Constable Kenny Koala has been working out over summer and is looking like a new koala! Do you like his spiffy new jacket and cap? Kenny is a much loved community liason officer with the Australian Federal Police, and has been educating children in Canberra on a range of crime prevention and child safety messages for the last 25 years or more.
Chris Sickels at Red Nose Studio makes real figures and scenarios that are then photographed to produce cool 3D illustrations for papers, magazines and books. The 3D illustration above is his cover for Cory Doctorow’s story The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away. Before seeing this I had thought of 3D illustration as more a virtual rendering process. In this real form it is closely, and interestingly, allied to my work making puppets and props. I recently had a picture of my 3D fail whale published as an illustration in the Japanese computer magazine WEB+DB PRESS. I suppose that is fairly close – the only difference is in your intention when you start making an object?
(via @LolaLulu)
I’m catching up some blogging on work projects that I have ignored for a while. This is a big model of a Helicoverpa caterpillar and leaf that I made for CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra a few months ago. There’s a photoset of the making process, with notes along the way. The Helicoverpa caterpillar is the main pest in the cotton industry.
For your reading pleasure: David Barnett frothing over last night’s broadcast of ‘Keating the Musical’. My favourite bit:
Alexander Downer, dressed as FrankN’Furter from The Rocky Horror Show, is shown as effete. Downer, father of four children and with nothing in his private life to suggest he is anything other than as square as a butter-box…
I’d never heard that euphemism before!
…how ironic it is that the Liberals are in the process of organising an orderly transition of leadership from Brendan Nelson to Peter Costello, along the lines of the transition by agreement from Bill Hayden to Bob Hawke. Not one like the brutal coup arranged by the stabber, Paul Keating, to serve his own ambitions.
I wonder if this is an insider view, considering Barnett is Prue Goward’s partner?
Keating! the musical is no joke, and the question it invites must be taken seriously: where does all this hatred come from?
An absolute mystery, isn’t it? Continue reading
In late 2002 on a train in Melbourne I caught a such a fleeting glimpse of this amazing massive eagle sculpture that I almost wondered if I had imagined it. Its air of keeping a brooding watchful eye over the docklands was arresting and exciting, and it was one of the the things that made me want to blog. There was little information and fewer images of it on the web at the time. Tim was down in Melbourne last weekend and had a similar experience, but was able to stop and take this cool photo of Bunjil the Eagle by the sculptor Bruce Armstong.
In between then and now my desire to blog Bunjil had been assuaged by reading Lucy Tartan’s excellent post about it in 2005, in which she writes about its appeal much better than I could. The post is one in a very enjoyable series which explores statuary in Melbourne.
Tim Raupach’s first photography exhibition is now at The God’s Cafe at ANU. It opened last Thursday and runs until mid July. Tim is my son. He takes both urban and country scenes and landscapes, with a finely observed sense of colour and composition. Walls, bicycles, mountains, grasses and pattern are some of the recurring themes; take a look at his photoblog, Cutflat.
That’s the dispassionate report…! The truth is that it’s wonderfully exciting to see my kids stepping out into the artistic world, expressing themselves in such different ways, and I am so wildly proud of what they are doing!
Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.
Previously:
Mary Black and Shane Howard’s lovely duet version of his song Flesh and Blood. It was replayed on Rockwiz (SBS) last night.
