Curling-inspired artworks

I started working as an ice-technician at Kinross Curling Rink at the end of September, and have since created a few unusual curling-inspired artworks, as I'll showcase below...

It all started with this year's early snowfall and my first snow sculpture - a rather crude little curling stone that I built with my bare hands at the end of my evening shift on Saturday 27 November.


But a couple of weeks and much more snowfall later, I had a second, and much more successful, attempt at sculpting out of snow. This time I had much more snow at my disposal; as well as a snow shovel, teaspoon, and gloves - all of which made the sculpting much easier than before. After spending about two hours spread throughout my evening shift of Thursday 9 December, my second attempt at snow sculpting was completed to a much better standard. As you'll see below, I had now created a much larger snow-sculpted curling stone, which raised a few eyebrows over the following days!

Onto my more conventional artworks, and earlier this week I created an amusing photoshopped-image of the curling rink manager involved in an unusual ice accident...

...Since I published this image on the Kinross Curling Rink facebook page, it has received a terrific response and attracted several new 'facebook fans': It has even been spread across other social networks by the management at the Green Hotel (which owns the rink).

Some landscape practice

Here are some quick landscape sketch/painting tests that I made late last month, but forgot to upload.

Majorca

Hamilton Mausoleum

Edinburgh North Bridge

New terrorist threat in UK

Al-qaida have claimed responsibility for the latest terror attacks to hit Britain: SNOW!

Days after the first strike, it is clear that this could become the most devastating terrorist attack in British history, with another 2 weeks of trouble expected to come...

But of course it's just a joke.

I got the idea last Winter, when London came to a standstill after a pathetic little layer of snow fell on the city. After watching the news about that story I sketched a wee cartoon strip, however it didn't convey my comic message too effectively, so I abandoned the idea like a car on the snow-closed M90.

This year, having had less than a week of intermittent snow (but now almost a foot of snow in the past 4 days), the country is again shutting down; so I have revived that old comic idea and turned it into the image you see above.

This week... In caricature

Here are some new caricatures that I've completed in the past week or so. I've not done much drawing or painting in recent months, so these are pretty crude warm-up sketches, but they should be good practice for a more regular series of artworks that I aim to be doing over the coming months.

Craig Levein, Scotland football manager.

Scotland played a friendly match in Aberdeen against the Faroe Islands mid-week. Levein's starting line-up was rather experimental with many fringe players making their debuts in the wake of a vast number of call-offs. Despite that issue, Scotland won 3-0, meaning that they've still lost only 2 international matches at Pittodrie stadium in the last 100-odd years!

Harry Potter stars.

The penultimate film in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One premiered in London just over a week ago.

In an attempt to gross more money from the box-office, producers planned on releasing the film in 3D: However they couldn't complete the post-production 3D process without delaying the films' release date, and therefore had to shelve those plans at the last minute.

Prince William gets engaged.

News that the second in-line to the throne, Prince William, is engaged to Kate Middleton has finally reached us lowly members of public: Apparently the Royal Family have known about it for months, yet last weekend we had to endure an entire evening of altered TV scheduling to accommodate their old news.

And finally...

Here's a caricature of Scottish golfer Colin Montgomerie, which I made in October after Europe beat USA to win the Ryder Cup:
...It's an old artwork that doesn't really belong here, but I'm posting it anyway because I hadn't put it online at the time of completion.