes already cut into it. The moment I looked at this piece I was reminded of the wells I saw in the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace.

I also had a flash back to the 1980’s TV series ‘Robin of Sherwood’ where often our heroes ended up thrown into a dungeon via a pit. These holes would be very useful in the final piece.



Quite a number of these pieces have a small tale to tell of their own, over the next couple of blogs I'll be talking about these pieces and their unique features.