Yet another year when things did not go according to plan. However, I did manage to accomplish some things that in reality are little more than administrative in nature. My writing fared a little better but my deadlines were missed!
Having decided to try Cara as an alternative to Instagram I posted 250 or so (I lost count!) of the bird paintings on my Instagram account to my new Cara account.
I regard my Instagram and Cara accounts as repositories / go-to reference sites for my portfolio rather than a means to chase for followers and clicks.
Once I have some new paintings (starting in January!) I shall post them to both accounts.
My painting plans in 2025 were disrupted owing to other responsibilities. I plan to re-start painting in earnest this month (January) with an intention to paint watercolour birds and landscapes (probably a total of 25 birds and 10 landscapes, at least 4 birds in acrylics, and a few other subjects.
Book writing projects
I managed to do a little bit of work on my books. One is a translation in progress of a book published in 2024 while the other is very much work in progress that, now the holiday season is over, will take my attention.
Designs (ASDS)
I have some potential ideas in my head but need to get them on paper!
Photography
It has been a while since I did any commercial work. However, I have some ideas and expect to be productive by March.
Interesting to note that Alamy had discontinued its Stockimo business (iPhone only) which I had used for a small collection of pictures but now provides a feed to Alamy for all Smart Phones. This gives me two channels, enabling me to do a quick start on my photo projects we.
Summary
The year, 2025, did not go according to plan for me. I was aware of a significant project that might take up more time than I would have liked. Indeed it did. This was the administration of my late mother’s estate. She left this world, perhaps arriving where she hoped, in 2023 in Sicily. The administrative process proved complicated, even while I was there to resolve them, and seemed to add unnecessary work at every turn. However, nearly all done.
The New Year of any year is always a time of hope so with luck 2026 will pan out with success in all my ventures.
Thanks for following / reading. Feel free to comment.
In my last post, in June, I mentioned that I had been afflicted by a horrendous cough. It was a debilitating cough that took weeks to overcome completely, only to be followed by a relapse in August. It appears the cough was due to an allergic reaction to cement dust and/or paint. I need to take preventive measures whenever I do any construction or repair work around the house.
Having completed the posting of all 250 or so (I lost count!) bird paintings to my Cara account I have not added any more. I note that, despite this lack of activity on my part, the number of followers has remained static at 115 (about half the level of my Instagram account which has also been static for a few months).
I regard my Instagram and Cara accounts as a repository / go-to reference site for my portfolio rather than a means to chase for followers and clicks.
No painting progress owing to other responsibilities. I have just begun to review some of my bird paintings, culling any that do not fit with sale expectations. While I have not actually destroyed all of my paintings I have torn up quite a few and the rest (the majority) are now in my “journal” collection on which I make notes about the subject and materials used. I will be re-thinking my painting style as I see too many similar paintings by other artists. I have always liked painting subjects on a plain white background (which also helps when selling print copies of the originals) but I have found that some paint/paper combinations seem to diminish the quality of richness of colour. There is also an issue with the size of the paintings that I think will be better in different sizes from those I have.
No plans to re-start painting in earnest until the New Year, by which time I expect to have an idea of how many paintings will be in watercolour and how many will be in acrylics.
Book writing projects
Work on my book projects has restarted. I have begun to draft chapters on two books while the process of translation of the Portuguese version (of a book published last year) is complete and only needs verification / editing.
Designs (ASDS)
The construction work of a small shop, designed by me, was concluded. The internal decoration was also done by under the direction of the shop owner. The shop opened for business at the beginning of August.
Photography
My Mac was once more hit by a large energy fluctuation before I had a chance to do any work on my photo collection. This resulted in it being left for another few weeks at the repair shop, luckily only having to pay for a new mother-board. It is now with me again. I intend to buy a voltage stabiliser before starting work with the old, well-travelled Mac. I bought it in India in 2012 before moving to Mexico City for a couple of years and from there to my home here in the northeast of Brazil.
This will be the final post of 2025, with the December update due to be published in the first week of January.
Thanks for following / reading. Feel free to comment.
For the last two weeks I have been afflicted by a horrendous cough that, initially, had me dreading each onset of the coughing fits that made breathing difficult while inducing a degree of panic. Things seems to be improving, though, and the coughing is now sporadic and less frequent.
