Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Terra Avis ad Astra


Who says Ostriches can't fly? If it is something you want enough, you can find a way. Of course, should ostriches be piloting highly dangerous rockets is another question...



I was given an Ostrich egg so that I could participate in Gecko Studio Gallery's The Work of the Eggs... Continued exhibition. Here is my finished object, a  rocket egg that opens up to reveal our intrepid Ostrinaut inside.



And here is a video of it under construction, to the accompaniment of Steve Taylor and the Perfect Foil's song Moonshot.

Friday, February 23, 2018

making cardboard automata with school kids!





In my day job, I am a chaplain at a primary school in south-east Melbourne, and as such, I get to work with small groups of children who need a little bit of extra support, especially in the areas of socialising and self-confidence. I thought one way to help them would be to give them a creative project to work on. By building these small cardboard boxes, they could express themselves, solve problems and create something cool.

A lot of hot glue later, and these are the results! I helped them work things out, but all the ideas came from the kids, and I reckon that they all did fantastic jobs!

Saturday, February 17, 2018

House - Illustration Friday

This week's Illustration Friday topic is house, and it  just so happens that in last couple of months I have illustrated some houses. And very different these houses are, even though they both can be seen to be typical of their neighbourhoods!

Firstly is a sketch of a Queenslander house, very common in Rockhampton where I used to live. Rocky is built right on the Tropic of Capricorn, and so the older housing is built to be cool in a hot and humid before the common use of air-conditioning. There is a lot of ventilation which stops heat build up in the house and allows flow through of breezes. Also they are built off the ground for a bit more cooling; an added benefit of this is that house built in flood prone areas, such as the lower lying parts of town, can cope pretty well with a couple of metres of muddy flood water. 
Weatherboards and corrugated iron are the main building materials used. I lived in a house such as this when the major cyclone Marcia came through town, and though it rattled a creaked a lot it came through unscathed.  

In January I went to Tasmania to participate in the annual 'Faith and the Arts' summer school, and I did this painting of the brick workers cottages in the shadow of the Western Tiers. Poatina is an old Hydro village, and was built in the late 50's to house the workers constructing the Hydroelectric power-station from the Great Lake up on the plateau above the town. A huge tunnel was bored through the rock and a pipeline came down the mountainside to the power station at the bottom. Poatina was to service this, but with automation, the town was virtually abandoned until taken over by Youth Work organisation Fusion Australia in 1995. 
There is now an arts colony in the  town, with artists of all sorts staying and passing through all the time. The arts centre features kilns for glass works of all kinds.
The housing is mid century brick veneer workers cottages, which don't have to cope with prolonged heat and humidity, but icy winds and occasional snow is a real possibility. 


Thursday, January 25, 2018

what holds you back?





This is an assemblage I made during Faith and the Arts 2018 as a response to discussion about freedom, and the things that hold us back. What weighs you down? What keeps your walls up and stops you being free to be who you were meant to be?

Wednesday, January 03, 2018

playing with Sketchbook

I have had Autodesk Sketchbook on my laptop for a little while now, but the nib on my Active pen broke, and although I could finger paint on the touch-screen or use a stylus, I couldn't really use the program to its best capacity.

Finally, however, I did get a new pen. It took a few weeks longer than expected because I ordered an Active Stylus by mistake. the HP website was not very clear in helping decide what I needed, and the Stylus did not work at all with my computer. It's weird that the one company would sell two seemingly identical devices that use entirely incompatible technologies, and then not differentiate between the two on their website beyond calling one a stylus and one a pen. Even the specs given were virtually identical. 

Anyway, I eventually got it sorted and got back to using my laptop for drawing, and here's what I came up with. Mostly I was playing around, and making things up as I go, but that's how you learn. A cartoon sketch, a drawing using photo reference, and a caricature-ish picture of a man on TV that was on as I was drawing.