The little pink elephant

My second attempt at some claymation...

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Mala

Arrived home on Friday to find that junior had beent treated to some plasticine. And as ever I had more fun with his toys than he did...

Had a quick go at some clay animation too. Always wanted to have a go at that. Dying to get a bit of time to give it a proper go though...

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The Praying Mantis

Not sure what this is. It started out as a sketch (yes that thing on the right there) and turned into what I guess you could call a multimedia doodle (need sound).

Pretty Vacant

New Graffiti animation from Blu

Blu has released a new stop-motion graffiti animation. Each frame of this would stand up as decent graffiti. Yet its also an animation. Which is fairly amazing. I originally posted about Blu on my Graffiti 2.0 post and there's some footage from the first one mixed in to this much bigger piece:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Speaking of graffiti, apparantly this wounded Celtic Tiger is somewhere around Dublin. Anyone see it?

Firewire slothiness

We've had a video camera for years. Six or seven years. I only got around to getting a firewire card last year. Then a few months ago I got a firewire cable and then this week I got the correct firewire cable. Organised or what?! So straight to business when I got it - I wanted to test it straight away and the clip below was the first tape I grabbed from the pile.

It's the game, SuperFlyGuy, that four of us made in college a couple of years ago for the end of year exhibition. You could fly around the city we built, using gloves that had a sensor inside (Wii had a spy in our camp!). So you could just fly around by doing Superman motions. If you look closely, you can see a few dublin-inspired buildings. Irishstu, did some sterling work on it, including the spaceship and the monorail/trains.

Still drawing willys

Yeay my first published graphic work (well first time in a book anyway). Much bigger news of course is that the first copies of the book have arrived. Congrats again to the Missus. Booyakasha!

I reckon my images would have been a fair bit different had I not read Tufte's classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information last year.Very worthwhile read.

Inflatable sculptures

Here's some amazingly creative street art from Joshua Allen Harris. He makes shapes out of plastic bags and ties them to air vents above the subway. Watch what happens to this plastic dog when a train goes by underneath. (There is no sound)

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Via the wonderful Wooster Collective.

Pottering through butterflies

I found myself with a day off midweek that I didn't really need in the end, but I took it anyway. It just seemed too complicated to unbook it! So I got to potter around town. I can never decide what to do with precious moments like that (if you don't have children, you won't be able to relish just how precious they are - those moments, not the rug rats).

I remembered an announcement that the Dublin Improv Movement were looking for secret agents to turn up with some travel money and that sounded like a great adventure. But when I checked it was Thursday morning (anyone know what happened there?). Very dissapointed I resumed my pottering. Walking along Grafton street, I tried to figure out why people gave money to a woman who did nothing but paint herself gold. But at least the Spanish Goatboy with the wooden mouth wasn't around, that thing gives me the creep. I don't know if it's rooted in some Spanish folklore or what - but it should never have been allowed off the Ramblas. Please don't feed it silver. He might just go away forever.

The sun was shining, so a I bought a book and went to Stephen's Green. That's what has me halfway through a gazullion different books and to the end of none. A woman and her mother sat on the bench beside me to feed a Twix to the pigeons. One of them surprised me by perching on my shoe! I asked her to get off...and stop creating diabetic monster-pigeons.

I had a hankering to see some Art but Kilmainham was too far without car. I pottered around the Original Print gallery and then onto the Temple Bar Gallery. Niamh O'Malley's a situation, a situation, and a story was on show. I tripped over the first A situation, didn't know what to make of the Second but liked A Story. The first piece (A situation) doesn't work in the sunlight, it's a clouded image with coloured slides projected onto it. I'm sure it was great on the opening night but they need to black out the windows or move it into one of the back rooms. A story is a simple but elegantly executed allegory of butterflies and time.

From one butterfly to another, I went to see The diving bell and the Butterfly (Butterflies have to be the most common metaphors in art). It's a wonderful film, but unlike some reviews would have you believe, I did not leap from the IFI imbibed with the zest for life. I just fancied some soup. (Cafe Café Irie spoiled the run of things by not having any butterfly soup but their replacement was still yum). I found the camerawork in The Diving Bell as fascinating as the story though. They seemed to use the same kind of tilt-shift method that can be used to make fake-model photos. Like the ones I did here. In the The Diving Bell, the effect you get is a realisticly claustrophobic first-person view.

I accidentally typed castrophobic there at first. I think Freud is trying to tell me something. The family jewels will be well-guarded this weekend.

100

Less because I think my 100th post is a huge milestone and more to do with the fact that I like making images. And this is as good an excuse as any. I'm not sure why it's made entirely of insects. Slightly inspired by some great typography.

Bananal Antbird

I like making images. Was thinking of doing an image-a-week kinda thing. Here's a good excuse for some image-making. I saw this idea on (the gorgeously designed) Sabrinadent.com recently but Grandad sent out an open invitation to join in. The idea is that you go to three different random link generators to get your band title, album title and album photo, then go makey makey.

