Zoomquilt 2

Aug 17, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, flash, web

Can you remember zoomquilt from a few years ago? Well zoomquilt2 is here and it’s bigger, badder and better.

Mannequin

Jul 26, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, Chirico, design, Metaphysical, painting, waffle

This post would probably be more at home on homebug – but I’ll take the conch on this one – every morning I walk by Clerys on O’Connel street and wonder WTF are they thinking!? D’you ever see a big company do something very wrong and you can’t figure out why no one has told them yet? Or even more likely is that every body knows the blunder yet some middle-mismanagement or office politico prevents it from happening. So here’s the thing; they gutted the inside of the shop and got the decoraters in. Grand. Paid a small fortune no doubt. Yet Jo-walking-by-Soap wouldn’t know any different because their shop windows look like they’re still being decorated by the same dusty old window dresser for the last 30 years. They need to take a walk up Grafton street or rent a copy of Mannequin!

I spy with my little eye an opportunity to BIG UP one of my favourite dead artists, Giorgio de Chirico. He had a thing for mannequins you see. De Chirico is one of the few surreal artists who managed to capture the essence of dreams. People say that about Dali but his paintings were way too polished and detailed to vaguely resemble any dream. Chirico was a big influence to Dali, as well as Max Ernst, and Magritte to name a few, and some of them directly copied his Metaphysical style. Every time I see that tower from the LUAS, (somewhere between Windy Arbour and Cowper ), I’m reminded of his Nostalgia of the Infinite (below) even though they’re nothing alike. Actually I think every time I see a tower I’m reminded of it.

PSST! Pass it on.

Jul 22, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, design, films

Love this. Can you remember that childhood game you used to play where you’d fold a piece of paper in three, and one of you would draw the legs, then another the body, another the head? (Child hood game? Pretty sure I played that recently!)Well here’s a video version. PSST! Pass it on is a collaboration between different teams of designers, animators, directors and 3D artists. I love the end of the clip below.

Well worth going to the Pass it on website to see the new batch in hi res.

Peeling Sticker tutorial

Jul 12, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, photoshop

I like this peeling sticker tutorial
http://www.photoshoplab.com/peeled-sticker-style-effect.html

Wallpaper design

Jul 4, 2007 by John    3 Comments    Posted under: art, design, wallpaper

Had a go at designing some wallpaper. Was really for a website but I reckon it’d look alright in a living room! Maybe. And works ok as a desktop wallpaper.

Flip up side ya head.

May 4, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, random, waffle

Random computer thingy:

Discovered this a while ago by accident and then forgot about it. But it just happened again. I think it’s because I have a dodgy keyboard with sticky keys. I probably should clean it – but the last time I took a keyboard apart to clean it, I had to type without any Ts or Us for weeks. Which was grea fn!

I haven’t mentioned what I’m on about yet have I? Well here it is. If you press CTRL + ALT + any of the arrow keys on your keyboard, you can rotate your screen left or right, or flip it upside down. Mental innit? Press CTRL + ALT + UP arrow for normality. Didn’t work? Must be only the newer machines. Only works in work for me. This can come in very handy if you have an upside down head.

Apparently this was just supposed to be a feature for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition but got carried through to standard intel machines.

Incidentally, I was going to add images of the shortcut keys before I caught a dose of The Laziness, but they weren’t as easy to find as I’d imagined. However I did stumble across some interesting paintings of keyboard keys.

Sure he’s just a big softy

Apr 23, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, drawing

New drawing….

Shahzia Sikander

Apr 23, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art

I got around to visiting the IMMA for the first time in ages over the weekend. The Georgia O’Keefe exhibit
is very small and not her best work and second on the bill is Alex Katz, kitsch, camp, large scale portraits.
Not bad but the highlight for me was Shahzia Sikander.
She specialies in small Indo-Persian miniature painting but her large scale work is really good too, a mixture of current illustration trends & more traditional Pakistani influences. The animation
on display is also fab, a clever motion graphics mash-up of her own illustrations.