Hey Internetters! Today’s creative activity has taken me so much time, money and effort, I am trying to quantify it by making a blog post out of it, despite it not really being exciting!
This is what I made! Read the rest of this entry »
I should probably write about the things that influence me more often. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered The Secret Life of Machines, a Channel 4 TV series from the late eighties / early ninties. I used to watch this with my Dad when I was really small- it was on TV when I was between the ages of 2-7 apparently (!) – and despite being so young, it clearly made an impression on my tiny mind!
Here is a clip from the show, where Tim Hunkin describes what the concrete ballast in a washing machine is for, with the assistance of Rex Garrod:
Genius. They picked such an expressive washing machine for the demonstration too! It’s great watching this stuff again as the longstanding lines of influence are pretty apparent. For example, here’s a series of post-it notes from 2007 that bear a subtle resemblance to the above clip:
Which is a concept I revisited last week:
Now there’s an idea that is going somewhere!
Anyway! If you like washing machines, you can see more of my washing-machine-related daily artwork by clicking here, or if you just like machines in general, you can find links to watch more of the secret life of machines on Tim Hunkin’s website.
This weekend, we have been celebrating Lilly’s independence from the country she is now somewhat dependent on! I have some nice pictures to share after the fold if anyone is interested! Read the rest of this entry »
This was going to be my creative activity for yesterday, but it ended up taking me a little bit longer to make than I was expecting, so it counts for the whole weekend! It’s a paper TV set for an iPhone!!
I’m not sure where I came up with the idea of making a little TV set to slot an iPhone into, but the thought came into my mind to use a magnifying glass lens to give it a nice curved CRT-like look to the screen. I copped this ramshackle bargain off eBay (complete with vital safety instructions) to make it out of.
The iPhone slots into the side like so:
And to prove it really works, here it is playing the title sequence to M*A*S*H, the only TV show Lilly has on her iPhone. The show happens to have post-it-yellow titles anyway, which matches the TV set rather nicely 
I have a T-Shirt design up for voting on Threadless! Yes, this is my first design that has actually made it to the voting stage, and now it needs all the help it can get.
It’s such a happy horse- why wouldn’t you want to see it on a T-Shirt? If it walked into a bar, the bartender wouldn’t ask ‘why the long face?’. It’s that happy!
I really wanted to submit this for a kid’s T-Shirt design, but I couldn’t see a way to do that independently. If you grown-ups like it though, great! Wouldn’t it make you smile if you saw someone walk past you with him on their chest?!
Please vote for it, especially if you like it! Get all your friends and all your enemies to vote too! Yeah!
Shock Horror, I’ve joined another social network recently! This one is called Central Station- it appears to be a network for creative people. I guess it’s similar to Behance, but I never really understood that, and this appears to be a bit more British (well, Scottish, to be precise) and a bit more personal.
Anyway, I don’t really understand this either, but it’s probably because I’m not very good at being social, and to me a network is something you make with CAT5 cables and Wi-Fi. Regardless, it seems pleasant and I approve of the post-it-note yellow, so I’ve put up a bit of work for other members to look at!
Putting stuff up seemed to be the right thing to do too, as people are looking at it! CenSta first added my Post-it book to their blog of things they like in February, which was very kind of them. It’s nice to be nice to the nice!
Not only that, but they then went on to feature my stopmotion experiment from 2008 ‘Full Mouse’ (embedded above or here on Central Station) in a prominent position on their site, which went on to get more views in the space of a week than it ever did anywhere else on the internet combined. Amazing!
So if you’re creative too, or if you just want to be a member of another social network, you should check Central Station out! It doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish – I’m pretty sure I’m not a Scot, and they’ve been very welcoming to me, as I think they are trying to grow beyond Scotchland.
Update: They’ve put the video on their front page now too! cool!
This is my creative activity for today, but I’m far too amused by it to only post it on my Flickr-based SCED project, so it’s going up here too! Besides, it looks a lot better via Vimeo than Flickr’s video service.
I took the Vespa out for the first time in the best part of three months this week, and came back feeling rather hairy. I’ve been convinced for almost as long as I’ve been driving this machine that my facial hair grows quicker when I ride the Vespa. It kinda makes sense in a fuzzy (pun not intended) logic kind of way- my face feels the cold, so my body probably tries to do something about it short of growing a scarf!
I found myself wondering last night if my social-network-avoiding actually works against me and my work, so I have decided today to dip my toes into the social waters in the form of signing up to Twitter! I’ll spare you the pain of a diatribe as to why I’m not planning on using it for normal tweeting, but rather its function will be to tweet about the posts I make here (like this post, which is doubling up as a test of the new system!).
So, if you like reading about my world, and are cooler than me as you like to use Twitter, you can follow Trickartt, to be tweeted at whenever I write something else stupid here!
Somebody on one of the forums rediscovered this today, which also led me to rediscover it- I had completely forgotten I made it! Apparently it dates back to last June. It’s the Trickartt DJ Bio Generator- a piece of PHP junk designed to generate your very own low-budget self-gratifying D&B DJ biography.
If you’re not familiar with the world of Drum and Bass, or any other DJ-centric music, it might be easy to miss the point. Similarly, it might not be so funny if you had already put the effort into writing yourself one of these manually (I bet you’re kicking yourself now- you could’ve just done it by filling out a few simple boxes!), but here it is anyway.
Hooray for basic PHP!
I still haven’t decided if this Blog is purely professional or still borderline personal, so here is a non-work-related post. I might decide it’s rubbish and delete it in a few days, but for now, it shall live. Anyway.
Happy new year! Yesterday Lilly and I had a tiny fireworks excursion for the occasion, partially in the name of her brother, who is out in The Gambia, West Africa, in the Peace Corps. He is a fan of fireworks.
We managed to find this tiny fireworks stand (pictured above), run by vaguely redneck-ish (but friendly!) people. We figured we’d start small for our first fireworks excursion and only got a few little bits and bobs, and I took a few nice pictures – more than I would post on Flickr in one chunk, so I thought why not write a blog about it! Read the rest of this entry »