Houns, your post sounds like you’re looking for 2 people… I’ll be the person to “go on the odd bike ride” with.

You can plump for Junky for your other needs, although he doesn’t satisfy any of the 3 criteria you specified… 😉

Hey Houns, how you doin… 😉

Who will be our graham?

Annoying… Condescending… Not particularly funny…

JUNKY?? You’re needed… 😉

For instance filtering all girls who like beards would be convenient!

Shaving your beard would be easier… And probably broaden your appeal… 😉

Maybe we should have a Blind Date style thread with Flowerpower asking 3 eligible bachelors 3 cheesy questions… I’ll be Cilla…

Any volunteers? 😉

The French call their paper clips “Les Trombones”…

Theatrical mice use paperclips as fake trombones when staging Gilbert & Sullivan musicals. They can’t use real ones because it’s a little-known fact that mice can’t actually purse their lips, so they can only play percussion and string instruments.

I have been discussing bikes with a young lady, i got a bit stroppy the other day and started writing bollocks on my profile, since then its been better! – See more at: http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/online-dating-help/page/16#sthash.KhF3hWPv.dpuf

I always found the “bollocks on profile” approach worked well… Written, of course, not photos! 😯
It makes it far easier for someone to strike up a conversation… What on earth do you say to someone who likes “going out or staying in”, does a bit of parachuting (once, 14 years ago on a gap year in Oz) or who lists their interests as “planking and banter wid me mates”.

I only once dated a girl that was a keen cyclist – she recognised the groupset of my roadbike on one of my profile pics and her opening line was “Is that the new 11-speed Dura Ace?”…

Alarm bells should have rung – I’m fully aware that my bike-geekery is a serious personality disorder, the last thing you want is to people with the same issues getting together!

Anywho, I’m still dating the Perfect 10 I met around 3 months ago… She’s even discovered the carefully disguised bike room with 11-or-so bikes in it, and whilst she thinks it’s a bit weird, she doesn’t seem overly worried. 😉

Jeez, you try and give a man honest, sound advice and he gets all uppity!

So you can add “uppity” to that list… 😉 x

he handled it well

Don’t you think it might possibly have been pre-planned and rehearsed? 🙄

I’ve had a Caddy for about 3 months now and don’t know how I lived without it. Mountain bikes are bungied to the driver’s side wall (it’s ply-lined) and I can get 2 bikes in with bags of space to spare – just turn the front wheels 90° so they sit right up against the bulkhead and they fit no probs. I’ll look at some sort of floor-mounted fork anchoring system for carrying road bikes when the race season kicks off again.

I was looking at a mate’s Nemo thing, he could carry one bike skewed across the whole load space, but 2 bikes were a problem without taking wheels off. I can even lie flat (corner to corner) in the Caddy if need be, and I’m 6’1″.

Drives just like a car, great fuel economy, looks the mutt’s nuts and I know it’ll hold its value. If you’re going to use it as an everyday vehicle, why not spend what you’d spend on a car and get something that’s pleasant to drive?

There’s nothing like a good Christmas tune… And that was nothing like a good Christmas tune. Appalling.

I went to one in South of France called Aquatica. Spent a wonderful afternoon sitting at the bottom of the big slide, drinking beer and watching beautiful French girls trying to recover their bikinis from their most intimate recesses.

Shib neither of us like the other lets take that as a given and not actually try to be an arse about it on every thread we happen to wander on to.

Ooh… Handbags! Where on earth did that come from Junky??

You’d get 20 hours work out of Junky for that… Your money might be better spent finding him a few jobs to do around the house… Just sayin.

It wont be cheap though as it would take time to do and you will pay a highish hourly rate £10-30 IMHO whether using an artist or a tattooist

If Junkyard thinks £10-30 is a high hourly rate, this probably goes some way to explaining his anger and general dissatisfaction with the world… 😉

Thing is I don’t want to just go to a single tattooist, that may or not end how I had hoped.

