I have really been enjoying the light on my walk to work this week - beautiful shadows in the air.
This is a nasty patch of grass where too many dog owners don't bother with those little bags. It felt transformed, but I still wouldn't walk across it.
Bit different from my usual finds:
Somewhere silent tears fall at the loss of this scruffy fellow.
Matryoshka bins.
I thought this most odd, but thinking about it, how else do you throw a bin away?
I made a suite of kids games for Lloyds TSB whilst I was still at Saint.
For one reason or another they stalled them going live. However I have just found out they are now up!
You can play them here: Lloyds TSB - Billy and Stan London 2012.
There is a bit of disused ground just by where I am working in Borough.
Shok-1 is a local street artist who uses this and some of the surrounding wall, doors, kiosks, and shop shutters as his gallery space.
I have been enjoying seeing new work appearing, sometimes watching a piece grow and change over a few days, a couple of times catching him in the act.
The work is big, but he puts in some lovely small details.
Back in the summer, we went for a weekend camping, and I tried my hand at spoon carving.
I thought the main techniques would be similar to those I learned on the bowyer course. This was true, but just showed me how much I had forgotten! However, whilst making the bow was largely big strokes and the very fine finessing to finish, this was all about close shaping strokes with lots of control from the start, so I was shown and got to practice some new cutting strokes.
Tools used were straight knife for the primary shaping, and a crook knife for the bowl. (It is also possible to burn out the bowl with an ember, but that's not what I wanted to learn...)
The course was very informal and we chatted rather too much, so I didn't quite finish my spoon, although I did get it to a usable rough state. It just needed some fine shaping and smoothing to finish. I had intended to do this after I got home, but have decided to keep my first spoon as-is. I will polish up my next one.
Photos show the newly split Birch, through drawing and roughing out the spoon shape, to nearly complete project.
I shouldn't have tried the paddle shaped handle as this added significantly to the complexity of carving the handle, and I should probably have tried to make a smaller spoon overall. This would have meant less complex cutting so I might have finished, but I guess you find out more than the direct skills learning these crafts...
I have only had a quick look at Ryoji Ikeda's work, but it looks amazing - creating sound and visual from data / noise.
Spent a little longer with Alva Noto.
Check his videos - headphones on and prepare to be assailed.
Love his ringtones, and funkbugfx down at the bottom of the page is great!
Just put another project live - a media serving site for Land Rover's latest concept, the DC100.
There are two vehicles: the standard DC100 (Tool), and the Sport (Cool) versions.
I programmed the 3D space and car driving engine using Away3D. Additional interface elements created in vanilla Flash (as3).
Lots of work optimizing the main driving engine to get fastest / smoothest performance whilst allowing for a (relatively) high poly-count so Land Rover's vehicles could look their best!