Having completed the posting of all 250 or so (I lost count!) bird paintings I have not added any more. I note that, despite this lack of activity on my part, the number of followers has drifted up to 115 (about half the level of my Instagram account).
I regard my Instagram and Cara accounts as a repository / go-to reference site for my portfolio rather than a means to chase for followers and clicks.
Watercolour painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Acrylic painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Landscapes
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Birds
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Oil painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Book writing projects
Very little work done on my book projects. The past two weeks have been very tiring as a result of the cough (is it Covid-related?) which prevented me from working on anything other than urgent tasks.
Designs (ASDS)
The construction work of a small shop, that will be the physical point of sale for a perfume and cosmetics outlet, has progressed more slowly than anticipated having been adversely impacted by seasonal heavy rains and a few local holidays. The design work, mainly on structure and project management, also included the interior design. It was expected to be complete and functional by mid June but looks like another two weeks (maybe to Mid July).
Photography
No progress – though no real urgency just yet. Disappointed to note that a couple of relatively high value image sales through Alamy (my principle agency used for my commercial sales) resulted in me receiving a very small percentage of the sale value. I find it annoying that a client is willing to pay over $1000 for an image license but my agent and the buyer’s agent take their commission and leave me with just $200. Still, better than $10 or less!
My Mac was hit by a large energy fluctuation in November last year. I wasn’t in a position to consider having it repaired till January (at the earliest) but I found a place that could look at it in March. It took a month to get an estimate for repairs, followed by another month to replace the mother board. I collected the Mac just before I fell ill – another delay was as a result of a burned out fan in the Mac. It is now working, not efficiently as it is a 2012 model, but my entire collection of 250,000 or stock images is backed up to Mac-only external hard drives.
When I get into motivated mode I need to severely cull this collection to a maximum of 100,000 images. Realistically I can get down to perhaps 75,000 once I remove the out-of-date images. I need to be really brutal.
The first half of this year has seen disappointing progress – a mixed few months “off piste” yet I can’t complain about the degree of progress against plan as the lack of progress in some areas has been offset by more progress in others.
All for now. With luck a more positive update of events in a month.
The April Update was not published as, once again, I was sidetracked by other responsibilities. Hence I will just post a general update covering the past two months.
At the beginning of February I wrote about the Cara site that I had been considering as an alternative to Instagram. Since then, as I mentioned in my March Update, I began uploading the images I have on my instagram page and have now posted 241 – a bit less than half of the pics appearing on Instagram.
I found that reactions were little different than the ones I had on Instagram – where I got something in the order of 30 to 50 “likes” per post. I don’t really take much notice of these (apart from responding to kind words) as I post the images with the intention of having a point of referral for my work portfolio. The impression I get is that most users of Cara are young illustrators rather than painters like me, though these do exist. I also note that the number of Cara users seems to be much smaller in number than in Instagram. Not a surprise.
When I get around to painting (still not had a chance) I will post to both Instagram and Cara.
In the meantime I note that Meta is under US government pressure to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. I shall keep an eye on this as it may force a spin-off of Instagram or allow more alternatives to the site (such as Cara!)
Watercolour painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Acrylic painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Landscapes
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Birds
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Oil painting
No progress owing to other responsibilities.
Book writing projects
Whenever I have been in “car-park” mode (ie while waiting between tasks) I have been able to translate parts of the book I published last year from English to Portuguese. So far about 50% translated so on track for publication by year end.
Designs for Zazzle
Although not not for Zazzle, I have done some design work over the past two months for construction projects. The first was the conversion of a shop to a flat (apartment). I had done the design work for the building that originally had four ground floor shops and four first floor flats above. That was in 2016. Then in 2020 I arranged the design of three of the shops to flats. The building owner kept the fourth shop for her own use. However, the epidemic that followed together with a number of other factors, resulted in the closure of the shop. Hence the conversion of the shop to create the flat. Hopefully will be ready for occupation by July.
A couple of other opportunities arose while this conversion work has been under way. The first was a small renovation of a kitchen – removing a window to install a sliding door. Project finished. The second, with work started this week (though impeded by rain!), is the construction of a small shop that will be the physical point of sale for a perfumery. The design work, mainly on the structural work and project management, also includes the interior design. Hopefully functional by mid June (weather permitting).
Photography
While I could begin some projects immediately I want to prepare my studio area which is in a bit of a mess. No real urgency just yet.
