24/11: SATURDAY BITS & BOBS

Thanks to all who gave advice and support re. the Blogger issue I posted about recently.   Since my post I've been directed to several other sites where fellow Bloggers have received the same message from Blogger (all within a week or so).   I think the biggest problem is that when changes were made in April 2012 we were either not alerted to them, or we failed to understand the significance.   Picture uploads were not being resized and therefore were eating into valuable storage space.    Anybody who purchased additional space with Picasa before April 2012 got a very good rate for increased storage ... from April this year the rate is much higher and I personally won't pay it.

Anyway,  I've spent most of yesterday on my Picasa site resizing recent pictures so I now have a bit of 'breathing space' re. capacity - its a slow and tedious job but worth it in my opinion.   Now I'm aware of the problem I'll ensure all photos uploaded to Blogger are reduced in size prior to upload and they won't then be counted in the storage allocation.
Other ideas that have been suggested are using an external photo storage site such as Photobucket or Flickr and uploading pics from there, rather than from one's PC.   Any uploads direct from the PC (and not from an external URL) automatically gets put into Picasa's storage system.

Another idea (clever I thought) is to add another author to your Blog - then write Posts via the new author and use their space allowance!!

Arty stuff:

I made some minor adjustments to the 3 Collie Portrait, added whiskers etc and that has been approved so will be en route to the owner next week:

I've made some adjustments to the little girl also.  The ref. photo shows her with a broad smile which makes her cheeks look very broad and I was asked to slim them down a little.   I've also softened the skintones and altered the smile slightly.   Just waiting to hear whether I'm to slim the face down further ... once happy with the face, I'll put the final touches to the clothing/background etc.

I started work today on a beautiful spaniel.    Haven't got very far really, just outlined the head and sketched in the main areas of colour/hair direction etc - its in pastel on pastelmat so hopefully I'll get quite a lot done on it tomorrow and will show a progress picture.  It was originally intended as a Christmas Gift but now the deadline has been brought forward to make it a Wedding Anniversary present in Mid December - no pressure then!

Then once I can clear the pastels away and clean the working area a bit - I really need to finish the graphite baby portrait as its been sitting on a sidetable for a few weeks now.   Its 90% finished so I need to email the client for critique/approval

Still awaiting the ref. photo for the coloured horse which is a voucher redemption so strictly speaking doesn't need to be finished by Christmas .. but it will be nice to get started as soon as possible.   I do enjoy portraying horses

Just for fun ....

This is a can of Gent's anti-perspirant spray from a well-known supermarket.    What do you think the words at the bottom mean .... NOT FOR EMERGENCY USE.        ???

We couldn't figure it out so David phoned the helpline number shown on the can (as you do when you have too much time on your hands) ... but they didn't have a clue either.    Any ideas?