At school and at home the great packing is in full effect. N has accomplished a huge amount at home. At work my classroom is currently in the ‘worse before it gets better’ phase. Sending belongings home and discarding reams of used paper.
Found an example artwork from early in the year:
NAIDOC week example piece. Watercolour pencils and marker on card. Sacred spaces special places. Students made some pretty incredible interpretations of their own special places in the style.
I was lucky enough to spend the morning at work designing origami information sharing devices in Illustrator. A nice change of pace. I’ll share the product once complete and approved for public display.
Tonsils are still very uncomfortable but not worse. I’m planning to hit the Calligraffiti WOTD again tonight after a workout and ironing. If I make it I’ll edit it in.
Completed over 2 years ago.
I was just last weekend struck with an idea for how to easily close the bottom opening in such a way that it would still be easy, when necessary to change the bulb.
I’ve yet to find a satisfactory way to make the joins without the fold shadow, other than 3D printing anyway.
Also note I’ve swapped to Flikr embeds in preference to Instagram. As with all things Fbook related Instagram has a developed a bit of a reek of puritanical distaste to it. #Freethenipple being but one example.
Here’s a video I’ve seen freebooted more than once:
Sounds like the beginning to a joke right… I got nothing.
Listen and enjoy peculiar beautiful visuals.
I found out that an artist/illustrator who’s work I’ve used extensively in lessons is making an appearance at Where The Wild Things Are tomorrow evening.
I’m planning to attend and perhaps even make a frivolous purchase.
Tonight, thanks to the gracious baby sitting skills of a colleague N and I were able to go to the cinema and see Spectre. Classicly formulaic Bond, at times thrilling, at times very cheesy. The plot, spoiler warning, largely revolves around the bad guy failing to kill 007 in ever larger and more elaborate set pieces. Lots of fun to get out of the house and spend an evening like social adults.
Reporting continues, I’ll do some calligraphy if I can still keep my eyes open when I get to the bottom of the maths assessment pile.
We were given this mobile among the many baby gifts. I liked the idea but found the execution lacking, so I made my own. I like mine better, it also had a large rubber band winding mechanism and I have considered trying to put a salable kit together.
Edit: Removed the dodgy .gif as it is not playing properly and I have neither time nor energy to try and repair it tonight.
Lastly, tonight I found one of the wife’s guilty pleasures left open among the chrome tabs.
Managed to get some serious marking done today. In an expensive cafe within the frenetic confines of the thankfully blissfully air conditioned Indropilly shopping centre. Also achieved food shopping, shoe shopping, finalising my NSW teacher registration application, circus with L and a tiny bit of laundry. I have since watched and read a number of interesting things.
Tried to figure out why when linking posts on Fbook I always get the same header image of the Jean Julien Peace Eiffel no matter what the featured image is here. Attempted two fixes, gave up for now.
Watched this and daydreamed about the workbenches I will make in my studio/workshop someday.
I also plan to get some digital painting done but have so far hit a number of hurdles.
First my tablet wasn’t even plugged in, mental hurdle vaulted.
Second my tablet drivers have not been installed since I updated to Win 10 a few weeks back.
Third that means all my presets and tablet shortcut keys need reassigned.
Fourth my preferred brush set was missing, found it.
Fifth the perspective template I want to play with, part of the perspective kits here (which I own) was missing. Unfortunately one of the three things I have bought’s download link has expired. Hopefully it is on another drive somewhere. Found a suitable perspective template but not the ‘Make your own’ tool I was looking for.
Stopped to figure out how to do the red dot brush re-size again. TLDR it’s Alt + Right click and drag. Up and Down for Hardness, Left and Right for Size.
Sixth now distracting myself writing this post instead.
So enough… painting time.
Edit Painting complete. Perspective was a wash, opted instead for a character study.
Yesterday we took a school excursion to see some genuinely peculiar pantomime. 12th Night Theatre hosted a performance of three one act adaptations of Roald Dahl stories. In order they were ‘The Twits’ which our classes studied earlier in the year, ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ & Georges Marvellous Medicine. It was an altogether singular experience. The students were very engaged, so that was a plus. The acting was camp and way overdone. The scripts were cheap abbreviations and the whole show finished with a surprise christian song, I tried and failed to find the song to include. Fortunately they skirted around the word ‘God’ except a final ‘god bless’. The secular nature of Australian education has been repeatedly subverted by Christian groups in my time as a teacher, this is a pretty mild example and even had I known they were going to include it I would have been all for the excursion. I just find it kind of funny. At the bus stop to leave there was a wild honey bee hive, fortunately not aggressive as we were in very close proximity with 130 children before it was detected and stuck on a narrow footpath next to a very busy road next to it until the buses came.
Impressed L with this video. He does tightrope at circus on Saturday mornings. N comments she has never seen snow filmed in this iconic landscape before.
Before the big plans for next year crystallised Nadine was considering getting me a jewelry/silver smithing workshop as a present so that I could realise some of the designs I’ve had floating around for years. Also I would have perhaps been able to make the rings we ended up buying from a Canadian Etsy seller. That plan has had to be shelved until a later date.
