Zhou Fan Paintings

I just came across Zhou Fan’s portfolio site on Reform Revolution, it blows my mind. These images in particular are so fascinating and beautifully executed, apparently the series of paintings are based on dreams he had as a child, pretty intense dreams! I’d highly recommend checking out the whole gallery.

In other news, I’m off to Madrid Friday morning for an ELVIN technical meeting where we should hopefully decide which opensource social networking software we’ll be using, my money’s on elgg.

Catastrophe Video (Jean Jullien)

I really enjoy Jean Jullien’s minimalistic, colourful and slightly whimsical illustrative style. I keep an eye on his website for exhibitions and new projects, which is how I chanced across the Catastrophe video for NIWOUINWOUIN (no idea how that’s pronounced!).

This video is typical of Jean Julliens style, I love it! Great use of colour, lovely stop-motion style, though it could possibly have all been done in aftereffects. Great tune as well, love the bouncy/happy hardcore vibe to it, and the video is bang on in capturing it’s fun, slightly hyper buzz!

Bats Video (We buy your kids + Mighty Nice)

I spend a lot of time researching styles and just looking out for lovely things in general! This gorgeous video caught my eye recently, it’s by We buy your kids and Mighty Nice, a music video for a guy called Paul Dempsey.

I love the rendering style, it’s so expressive and evocative. I’ve been looking at Henri Rousseau paintings recently (check the beautiful Sleeping Gypsy above!) as reference for an oil pastels image i’ve begun work on. This video really reminds me of his paintings, incredibly dreamlike and sensuous.

What's going on blogspot?!

Where are all my nice pictures gone?! I hope they'll be back soon and I don't have to link them all again...

ZAPA Tag Marketing Animation

Last week was the handover date for the ZAPA tag marketing animation. Due to the short turnover time of the job we subcontracted a graphic artist and animator, Pearse Cullinane, to animate the piece. I supplied him with full storyboards, audio and image library and happily, we made the deadline! Here are some of the storyboard panes. ZAPA have quite a strong existing corporate ID, the line drawing style, and much of the line drawings themselves, were taken from the existing ZAPA identity.

Friday Night Scribbling

So i'm at home on a Friday night doodling, my fingers are sore from the track pad on my laptop! Repetitive stress injury here I come. Here's my sketch, scanned and filled in in illustrator, am thinking this will form the basis of the homepage of my long overdue new website, this is all subject to change / complete scrappage of course! I want to do quite a simple, clean website, using all flat colours, although maybe the flat colour here takes away from the image a bit so I possibly need a rethink...

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.