• I do find building techniques really quite fascinating. Today I went shopping to Cardiff. I saw this building site and took a photo, because I couldn’t work out what the yellow Xena loading bay things were.

    I looked them up on http://www.xenasystems.com/ and was amazed at what I found.

    There is a crane at the top which lifts loads and drops them into the loading bays which pop out on each floor. This means that there is no need for a tower crane on the site.

    I suppose tower cranes are quite expensive and they need a lot of space to swing around in. This is brilliant for a really tight site. A truck can pull up underneath and be unloaded very quickly.

    It’s amazing how people keep coming up with brilliant ideas for problems you never knew existed!

  • A few people have asked me to draw trees for them. They are not my best subject. Because they are so complicated I’ve always been a bit scared of drawing them and so tend to rush over them and hope no one will notice. No more! I’ve decided to work on them a bit and not be scared any more. As with most things in drawing, you need to take time out to study and learn how the thing is put together, then practice until your hands understand the lines.

  • This may seem a strange subject and a little offbeat, but Sonia Villalta, an Interior Design Junior Student at San Francisco State University asked me for help in trying to make a drawing of this chair look shiny. She really wanted me to use markers, but I’ve never really used them. I used crayon instead, which should give some tips for how to approach the drawing. Lots of tips along the way. We’d love to see what you come up with, Sonia!