TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

The Croods is a fairly fast paced action adventure story that is essentially the caveman version of a road trip movie. It tells the story of a displaced family, the Croods, forced to leave the safety of their cave in order to survive a cataclysmic event upon the world they've come to know. Their journey is guided by a young stranger who shows them that there's much more to life than staying safe. If you like slap stick, cartoon humor and can suspend disbelief far beyond anything you may have seen in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull then this may be just your thing. It's a film filled with interesting ideas at specific moments as well as quite a number of fantastical prehistoric animals and plants I don't recall seeing in a science journal anywhere, ever (though this may be due to the over the top design to make them more colorful and stylised). Nicolas Cage does a great job voicing the Dad, Grug. Emma Stone is convincing as troublesome te...

Paper Plane that I designed several years ago. Yes it flies! Two of my favorite things that have persisted from my childhood is building Lego models with Lego Technic and trying to design realistic looking paper planes that fly. Lego bricks are something that my parents introduced me to early on. As I got older I gravitated towards Lego Technic where I spent many years trying to create my own, fully working version of a car chassis.  Even though I was lucky enough to own Lego's version two car chassis ( set 8860 ) - which I think was loosely based on a Volks Wagon, with the motor in the rear. Even today I own a modest collection of Lego Technic sets which I potter around with, mostly trying to build car chassis' with but occasionally other things, like robots too (though I've never gotten far with robots because I don't have any motors or any of the Lego Mindstorm kits). Designing realistic paper planes (ones that look more like real planes) that fly was so...

After a couple of weeks break from painting (read: busy with client animation work) I set aside some time to continue my painting,  Dog Star Football , having finished the other painting, Fringe Benefit, in my last studio session . If you want to see previous parts in this series click the links for Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 . When I left Dog Star Football I'd pretty much finished the background and all the base colors. All that was left was to add the darker details and apply shading, as well as adding little details like the collar tag. This last session only took around an hour and a half to two hours to bring the painting to completion. If you've ever wondered why I paint cats and dogs more than people then the comparison between painting Dog Star and Fringe Benefit , in terms of time and detail, should give you some clue. No curse words or broken brushes during this session! Dog Star Puppy - Acrylic on Canvas.

Could these two have bumped into each other? The Batman, DC, comic-movie-verse was has been a buzz for the past day or so with a pretty strong rumor from Latino Review that Christopher Nolan, David Goyer, Zack Snyder, Henry Cavill and Christian Bale could all be on board for a Justice League movie . Latino Review have a reputation for being right on their exclusives so it's hard to pass this off as some journalist taking a shot in the dark. The team over at Modern Myth Media recorded an extensive podcast discussing the implications on Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy , the soon to be released Man of Steel and the possible future for DC Universe on film if this all comes to pass. Essentially Christopher Nolan is said to be going beyond his role of overseeing Man of Steel to overseeing the entire DC Universe on film. David Goyer will continue writing (he co-wrote The Dark Knight Trilogy and wrote Man of Steel ). Whilst Henry Cavill is the next actor to play Superman in w...

Fringe Benefit with corrected background. Continuing on from Part 1 and Part 2 I decided to put Dog Star Football to one side for now and focus entirely on the Fringe Benefit painting. This artwork needed to be finished by the day before I'm writing this post so it could be part of an exhibition at The Gawler Community Gallery . As well as that I felt it needed my full attention because the start I had made in Part 2 wasn't quite right. The background was too red rather than the more blueish/purple that I had in mind. Hence, the first thing I did was repaint the background as you can see in the video below. As I said in the above video I had thought I might even finish the artwork in that session but as it turned out it took two more sessions combined into one video (below) to get this artwork completed. I'm really not used to painting at such a small scale with acrylics so, whilst these videos may make my process look effortless, I can assure you there was...

My entire paint set. I have to admit, I find committing myself to painting again something of a struggle. I haven't done any additional work to either painting until today, a week after I started and wrote Part 1 to this series of blogs. Why have I not worked on them until today you may ask? Well today I needed to write about my progress in this blog post so... I thought I'd better... you know... 'progress'. It's not that Dog Star Football or Fringe Benefit are particularly hard paintings to create, well, Fringe Benefit is a bit harder than usual but not by much. If I just follow my process they'll turn out just fine. It's just that I need to start painting pictures that have more meaning to me than my previous work has. Start really painting the things I want to paint and stop painting things that will result in a nice painting but doesn't really say more than that. Anyhow, enough navel gazing. Here's where I'm at with the current...

In my New Years Resolutions post I said I wanted to do more painting this year and now I've finally made a start with two paintings, 'Dog Star Football' and 'Fringe Benefit'. The keyword here is 'start'. This is the first of a series of posts and video diaries documenting the progress of these two artworks. One is destined to be my first artwork in a while that I've listed on Ebay, whilst the other will be exhibited at The Gawler Community Gallery during this coming March. At this point I'll tell you about what inspired each artwork. Dog Star Football Dog Star Football - Primary colours undercoat. Final 'Tera' Artwork. Dog Star Football started out as one of many sketches I did trying to create a cartoon version of my brother's dog, Tera, to put on some Cafepress items and send to him as a gift for his birthday last year. He's a follower of Australian Rules Football which prompted an idea of combining his dog wi...