Three Pictures of Cornwall

Stumbled across an old watercolour of St. Michael's Mount and thought it interesting to compare it to a recent pastel a while back a medium I've not tried before. The cliff watercolour is from a walk on the north Cornwall coast in an extraordinary week not that long ago and one I shall, never, ever forget ...

Do take a look at the work of the travelled landscape artist Patrick Lewis at patlewis.co.uk, an equally extraordinary and inspiring talent, by chance, I found working "En Plein Air" captivated by the spell of the north cornish cliffs. The wonderful colour sense of his work and vibrancy of his sketching serve only to echo the heart felt passion pouring off his 'real life' canvasses in situ. Portraying a human connection with the form of our natural landscape and changing light that only a true artist working beneath the elements can be experiencing - something today rare to find in contemporary landscape art, frightened by the quality of its roots like Turner and a world away from photographic, illustrative, representations and studio work the public are so often confronted by. This is intelligent work from a painter with great sensitivity for composition, detail and understanding of expression for the elements surrounding him. And someone I would do well to learn from!

Annecy Film Festival 2006

Back from a last minute visit to Annecy 2006 having been greatly inspired at the festival there. The film that took the top prize deservedly won, 'Histoire Tragique avec fin Heureuse'... check it out at Annecy.org. A few sketches and thoughts... been a while since my last post almost forgotten I had a blog! Perhaps soon I shall have more of a reason to post... ;-)

Some New Life Drawing

Haven't posted for a while caught up with following my animation dreams and visiting the "animated Exeter festival", so thought I'd put these up and run ... ! Hope to get all tonights drawings on the amolad.com web site very soon. All these are charcoal on A1 sugar paper 3-15 mins. (Yeah, and I know one of the shoulders is awful, shall have to change that Brian :-)!! He's such a pencil master ...

Hurrah Happy New Year Lip-Sync Model Test

Fiddling over Christmas and the New Year to see the limits of the modelling and what needs adjusting. *happy sigh. Much to do... But at least I had a giggle... Even if I've some way to go yet this link should enable you to see the brief test . Only a small file in wmv format at this stage, sorry. You may need to alter the browser default player to windows media player temporarily in options. Bill Gates I'm watching you very carefully...

New Life Drawing - Ssssshhhhhh... Don't Tell Everyone...

Finally tidied up the display of my life drawing after such a long while hopefully now I can add recent work much more frequently and easily and shock myself into improving. *sigh... finally... If you dare take a peek. It's not great but it's a start ... Most of the works are from studies at The St. Ive's School of Art and Penzance School.

Simple webpage animations

I stumbled across this informative site by a chap called Stu Nicholls for improving web animations and thought these two links might be useful. The demonstration is of a streaker running between two doors as you scroll your the mouse back and forth and the second link shows you how to make flicker book kind of animations with mouse control. I was surprised how simple and effective the technique is. There's a lot of other stuff there too by someone very clever but hey I'm NOT a programmer. Right back to work again...

New Year's Eve Lip-Synching Foolery

Hope you like this my first blog. Something for a little lyp-synching I have been fooling around with for a few Happy New Year messages. And really just a test blog until I figure out what the heck I'm doing here! All my own work the rig and animation. I'm quite proud of him really even though he drives me CRAZY...and was just begun as an experimental piece to finally return to the animation world after a needy absence. The top image is an impression of Jack Nicholson, you have to hear to believe. His jacket and jewellery (not shown) are a fiddly nightmare, oh what fun I'm having...