This morning, for some reason, I put pen to paper and knocked up a quick sketch of her within a couple of minutes. You probably don't realise what a major thing that is for me to have done, but it is. I just don't draw. I have such complete block about my ability to even do so that this is actually the first time in months that I've even tried. It might even have been the first time this year. So, it's a big thing to me that I suddenly felt the urge to do so, because it's something that never, ever happens, but today it did, and I didn't even think about it. I just grabbed the first pen and a pad of paper, and drew.

Of course, a couple of minutes in I lost my confidence again, as I made her nose bigger and pointier than I wanted to, and I bodged up her mouth, which made her look a bit cranky (hence the comment about needing coffee, because that seemed a good reason to be cranky!)

Anyway, my point of this post is really this: Jenny Everywhere is a character with so much potential, because she's a copyright-free open source superhero with the power to travel between dimensions! She can fit into almost anything, and she's got a great attitude, and, frankly, I don't think nearly enough people know about her. So I thought it would be fun to come up with a "draw Jenny" challenge — a bit like the "draw Batgirl" challenge that did the rounds of the blogosphere a couple of years ago (not that I'm expecting it to go quite so viral).

Here's the pertinent information about Jenny Everywhere, aka The Shifter:
"Jenny Everywhere has been described both as existing in every reality and being able to shift between realities. This gives the character the ability to be inserted into the continuity of any existing or new work, such as various comics or webcomics. The concept may also be extended to other mediums [sic]

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish."

More information on Jenny Everywhere here: theshifterarchive.com/faqs.htm

I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone takes up the challenge! If you do, tag your blog posts/Flickr pictures etc "drawjenny" and hopefully they'll be easy to find. If you want to leave comments here on my blog, or on my livejournal, I'll try to post as many as I can next week.

(Might try it again with eyes, as well.)

I went to my first Shoot Experience event on Saturday. I'd always been put off by the £50 entrance fee they require from each team, but Ade asked if I wanted to join his team, so I figured I might as well see what it was like.

Each team was given four random lines from a story which they then had to capture photographically in whichever way they saw fit. They weren't complete sentences, rather they were words or concepts. These were ours:

We were going to go to Postman's Park for "walled urban park", but after wandering 'round a little I was struck with the idea to go to St Dunstan's In The East instead, because it's a little further off the beaten track and a lot more picturesque. En route I popped into a Tesco Metro to buy some hundreds-and-thousands so that we could use them to spell out the word "thousands".

Stu had the bright idea of getting some blank paper and blu-tack to make empty thought-bubbles which we stuck on a wall for "they had completely forgotten".

The only one we really failed with was "they mistrusted", where we resorted to the rather obvious subject of CCTV. Initially we wanted to go to Whitehall to cover the double mistrust of CCTV and politicians, but because neither the Jubilee line nor the District line were working we didn't have time to get there. It didn't really matter; the photo Stu got was enough to suffice for the sake of the story.

Although it was a lot of fun watching all the photos illustrate the story in order at the end of the day, our team all agreed that it would have been more fun to have had more photo opportunities, with a list of clues or something. It was also annoying that once we'd chosen the four pictures we wanted to represent the clues, we had to delete all the other photos off that memory card, no matter if there were other good ones there. The organisers did suggest bringing extra cameras, and all three of us did, but it's easy to forget to take multiple shots of everything with more than one camera, especially if you've already taken several shots in order to make sure you got a good one.

To be honest, I'm still not sure what exactly we were paying for, and I don't really feel like it gave good enough value for the money they charged. One of the selling points had been prizes and all the beer you can drink after the shoot, but these were all sponsored — and the beer ran out. I suppose they probably have to pay a lot of money to use the Turbine Hall, but it's not like it was being used for anything else at the time — there aren't any installations in there at the moment. It was quite a fun day, but it definitely dragged a bit in the places (where we were just hanging around waiting for the organisers to get themselves sorted.

Having organised scavenger hunts myself, I know a lot of work goes into events like this, and I don't object to paying a fee to take part. However, I'm not sure I can easily recommend Shoot Experience for the price that they charge. Our team — Stu, Doug and myself (Ade couldn't make it due to a leg injury, unfortunately) — did enjoy ourselves, but agreed we could have had the same amount of fun just wandering around London without having to pay fifty quid for the privilege. So I recommend just doing that, instead, really, especially St Dunstan's In The East. It's been a favourite spot of mine for years and it's nice to see that it's still as peaceful as ever.

There's an exhibition of the photos at Host Gallery from May 23-30.

[strangely I thought this post had been published yesterday, when I wrote it, but it didn't for some reason.]

(click on the picture to get notes about all the items)

Come and join the International Championship League of Matchbox Stuffers. My new favourite game!