I’m back from Eindhoven and have finally finished going through my pictures. Sadly, they’re worse than usual for one key reason: I bought a secondhand camera so I wouldn’t have to keep nicking my wife’s camera (and worrying that I might lose it), and the display doesn’t work on it, so I wasn’t able to check the pictures as I was taking them. I’d tested the camera before leaving to assess ideal conditions (how well it captures detail, at what sort of distance, lighting, flash, etc.) and thought I’d had it figured out, but it turns out it’s quite a bit more picky than I’d realised. Still, it’ll be fine for landscape and architecture stuff when I’m on holiday, so I suppose it’s not a complete loss (and it was very cheap for what it is).
Anyway, with the usual excuses out of the way, here are the pics I’ve managed to salvage:
So, despite all that, I did manage to get nearly 300 pictures close to my usual standard of photography (which I would charitably call ‘adequate’).
As to results: the ducks did very well, nabbing a bronze medal in masters’ historical painting as well as a lovely trophy from the people who organise Ruby Sphere, which is a competition held in Moscow. That was a real surprise, because it wasn’t actually there when I first checked whether they’d got anything in the morning. It was only later when I was trying to get some more photos that I saw it. BEHOLD:
So, the show itself. I believe attendance was down on last year, which isn’t hugely surprising with the World Expo there in July next year – I imagine a lot of people are saving their money for that trip, and quite a few will also be working on special projects. Having said that, there were still 1500 entries, which is no small number.
I managed to actually spend very little this year, which was also quite nice. Given my new approach to painting – plan out a whole display and just work on that – my actual needs are much more focused, so I only buy things that will generally contribute to the next project. As that project is a little weird, there’s not really much I was going to find at the show. As a result, I only picked up a couple of plinths, a couple of flats (for practice), some more Scale Colour Artist paints and a pair of bulls.
I also gave away most of my spare waterfowls now that the duck project is complete (I’ll do a proper photo shoot for them and get some nice pictures up as soon as I can be bothered unpacking them). There are some lucky people who now have geese, ducks and/or ducklings. I look forward to seeing what they do with them.
Ben also was lucky enough to be the world’s only owner of an authentic Fet waterfowl outside the Fet Family Collection. He’d sent me a picture of the Untitled Goose wielding a Klingon bat’leth with the simple instruction “Make. It. Happen.” So I did.
The Untitled Goose then spent the rest of the show hanging out in the judges’ display because Ben presumably wanted to show him off to the world, and not at all because he didn’t have his case on him.
So, with SMC out of the way, I believe the next show on the itinerary will be Bugle Call over near Bristol next month. It’ll be a very quick trip and probably exhausting.
Next update, however, will return to talking about my daft projects. The next one is properly daft. Probably.
Fet Paints 