Trying to get over a weirdly awful week that started with the death of a friend and ended with me doing a classic face splat on the road and an ambulance trip to emergency for a patch up job. It was one of those nano shit moments – a nanosecond before you tip over, your brain goes “aw shit” and down you go. And now I have a nifty swollen black eye, broken glasses, an ugly cut on my eyebrow and a variety of bruises on the go as a souvenir for the week.
Did you know they can glue your forehead back together? A little glue, good as new… well not quite but almost. After the repair job, off I went in search of a place to fix my glasses. They were oddly askew with the arms pointing in the wrong direction. Hard to see when you can’t put the glasses on your nose. Made it as far as Eatons Centre and Lens Crafters fixed them up for me – no charge. Considering how badly damaged they were, I’m amazed they even offered to fix them. Damn fine job they did to. Really pleased. Thought for sure I’d have to buy a new pair of glasses, they were that badly mangled. Wasn’t looking forward to spending $500 on them.
Started rooting around looking for something to cheer me up this morning, so I pulled out some pencils and paper. Began sketching after a long lay off. I was paging through some of my previous drawings as well. Here’s a page of feathers:
Not a bad collection of feathers
I have a book of pictures I’d shoved on a shelf and neglected. I drew these about 2 years ago (I think). Maybe longer, can’t remember.
Feathers are intriguing – each bird has such distinctive ones. Great fun. I used a mechanical pencil with no .07 2b lead on these ones. Unfortunately, I dropped the pencil behind the bed this morning and will have to pull everything out to get at it. Bit of a pain, but my Staedtler mechanical is a favourite. It’ll have to wait until I can bend a bit better. After yesterday’s fall I’m not so pliable… maybe tomorrow.
Here are a couple of lovelies – Soruth 1868. I acquired them about a year ago at auction. Soruth (or Sorath, Junagadh, and Saurashtra ) was a small Princely State in Gujarat until 1947 when it became part of the state of Saurashtra and then part of Bombay State.
These are hand stamped with water colour ink. You can find them in Scotts 9 and 8 respectively. I usually use Stanley Gibbons but I’m having a few problems identifying this set clearly. Too many variations. The only thing clear is both are Type B – you can tell by the bottom left character.
Unperforated, no watermarks, no gum, laid paper. Very nice, large margins on both.
I got lucky at auction and picked them up for a song. The catalogue price hovers around $170 for the pair. I didn’t think I’d have a chance at getting these, but I scooped them up for under $25(Cdn). Sometimes, it’s all about who shows up for the auction. I went with the faint hope of getting them and was surprised to find no one else was interested. Everyone showed up to watch the fight over a great set of Canadian covers and no one was interested in the Indian material. My pair sold early in the auction and which was excellet because everyone was saving their money for the cover dustup. Unless you had over $4,000 for each cover, there wasn’t a hope you’d be able to touch them.
I don’t spend a lot of time or money on Feudatory States – although I’d like to. The problem is they are just too difficult to identify and many forgeries abound, I know experts who have been snookered on occasion. I have a modest little collection – low values mostly but infinitely enjoyable.
Sitting here trying to enjoy my coffee and feeling exhausted. Two people sitting near me talk 100 miles a min, quite loud and I swear they never stop long enough to breath. Which leads me to the following thoughts:
I’ve discovered I have a real thing for industrial style backgrounds and photos. Gears, concrete, rust – something about the textures appeal to me. Here’s another background I’ve been playing with.
A basic street scene laid over a photo of crumbling concrete. Can’t remember where I took the photo of the concrete – down around Bloor and Spadina I think. Kind of cool effects:
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