Dog portrait

With some time off for Easter - two bank holiday weekends - I took a short camping trip. I also ended up dog sitting. Unusually the time off conincided with some unseasonably warm and dry weather. We treked in the Connemara National Park. If your visiting this part of the world do try to make your way there.
This was a photo I took of the dog after a little Photoshopping.

This image is how it started out.

Easter Bunny

Lolling Lizard

I  have kept working on the vectors and choose a lizard as the next unwilling victim.  I ended up with very much the same colour scheme as the last one but it was not intentional.

Lolling Lizard

Spring Sheep

Last Sunday was the first really spring day I got to enjoy. There may have been some earlier but as I work in a room with no windows I may have missed some. 

The fields were full of sheep and their lambs in sunshine. One of those days when it is just great being there.

Animation Shorts

The creation of an animation short is an interesting exercise.  Gone are the days when the cartoon was played alongside feature films in cinemas.  Instead these creations don't really have a readily recognisable forum or stage where they can find wide exposure. 

The form itself is interesting as it is usually the work of just a small group of people or maybe just one brave soul like students creating course work or a professional looking to explore personal boundaries.

This can mean that the vision is less likely to be diluted and daring it its execution.

The Internet has provided a place to show off these creations with some finding fame on the likes of You Tube.

An example of a personal project is Ryan Woodward used his considerable  gesture drawing skill  taking it to produce an evocative piece of animation The Thought of You.  There are more details on the process on his site http://conteanimated.com/

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

This animation was created as a video for an Australian group the Audreys song Sometimes The Stars.


Sometimes the Stars from The Audreys on Vimeo.


There is an interview with  the director Ari Gibson and art director Jason Pamment here

Out of Sight   was  a graduation project by Yu Ya-ting, Yeh Ya-hsuan and Chung Ling from the Department of Multimedia and Animation Art at National Taiwan University of Arts.  It is a hand drawn imagining of the world perceived a blind girl.

Mapping St Patrick

One of the great things about the growth in digitisation of library and museum collections means that the collections can be browsed without travel and material that even if you made that journey may not be available to the general public.  

As St Patricks Day arrives (17 March) I thought it might be a good time to look at the mapping of Ireland what could be found online .  The earlier maps were drawn with little real geographical knowledge and were therefore prone to bias and perhaps exaggeration of a locations size to match its perceived importance. 

The earliest map of the British Isles is the Mappa Munde dated 1025-1050, available in the British Library  collection. 

Ireland - an undistinguished blob- but mapped nonetheless.

Also in the British Library collection is this map on vellum from the 1530s.  This has some  rudimentary coastal detail.  What it lacks in detail it makes up for in character with some nice illustration. 

This map in the British Library collection dated in the mid 1500s has more detail with lakes, rivers, mountains and Islands.  

This map does mark the location of St Patricks purgatory (marked St Patrick).

In the Library of Congress collection are some later maps showing the growing accuracy of mapping.  This map dates from 1598 and also marks St Patricks purgatory in Lough Derg. 

 And this on this map Loug Derg and St Patricks purgatory are marked together. 

St Patricks Purgatory was and remains an important site of pilgrimage.  

This is how it appears on google maps today. 

You have to look hard to find it!

Happy St Patricks Day !