Hello Again!

I’m back with another post on my vacation trip, this one about boats. Boats are ubiquitous in Kerala - something we rarely see when living in the city. Perhaps there are a few in the lakes around Bangalore. But boats really do come to life in coastal Kerala.

Resting in the Backwaters

Here is a sketch of a boat tied up in a backwater which I drew while resting under a tree on the other bank of the backwater. Even at rest this boat conveyed a sense of movement. It was bobbing up and down gently on the …

The hotel we stayed at in Kovalam had a “Crow Problem”. There were lots of crows and would steal your food if you were not looking. I was having a snack outdoors in the afternoon - and this pair were watching me intently - ready to pounce.

The crow problem was bad enough that they had to post a security guard during evening tea to keep the crows away.

I had fun drawing the alert crows and the security guard. And we had some nice snacks at tea. Win win!

Abhishek Mishra …

Hi!! and A Very Happy New Year 2023 to You!

A few days ago, I wrote a post about our trip to South Kerala. This is the second in the series.

I was sitting near one of the backwaters in Kovalam and this stork sat down in front of me on a piece of wood sticking out of the water - and started grooming its feathers. I had just enough time to draw this quick sketch before it flew away.

I will post more sketches in the coming days. Stay tuned!

-Abhishek (art noob)

The Vacation

In August this year we went on a week’s vacation to Kovalam, Varkala and Thiruvananthapuram, in the South of Kerala. All three places are located close to each other. This time we travelled by train from Bangalore to Trivandrum. This was a fun experience to be travelling in Indian Railways after a long time.

Instead of my camera I decided to take along my sketching supplies. I took a sketchbook with thick watercolour paper, some pens, pencils and brush pens.

I’m going to write a few posts with one or more sketches chosen from the trip …

The first source-only release coll v0.1.0-alpha.0 of coll is out. It is an ANSI C collections library with only two datastructures implemented at the moment:

• An ArrayList - A list datastructure which manages allocation/deallocation internally.
• A Map backed by the ArrayList (i.e. no hashing) - suitable only for tiny maps.

For further details check the project page coll.

A new release PicoTurtle v0.2.0-alpha.0 of PicoTurtle is out. This is the seventh in the recent series of weekly releases. It is also the first release with a windows 64-bit installer. There are several minor changes and bug-fixes in this release. You can read all about it on the release page.

The windows installer can be downloaded here -> PicoTurtle v0.2.0-alpha.0 for Win/64-bit

A new source-only release PicoTurtle v0.1.0-alpha.5 of PicoTurtle is out. This release has minor bug fixes, better documentation and an improved docs viewer, and a new about dialog. The release page contains detailed release notes.

Few changes in the CMake build to support a windows installer are added to the release. These will be used to publish a binary installer for Windows starting next release.

The first source-only release c-color-names v0.1.0-alpha.0 of c-color-names is out. It is an ANSI C API for the excellent collection of colors in the color-names NodeJS package. I use this for some my experiments and projects.

For further details check the project page c-color-names.

We recently moved to a new place in Bangalore. And I’ve been busy with one thing or another for the past 3 months. However, we’ve settled down now.

My son and I were taking a walk a few weeks ago on a beautiful late Sunday morning. I had taken a camera along to take photos if we spotted something interesting. And we did…

This is a trio rudra-palash flowers - and I really liked the symmetry of these three. I like the way the photo turned out - hope you like it as well.

That’s it for now… Hope …

A new source-only release PicoTurtle v0.1.0-alpha.4 of PicoTurtle is out. The release page contains detailed release notes. However here are a few highlights:

1. Turtle Lua Console - allowing turtle run in an interactive lua console widget. This is similar to the browser developer console functionality - although with fewer features.
2. Find/replace - is enabled in the Turtle Lua editor.
3. LUA_PATH - The path of the currently run lua file is added to the LUA_PATH.