A mixed couple of months and, while I have been a bit “off piste”, I can’t complain about the apparent lack of progress as it is a case of swings and roundabouts …. less (or no) progress in areas but more progress in others.
All for now. With luck a more positive update of events in a month.
It’s April! The first three months of the year have crash-dived into the ground and are still in a smouldering mess! This first quarter of 2025, which I had anticipated would be under solidly good management, turned out to be a disaster.
A number of things got in my way, led principally by the administration of my late mother’s Will which was supposed to have been concluded in early January.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the solicitor involved, in Sicily, did this on purpose as I can’t imagine he would have been so unprofessional (he being a leading Notary in the city of Trapani) by accident.
My brother and I have since decided to give up any expectations of any documentary conclusion and, as neither of us live in Sicily, even if something did arise there’s not much they could do about it.
Between that particular project and other tasks there was little time to work on my projects. I kept postponing these until I eventually decided it was necessary to reschedule. Having said that whenever I had a moment I was able to do some limited catching up.
A group of related issues occurred simultaneously which necessitated some investment. I was unable to resolve these until after receipt of my mother’s inheritance: my main Mac desktop computer had blown after an evening of power failures in our neighbourhood and, being a relatively old computer (a 27 inch 2012 model) which I used for processing my fairly significant collection of photographs in total about 250,000.
That left me reliant on my MacBook Pro – a 2010 model – which eventually ground to a halt owing, I presume, to it’s outdated operating system losing compatibility with some of the software that I used.
Incidentally, my iPad which I used for some design work had been dropped on its side which consequently cracked the glass and made it impossible to use. Difficult to repair in my current financial situation.
And finally my printer suddenly decided not to print anything with cyan ink. Despite trying to clean the nozzles of various occasions I was unable to correct that problem.
I noticed, coincidentally, that a new model of my printer had been launched. I can’t help feeling that somewhere along the Internet a message was sent to my printer to tell it to stop working in the hope, presumably, that I would then upgrade to the latest model.
Having had, in the past, a number of Epson printers (the most expensive being a huge machine used for printing artworks) I know that once Epson printers nozzles are clogged up they are almost impossible to repair. As I couldn’t easily find a repair shop I expected to have to buy another one. So I did.
I also bought a new MacBook Air though, sadly, with half the memory my MacBook Pro had. Hence I have since had to buy extra memory which, in any case, I needed as I was having problems with my existing external hard drives – I have 20 TB of photos on several drives which worked perfectly well on my big Mac, but no longer seem to work on the MacBook Air. Today I bought a 4 TB Toshiba external hard drive and hope it works perfectly well for my urgent needs and later on I will buy some more hard drives.
Why not use the cloud? Because my photo collection of over 260,000 images are mainly in RAW files which take ages to upload to my iCloud.
So that’s the administrative stuff, which has been keeping me awake at night, all pretty well sorted now.
I haven’t done any painting but now plan on doing some probably in May.
What I have been doing recently, and am still in the process of doing, is transferring my Instagram images (something like 500 photos that I’ve posted over the years) to an app called Cara.
I think I have something like 250 images that I’ve transferred across and probably will post another hundred before I start posting new material.
Cara seems to be used by a lot of illustrators and digital artists. Thankfully I haven’t seen any artificial intelligence work posted on there and although I haven’t liked or followed any of the other Cara users the feedback I’ve had has been quite encouraging. I have to say I don’t aim to build a huge following on any social media. I post because I have pictures to show and therefore regard Instagram (in the past) and Cara (in the present/future) as my go-to portfolio for anyone who may be interested in my work.
As a designer, I was quite interested to note that Jaguar had recently launched a concept (Type 00) for what they expect to be the future of Jaguar motor vehicles. A lot of feedback has been very negative and seems to conclude that Jaguar has just published its map to extinction.
I’ve had a look at the concept vehicle from various angles (front, back, top, and side) and have concluded that, if I were a long-term Jaguar client, I would not consider buying anything that resembled the concept car, and that if I were a new prospective Jaguar client I wouldn’t even bother considering buying from them.
Their concept car design, which they say borrows nothing from anything that has ever existed before, has in my view no redeeming features. It is blocky, seems to provide little in the way of anything that can be said to be remotely innovative, and just looks nothing at all like a powerful luxury car that Jaguar is famous for.
