I found RainyMood.com over in someone’s links and fell in love. Gosh, that’s a perfect backdrop to some classical music I might listen to! It’s running now, the rain pouring away virtually. It’s very relaxing.

We don’t get rain very often at all. It’s a matter of a downpour three times a year, lasting several days and thoroughly flooding the main roads. It’s an annual disaster, although loved by the locals longing for some rain, myself included.

Just take a look at this! That’s a very quiet inner road, no big deal. Imagine city streets filling up. Whole inter-emirate roads! I’m looking at you, Emirates Road!

Nothing like a bit of hot, blistering summer! I rather liked this, I think I’ll follow on. I have a giant image collection, would be put to use.

The shells, rocks and coral all came from the beach down at Dibba. That’s Indian Ocean for you! I had them spray-varnished to show their colours, they look much brighter than when dry this way. I always wanted to make a frame like this, but only got around to it now.

This is the sort of creativity you only see once a year, during UAE National Day. This year, the drivers were extra-careful, there was a competition going about for the best decorated vehicle. Looks like this lad prepared well.

Held in DUCTAC, Mall of the Emirates, it was a bit of a long drive to see it, but I was there on its opening night and mingled with other illustrators, had a joint doodle session and had a brief interview with a staff member of an Arabic newspaper. It was a pretty nice experience for a first-time exhibition!

I decided to settle with four artworks – Demoness, Bird, Angelboy and Night Kisses Day, all done in my usual style. It was fun watching the public walk by and linger on my art, enjoying the detail, figuring out the patterns. Some of the artists there were published, others did it for fun. They came all over the world, too, spanning different continents and countries.

Angelboy

Night Kisses Day

Demoness

Bird

This is one of the ambigrams used in Angels in Demons, standing for the name of the group. See how the spaces in letters aid in the making of such an ambigram. The disjointed style of “a” helps to create two “l” at the beginning.

Yesterday I tried my hand at making a more fluid-looking ambigram of my name. Sufficed to say, it wasn’t easy at the beginning, but I think I ended up with something that has at least an inch of readability.

I ended up changing the style of the “R” from an uppercase to a lowercase letter – saved me a lot of headache and made it look much more fluid in the end.

And that’s the final sketch. I still want to render it in a vector program for easy handling later on and to make it truly symmetrical.

For easy anagram-making, check out this website. It appears to be using a specially adapted font for this sort of thing. What’s more, I’m amazed at the instant results. Seemingly anything can be fitted to spell anything both ways.

More for the read

Ambiblog – Ambigram Submission

Apart from doing that, I also decided (while the place is still small and manageable) to do some SEO optimization. Picking up the nearest link in Google, following instructions from there wasn’t all that difficult.

Granted, I didn’t do everything on the list, some points were already filled and some I just couldn’t figure out yet. I decided to put focus on the idea of tagging and describing everything on my site. Well, not everything, but practically everything. I added tags and descriptions to all of my images and galleries, described every category. Soon, I’ll be adding more tags into the mix as well for all of my posts.

There’s the arrival of Adsense in discrete places, a welcome guest on many thousands of websites on the internet. It doesn’t distract and provides a small source of revenue. Really, little effort for a penny earned.

A little something to tinker with and have some fun with your day. I ended up spending a good fifteen minuted playing around with the different notes and speeds, it’s impressive for the little gadget that it is. If you care enough, you can make very nice tunes with this – or plat just the same! Afterwards, share it with others! The sound you see here was my last tune.