As a designer, I get loads of people like you asking me to do a load of unpaid work so they can then compare it to loads of unpaid work by other designers, so they can see which one is their favourite.

I tell them to sling their hook – I don’t do colouring competitions – and I would imaging any decent tattoo artist would tell you the same.

Anyway, tattoos are stupid. 😉

Is anyone else blushing on Grantyboy’s behalf? 😳

I think there’s a much wider topic that you’re touching on there Mac, namely that the ‘reasons’ for producing artwork have changed, mostly due to the written word now fulfilling a lot of the roles for which art was traditionally used.

But I think it’s fair to say that since man first daubed mud, blood or charcoal on cave walls, we’ve been striving to freeze a moment in time for others to view.

It fascinates me to watch my nephew’s/niece drawing (age 3-6) and it’s easy to recognise the naivety of early art in what they produce. And I’m sure their skills will grow as they’re taught certain techniques, and as they become used to seeing flat images.

Obviously, there have been movements like cubism to address the single-viewpoint issues, but an enduring theme that seems to run through all art is the desire to record things the way we see them. I don’t think that’ll ever go away…

Some was, but there are many examples of “naive” perspective art from the early Renaissance period, like Masolino’s “Banquet of Herod”.

He worked out that if you paint a flat elevation with a single, central vanishing point, you ended up with a suggestion of perspective that had, up to this point, been unattainable. We see it as naive, but at the time it was ground breaking.

Nowadays, we all learn the double-vanishing-point technique that didn’t appear for another century or so…

…but I really can’t see the difference between looking at a person and then looking at a photograph of that person. How they reproduce it comes down to their technical skill and artistic drive.

Just reading back through this, and this is an interesting point. Drawing from life is far harder than drawing from a photograph. On a photograph, the perspective, composition etc is already taken care of – it’s effectively ‘flattened’ into the image you’re going to reproduce.

If you draw and paint from life (I did 10hrs a week for 3 years) you need to possess the ability to ‘flatten’ the image in your own eye. That’s why you often see artists ‘framing’ a scene with their fingers or holding a brush or pencil up to the image. What they’re actually doing is plotting negative shapes against a fixed reference point – vital as it’s just as important to represent the shapes around a subject as it is to do the subject itself.

We’re used to seeing images flattened nowadays, in print, film etc, but look at pre-Renaisance art to see how difficult it was for artists to interpret the 3D world into a 2D image. There were one or 2 freaky artists that had an ability to meticulously reproduce exactly what they saw (Van Eyck is a good example) but most artists really struggled until the basic rules of perspective were unraveled and the study of anatomy became commonplace.

If it’s “not difficult” then it must be a few people on every uni art course worldwide surely ?

Absolutely. Although you’d probably find it far more prevalent at school/college level. If you’re a neat, accurate artist, they tend to beat it out of you at art college and encourage a looser, more painterly style.

But I’d go as far as to say that most reasonably proficient artist could produce work like that with a little practice, a lot of time and and propensity to immerse oneself in sheer boredom for long enough.

A few of my art college contemporaries make money by doing pencil reproductions of peoples’ photos of pets, horses, even pics of them holding big fish.

The easiest way is to print a 10% tint of the photo onto a sheet of vellum and then shade over the top. It’s not art, it’s just shite.

Personally – and art is very personal – I think it boils down to how much you can ‘take’ from a piece that defines its merit.

The photorealistic example posted above just looks like a photo. Someone, upon being told it’s a pencil drawing might say “wow! pencil?? I thought it was a photo…”, so it has merit to some, but it’s rather limited in my opinion. Personally, I’ve seen enough of that sort of thing to not be blown away by it.

The work by Simon Stallenhåg is so absorbing, I have a few of his prints and I can pour over them for hours. Some people might think the subject matter a bit eccentric, but like you say, the imagination is undeniable. For me, it’s the composition, the draughtsmanship and the painterly execution that I admire, and his ability to capture an atmosphere/era, slightly nostalgic, slightly futuristic… Genius.