I can only assume that Jaguar believes its future customers will have absolutely no imagination whatsoever. In my humble opinion, Giugiaro’s 1980 FIAT Panda has more notable design elements than Jaguar’s Type 00 concept
With regard to my book writing, I have translated about 30% of the book I published in English last year. This Portuguese language version will also have a limited distribution but it’s something that I’d promised and therefore I expect to be on track for publishing at the year end.
A book about my early days in banking and specifically banking in the Middle East, is in progress with three chapters completed so far and in order to completed by the year end I need to complete the chapter a week which will give me something like 40 chapters altogether. I think it’s doable as long as I don’t get interrupted again.
That’s all the news I have. Hopefully more next month.
Quite a while ago – it was in September 2022 – I began a review of alternatives to Meta’s Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram as well as Twitter which was in the process of migrating to X.
I was unable to complete my review of those applications but got as far as making a list of alternatives. Domestic responsibilities then took over my time so the review was killed off.
In the intervening period I added Cara to the list and, more recently, began to use it.
Cara is a portfolio and social network platform for artists and fans of the entertainment art industry. That’s what it says on the tin.
In essence Cara is similar to Instagram, which is why I like it. The majority of users seem to be illustrators and animators, judging by their posts, though there are also photographers and painting artists.
The icons at the bottom of the screen are: Home – where all posts are located; Search – which allows one to “discover” through filtered searches of the app; Messages – one can message other users; Notifications – a listing of all likes and comments; and Portfolio – all images that have been posted to ones profile that have been designated as Portfolio images. These are separated into Portfolio images and Hidden images . hidden ones are those that have been posted but not included in the Portfolio. I like this since I think it better to have a limited Portfolio that can be changed without viewers trawling through a mass of images and getting bored. I have decided to maintain 15 images in the portfolio, all visible without scrolling, and to replace the oldest image when I add a new one.
One can post videos or still images in square, portrait or landscape format. Viewers may comment or simply add a heart (like).
At this stage I am still learning how to use Cara but on balance I think it is a great replacement for Instagram. Once I have mastered the app I will provide an update.
I hope that is a useful, though brief, description.
I was up early and checked my account for the missing transfer. No show despite being scheduled to arrive in my account today. NB Different time zone so it was already midday in UK by the time I checked.
I spent time crafting and sending notes of complaint to my bank and an apology to the solicitor who was trying to send the money. This took up most of the day.
What I find really annoying is that the bank takes no responsibility for their incompetence. They have lots of little boxes but all disconnected!
Just before lunch my wife noticed oil under the car. I traced the leak which, not being a motor expert, I think is a gasket that needs to be replaced. When I tried to move the car out of the heavy rain I discovered another problem. Maybe the starter motor but I really have no idea. We need to find a mechanic.
So yet another day wasted.
Projects
My work projects:
– Watercolour birds
I transferred 3 of my instagram posts to my Cara account today. I also discovered how to ensure images from posts to Cara are included in my Cara portfolio. Easy … I need to keep my eyes open when doing stuff!
All new paintings will go direct to Cara but not to Instagram.
A miserable, wet day though the sun shone for a while. My money transfer issue took up more time than I wanted, as did domestic tasks, but I was able to get some work done on my Stories blog (Shoot Stories).
The day ended with a power outage with intermittent failures to re-start. Last time this happened it killed my Mac which I hope can be repaired without lost of contents. The outage was caused by a vehicle hitting a power line post. The issue for me is that the internet remains offline for 10 to 30 minutes once the power returns, and sometimes needs to be re-booted. The intermittent power failures continued every half hour or so, possibly due to heavy rain, until the early hours.
Projects
My work projects:
– Watercolour birds
I transferred 3 of my instagram posts to my Cara account today. It is easy enough to do, takes no time, but I do not want to post too rapidly on Cara. Ensuring a regular flow is good. I will try to average 2 per day and see how things go.
All new paintings will go direct to Cara but not to Instagram.
– Watercolour landscapes
Nothing new.
– Acrylic birds
Still waiting for support stock
– Oil birds
Still waiting for support stock
– Ceramic tile designs
Nothing produced yet!
– Target is now 3 books by year end.
The first short story (literally an extract only) will be posted on my Stories blog (Shoot Stories) on Friday (7th Feb). There will be one story posted every fortnight thereafter.
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