I stumbled across this user interface collection photo-set at flickr. There are some really lovely UI examples in here - 768 of ‘em! I shall be browing through them for some time.

I’m also getting a serious yen for a Munny to deface. The creativity people are bringing to bear on these little plastic blank canvases is amazing. There’s something really compelling in these bizarre and wonderful variations evolving from the same starting point.

I haven’t posted in an age, because I’ve been busybusybusy working - unfortunately nothing I can show on here. In the meantime, go take a look at the lovely illustration work of Sarah McIntyre at Jabberworks. Her very prolific blog puts me to shame.

As a paltry offering, I drew these in honour of Easter today:

…which reminds me: I’d better start sorting out my seeds for planting.

Happy Halloween!

I’ve been busy, busy, busy for the past couple of months and so have barely had time to breathe, let alone post anything! That said, I can finally mention the Xanga Minis project, as it was officially launched yesterday: Xanga Minis are here!

These are little animated gift icons that Xanga users can buy with their ‘eProp’ currency. I was commissioned to illustrate and animate the five below; these were drawn directly into Flash, because I knew they’d need to be animated, although I did sketch a couple on paper first. In fact, you can see some rough versions of the soup (chicken noodle!) and heart in a previous sketch post here. I was contemplating posting the Flash animations, but I think I’ll leave those for Xanga users to discover. The style brief was quite open, so these were huge fun to create! Go, go, go create Xanga blogs!

Okay, I’m off to do work on another drypoint plate for printing tomorrow. I discovered the wonderful joys of offsetting prints onto plates last time, so this will be my first two-colour/multi-plate intaglio print.

(I just realised that I started this blog almost exactly a year ago: happy birthday piemash blog!)

I’m so behind with updating this thing! I took a course in Photo Etch with Jill McKeown at the weekend, but I’ll leave the write up of that ’til I have photos of the prints (they’re still drying under a stack o’ boards in the studio). Photo Etch = Love.

I briefly went home to London a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t been back in a few years, so it was a wee bit of a culture shock. My beloved Borough Market and South Bank are now uber-trendy capitals of culture. It’s lovely to see the development going on down there, but a tiny part of me misses the old tranquility of the river. The Borough and Waterloo were my childhood hunting grounds - nearly every weekend my dad would take us on a photo expedition from Hay’s Galleria, past the Kathleen & May, the Clink, and along the river up to Westminster. I used to skateboard under the Royal Festival Hall, and one of my first jobs was at the then-newly-opened London Aquarium. Of course, I adore the Tate Modern - I’ve always loved the Bankside Power Station, and I have a vivid memory of my dad promising me a fiver if I could count all the bricks in the building. I rummaged in my parent’s attic and dug out a load of my old A Level photography prints of the dilapidated old dock warehouses at the Borough - these are now food and drink emporiums. Still, we got some gorgeous mushrooms and unusual tomatoes. Mmm.

One of the highlights was this interactive aquatic sculpture, ‘Appearing Rooms’ by Jeppe Hein:

These were four ‘rooms’ created by high pressure water-jets - each wall rose and fell at random so, once inside, you had to shift from room to room to get out without getting soaked. Mum and I stayed in it for far too long - I want one!

I didn’t get a chance to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward (I remember being amazed by ‘Field’ in situ at the Hayward many years ago), but I did take a photo of one of the many full-body casts dotted around the area like attemptive suicides.

I love them.

Gabriel’s Wharf is still just the same, and I bought my first original print from the Southbank Printmaker’s Gallery: an etching by Teresa Pateman that I fell in love with. She had another piece there that was absolutely gorgeous - a glowing pot of tea and a custard cream - but my wallet was a bit bare. I must find out how she gets those gorgeous glowing colours and gradients in her prints.