Here's the three random links:
• Go here. The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
• Go here. The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
• Go here. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

I got very lucky landing on that great photo and the title fits in by chance but the album title makes no sense whatsover!

Wallpaper tiles

I seem to get a lot of people coming here from www.irishblogs.ie/categories/wallpaper/ looking for wallpaper and I've just got one measly post tagged with wallpaper, so I've done up a few more tiled wallpaper images...

And here are some drawings, photos and photoshoppery that could be used as wallpaper:

Fake model photos

Had a bit of Photoshop fun making holiday snaps look like model towns. Here's two of the better ones:

Worked well on Nerja. Looks more like Lego land. Large version. Original image.

A riverside in Stockholm looks like a Guinea pig is about to arrive on a boat. Large version. Original image.

There are some great one's on the Tilt-shift miniature fakes Flickr group. Here's a video featuring the original Tilt-Shift photographic technique.

Perry Bible Fellowship

The Perry Bible Fellowship, BY FAR my favourite comic strip, has finally gone to print. Pre-order one now. I've got two on the way.

Christ, that's definitely the earliest I've bought a "that'll-be-a-good-christmas-present-for-someone-better-buy-two!".

Graffiti 2.0

Light Graffiti

Take some glowsticks, set a long exposure time on your camera, then start painting the air and what have you got.... Light Graffiti!

• Picasweb photoset from Donegal
• A Light Graffiti Flickr Set
• Various photos on Linkinn
• The Blue Peter Light Graffiti Kit.

Graffiti Animation

First two videos are by Blu. Amazing stuff. More pictures and videos at www.blublu.org/blog. The third one is at the side of a railtrack in Germany and the last is Mark Ronson's fantastic remix of Radiohead's Just done by the The Motion Group/Abbey Road Video Services.

Reverse Graffiti

The logical progression of fingering Wash Me on a dirty car.

Lots of photos on weburbanist.com

Graffiti Illusionists

• Julian Beever

Three Dimensional Graffiti?

Ok this is pushing it. Not it's exactly graffiti and I might as well start talking about stencilling and Banksy but everyone and their dog knows about all that. Anyway I love Mark Jenkin's street art and would love to have the time and the nerve to try something similar. If you like this, keep an eye on www.woostercollective.com

One last link for the road .

It's just good old 2D graffiti but as someone else put it, it's like an illustrator got bored of working indoors.

A sketch from my summer holiday

The Persistence of Memory

A few years ago I got sick of having a terrible memory. I've since nailed it down to a slighlty bizarre portion of bad memory in that I can't for the life of me remember proper nouns. So I can't remember names of pubs, shops, roads, restaurants, people etc. However, like most people I'm better with faces, much better though, I could see a bloke walk by in the street and remember that he was two people ahead of me, in a queue in a chipper, in Dun Laoighre, eight years ago. So I have a good visual memory and when I came across a book called Master Your Memory by Tony Buzan, I scanned the back cover and saw that it had a system to improve your memory through your visual memory. So you could remember long numbers as images in a story for example. But it didn't really make any sense without it's precursor Use your memory. So I bought that and spent every morning on the bus to work practising the techniques in both. And they are fairly amazing techniques. Definitely a step above your average self help book.

The first thing I memorised, just for practise, was Pi to 500 decimal places. The second half of Master Your Memory contains lists of trivia to memorize so I went to work on them.

• All the countries of the world - including their capitals and currency
• The periodic table - including atomic number, atomic weights etc
• 100 most frequently used words in Spanish
• 100 Painters - including a famous work, its location, the artist's lifespan, nationality and school of art

For the list of painters, I tracked down all the paintings on the web to make it a bit easier, and then discovered that the a lot of the data isn't that well researched on any of the lists. When I reviewed the book on Amazon, I slated the content (while praising the system) for not researching any of the material properly even in it's later editions. And Tony Buzan is definitely not short on pennies.

So, after quite a bit of waffle, the main point of this post is that list of paintings - if you're looking for all the paintings in this list like I did, or just want to have a look through 100 famous paintings, here's my list of 100 Artists, thoroughly researched, and backed up by a few books I've read over the years. And more importantly, there's an image to go with each painting. There were a few cases where I couldn't find the famous work that Tony Buzan chose, the fact that they were so hard to find was testamant in itself that they weren't the most relevant works. In a couple of other cases I chose a different painting anyway just because it seemed much more relevant - but in most cases, I stuck to the original list as much as possible - apart from correcting all the mistakes, which were mostly dates and locations of paintings.

By the way, after years of this 'Brain Training' I still have a terrible memory! It didn't do a thing to improve my day to day memory. Arsebags! Still an amusing way to pass the time at the bus stop though as you have to keep going through these lists in your head. Specially if you have a head like a sieve, like I do.

100 Artists - 100 paintings

Zoomquilt 2

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

Mannequin

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.

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

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

Wallpaper design

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.

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

New drawing....

Shahzia Sikander

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.