Five a Day

Well I got busy putting together a showcase of some of my fruit a veg images.  It was heavy on the bananas and apples as thats what I tend to bring to work for lunch.  I have to take an hour lunch so I can spend 30 - 40 minutes drawing.  A lot of  it tends to be digital but I do break out the pencils as well.  I really like the watercolour pencils for this kind of ad hoc effort.  Sometimes it feel repetitive to work on the same subjects but looking at this collection  should keep working on them.  They were created in the last 2 years.

So the Dot character was made using 3D printing.  That is achieved by taking model information stored in a 3D modeling program and turning into a real 3D model that can be held and used.  The principle application of this kind of kit lies in the design and engineering worlds where there is a  requirement for prototypes.  With the increasing accessibility of 3D modeling programs such as Maya, Mudbox and the opensource Blender the uses and applications are likely to increase.  

The variety of uses of to which the 3D printing know how can be seen at the Shapeways website.   They can take your design and print it for you at a quite reasonable price. Alternatively you can choose from a range of other designers work.
Below is their 'how its done video'. 



Products available their include Lightpoem for LED candle,  Message Cuff Medium

or this cute fellow  Hoodie 5cm

If you look at these items you can see they are actually printed with a couple of different materials.

Join The Dots

Found the video below produced by Aardman. 


Along with this great clip which is a short 'making of the movie'.




They have already won the award Best Animation at this year’s British Television Advertising Craft Awards and epic awards with this movie.  

Most interesting is that they drew inspiration from the application of the cell phone cameras use in the remote diagnosis of disease in third world countries.



Another cool technology is what was used to create dot.  I will look at that next time. 
 

The Start

This is my first post on my first blog. I had a few false starts before this but I have a feeling this will a serious effort- until tomorrow.
I suppose I should set some agenda as to what will be the scope and content of this page. for the most part I am going to use this space to track my artistic efforts. I work full time and in the 'present economic climate' I should be glad of that but in the past 2 years I have put a bit of effort into developing my skills mostly in photoshop and oils and I want to push this further. I hope to use this space to document that effort and maybe some other folks will join in?