Hardly anyone can do it.

Again, I’d disagree. Working in pencil from photographs is probably one of the easiest mediums to work in. It’s mind-numbingly boring, but it’s not difficult.

Working in oils or acrylics – or even on a Wacom tablet as Mr Stallenhåg above – requires far more skill, especially if the artist has the ability to abbreviate the image into simple brushstrokes and still maintain a sense of realism. It’s a skill I wish I possessed!

Samuri – that’s a pencil drawing??!

Bloody hell that’s impressive.

Do you think? I have a scanner/printer that can reproduce photos to a similar standard in a matter of seconds.

I really don’t consider this sort of thing to be “art” at all, there’s nothing creative about it at all. It’s the visual equivalent of karaoke.

Now this is art… Someone posted a link to this artist’s work recently and the concept and execution is brilliant. And it’s all done digitally too!

Gunt! Brilliant…

Simple economics, innit. Say I have 10 Bacons that I paid £1million each for, and a fellow collector has 10 Bacons that he also paid £1million each for, we orchestrate an auction where we outbid one-another until the price is a world record, and suddenly every Bacon increases in value by about 50 times.
Now our collections are worth half a billion, for an investment of just £89 million. Genius. That’s how the art world works.

That’s very funny! 😀

It’s definitely a burning poppy…

This is still salvageable Dez, text messaging is your friend… Something like “hey, tried to ring last night but must have missed you, let me know when you’re available for a chat… 🙂 x.”

It doesn’t sound desperate – you’ve waited til the following day – and if she’s got anything about her, it’ll make her feel a bit guilty for not taking your call when you’d arranged to ring. She might just have bottled in, in which case it’ll probably help her confidence to know that you’re still interested, and as I mentioned last night, it shows she’s just as, or more nervous than you. So you can take a bit of confidence from that.

Stick with it, she’s not dead in the water yet!

Obviously, that was “butty shop”… Damn predictive iPads!!

Did you leave a message?

She’ll be far more nervous Dez, talk to her the same way you might talk to he lady in the nutty shop… That way, if it doesn’t go well, at least you might walk away with a BLT and a slice of flapjack 😉

Good luck, you’re a tiger… Grrrrrrrr

Banning things offends me. I think we should put a stop to it.

Maybe the European Defense Mechanism failed…

My mum’s Victorian long-cased wall clock bonged 11 times yesterday morning and then stopped dead. The spring is half-wound and it’s run flawlessly for many years and it stopped dead at 11am on Remembrance Sunday.

Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? 😯

Rather than picking holes in my post, perhaps you could add something to the discussion? Thanks

That sentence is no place for a question mark. HTH 😉

And was basically called a moron…

And quite rightly so. What on earth is “misogynistic” about it??

Here’s mt Rat…

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I have a flat bar roadrat, I built it with CXP22s on disc hubs so I can run it with everything from 23mm tyres to cross tyres and I have hope mini monos – I’m not restricted to cable discs or converters as you would be on a drop bar bike.

I built it as a blingy pub bike/commuter/tow-path-and-bridleway-bike a few years ago and wouldn’t part with it. It’s even been used for winter training when I need more grip than I get from my road bike tyres.

I’d go Madone… But I like racier frames… I do like the innovation of the domane though, but not having ridden one, I can’t comment on the real-world advantages…

I think your last comment says it all… I couldn’t agree more!

At the end of the day, we’re all big kids at heart (gaykoala excluded of course) and we love shiny new stuff. I get a lot of pleasure from knowing I ride a bike that has won the Giro, several TdF stages etc, and I’m not ashamed to admit I get a lot of pride when other cyclists come and ask me about my bike.

Anyway, you can upgrade calipers and chain set in future for not much money… Do it! 😉