This pair of Tiara designs were among the many creations and possessions destroyed by the flood in our street in may this year. As there was no practical way to save everything I discarded a significant portion of old art saving only the most important pieces and photographing the rest. These designs had marked overlaps for a woven knot-work effect. I believe them to be about 7 years old.
I’ve done a page of calligraphy practice with nothing worthy to show for it.
Giggled at this:
Watched this:
and this, not for the first time:
While watching this I had the thought, “What if Daesh targeted Paris because they want the inescapable publicity that will come with the Paris Climate conference?”
I guess even if it wasn’t deliberate their actions will colour the news coverage of the event. Daesh is not the global threat they would like to believe themselves, global warming is.
My firstborn graduated high school yesterday. Pretty bloody impressed with him really.
It was a rather nice event as things go.
He’s the younger one.
I got home quite late sat down at the comp and went,
“The only post I can write right now is one that says: No post tonight!”
Back on track today, in keeping with reporting week I’m sharing a piece I finished over a year ago but have not previously shared images of.
A Northern White Rhino. I started this one sometime around the time the species was declared extinct in the wild back in 2011. I’ve dated it as 2013 on the back but I’m pretty sure it sat unfired for about a year after that.
Super Sculpey and Super Sculpey firm (bake-able polymer clay) over wire and foil on an MDF mount. It is clear that the WordPress post editor is not up tot he job of resizing and cropping of images so in future I’ll revert to Ps. I finally stocked up on Sculpey again a few months ago but the urge hasn’t struck at a convenient time since.
Still stewing on a topical political post, yet another very long day.
Making progress on children’s board book projects today. I have a set of three plus envisioned. All using a swap the shoes, hat or outfit from one thing to another by turning part of the pages gimmick. The first of which is roughed out but not completely scripted. A fourth book based on food has entered the mix today. Progress today in finding some more rhymes, going shopping and getting a haircut. I have not yet done any work on my reports.
I found point four in particular interesting. Amigdila involvement would in my understanding suggest reactions and process happening before and beyond control of higher brain function.
No post written today could forgo mention of the events in Paris.
What a preposterous, toxic and hostile belief system that brings people to a world view where they think murdering strangers will in any way aid their cause.
I’ve been thinking a lot about audience recently. Particularly in regards to the reach of ideas and my ability to make supplemental or total income from my creative endeavors. I noticed a button on imgur.com the other day that shows the view count on images and some basic analytic information. Turns out a few posts I put up way back in the height of Minecraft mania in 2010 have been kind of popular. Almost a collective quarter million views popular. Ongoing popularity appears to stem from occasional threads like this one from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/2fxado/complete_environmental_overhaul_19_idea_thread/
I was a little dumbstruck to discover that the most seen of my creative works is almost certainly fan concept art for Minecraft.
I think I can claim partial credit for at least some of the many ideas shown above that are now ingame. At the time I was very active in the r/minecraft community and the enthusiastic response to each image fueled fire to create the next. Eventually I tired of that game and have only recently reinstalled Minecraft to impress the three year old L with. The amount of new content is pretty staggering. I no longer feel as inspired to spend hours creating virtual sculptures or exploring the endless random and repetitive landscape.
My previous blog still draws views, much to my shame as of the 365+ posts I am proud of about 60 and embarrassed by closer to 200. Even so the views trickle in 3 to 20 a day, mostly drawn by the papercraft R2D2’s and the zombie Pikatchu, Sonic and Mario. Sometimes a more specific search for creatures from Bas-Lag or one of the many other appropriated characters lands someone among the virtual tumbleweeds.
Since 2011 I’ve had four classes of my own and two more shared with a colleague. I’ve generally engaged regularly with between 50 and 120 students each year. This audience is amazing and I learn a lot from them in return. A lot of my creative energy in the past four years has been channeled into the day to day tasks my students undertake. Last year I told my graduating year 6 students that they could count me in their fan club, that when they earnt masters, published books or got jobs at NASA I would be delighted to hear about it. I am confident that I can count at least a few of my students in my fan club.
My Instagram and Twitter followers are mostly robots, what they get out of it I do not know.
I am convinced that the Facebook filter bubble doesn’t know me as well as it thinks it does and therefore the people who see my posts on Facebook are probably not the people who most want to. I see a lot of content from distant acquaintances in my feed, I seem to develop ‘liking’ relationships with people I barely communicate with because we share links that entertain each other. Yet even when my feed is supposedly set on “Most recent” – And I check regularly because it reverts of its own accord- if I go to the profile of good friends I see posts that have not shown in my feed. So the value of FBook as a social communication tool is limited as there is really no way of knowing if the people that count are seeing your content let alone engaging with it. Add to this my disquiet at growing toxicity of the FBook platform and you can count me happy to jump ship if ever a reasonable and open competitor begins to develop market saturation.
Summer is coming up and there are big changes afoot. Typically as long as I am somewhere I can work it takes me about two days without work before the creative urges become overpowering. So I think it is about time I set about cultivating 1000 true fans by finishing, funding, making building and publishing some of the ideas and projects I’ve got kicking around. Because all to soon I will return to the classroom where all my energies are funneled back into keeping our space the best place I can make it for my students to learn and grow.
by 
