Mugged

Heya everyone.

So I've recently acquired an awesome mug for work.
It's thick and big and has blue in it but that's not what makes it awesome.

What makes it awesome is you can draw on the outside with whiteboard markers!
BEHOLD!

Thought I'd just pick out some of the better ones.
I've been instagram-ing them to my twitter account. Actually it's just about the ONLY thing I use instagram for...

Makes tea time a fun and creative experience :D
Hope you're all having a great day,
-Daniel

ANZACS: Catnip For Canadians

Heya!

So, I've discovered there is a limited number of things I can cook confidently and cook well.
As long as I follow the recipe I'll get most things right, but there's a couple of things I can go back to and know pretty much how it'll turn out.

Bolognese is one, and it seems ANZAC biscuits are another.

We hit a rough patch at work, meaning people were eating most of their meals at the studio, so I thought I'd whip up a batch of good ol' Aussie ANZACs.

I don't know if it was because we were all so tired or because they were something new and different but a Quadruple batch was successfully devoured in 15 minutes flat. And I felt quite proud about that :D

Hope you're all having a grand old day,
-Daniel

The Bunyip Festival

It is said that hidden away on the island in the middle of Lake Lorne, there lives a Bunyip.



Though he is a friendly Bunyip he only comes out once a year, because he's a bit of a hermit like that.
And so, every year, he walks from Lake Lorne, through the town of Drysdale, to one of the local schools.



This is what I grew up with. For the first four years of my schooling I went to Drysdale Primary school, where every year we'd join with Clifton Springs Primary School and have a great big fundraiser. And those photos above are actually the main street of Drysdale. Those painted 'footmarks' have been commonplace in that town since before I can remember. The Bunyip's right up there with the Easter Bunny or Santa down in good ol' 3222. It seemed a lot cooler growing up, but according to Mum it was.

But it's great, and I still enjoy it. There's cake stalls, a silent auction, bouncy castle rides, go carts. The local fire brigade come along and let kids wear the helmets and put on the sirens. It's great fun!



And let's not forget the all important sausage sizzle!



Best of all, you get to MEET the BUNYIP!



That's me on the left with the Bunyip, and Mum on the right with the Bunyip.
Truth be told, it's usually a grade six kid dressed up in there, but the whole thing is great fun!

Oh, and it's not the full Bunyip festival experience if you don't get your teeth stuck together with toffee from the cakes stall.



Anyway, that was my Saturday morning.
Hope everyone had a great weekend,
-Daniel

Geeking out

Christopher Lloyd is coming to Melbourne for Supernova and as a big BTTF fan, I'm sporadically geeking out about it as the date draws nearer.

So, I totally got my geek on this weekend and made a couple of time-travel t-shirts by cutting up large iron on sports numbers.

On the left is the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future and on the right is the Season 5 Dr Who logo.


I'm definitely going to wear my Flux Capacitor T for one of the days.
I'm just hoping I don't freak out too much or loose my (already pretty hindered) ability to speak if I get to meet him.

Back to the Future has definitely imprinted a LOVE of time travel in me. To the point where I'm a little ashamed to have never watched any Dr Who until last year (thankyou ABC iview!).
I've watched all the new seasons, and have some old episodes waiting to be consumed, and am LOVING it!

Okay, I'm gonna stop now.
Need to tone it down for work tomorrow. Don't wanna push being the office eccentric any more than I have.
Hope everyone has a terrific Monday and a funderful week!
-Daniel

*Edit: Oh, and I know the Dr Who T should've been more of a TARDIS blue, but Best & Less didn't have any XL's left in that color, so I had to settle for navy. That said, 2 shirts for $15! Awesome!

Morningsworld

Hey everyone, just a quick post.

I little while ago I was asked to take a photo for a website, All the mornings of the world.

The idea was that on monday, january 24th 2011, at 7:59 am, a whole bunch of people from all over the world took a photo.
This was my contribution. I was on the tram on the way to work, in the rain.



It was really interesting to see the other photographs people took, especially the ones in the same timezone as you.
Here's the link again. Check it out if you have a bit of time. (due to the added hour of daylight savings, mine appears in +11 timezone)
http://www.morningsworld.fr/

Hope everyone's having a great weekend,
-Daniel

IF: Deja Vu

My submission for Illustration Friday. Theme - Deja Vu



I don't know why, but Deja Vu made me think of mustard...
Hope everyone's having a great Thursday,
-Daniel

The Gordon Recognises Geelong Magazine

Not long ago I made an animated short for The Gordon Institute of Tafe. And they were kind enough to send me a copy of their magazine with stills of it all over the cover!



Also a postcard.



Hope everyone's having a FANTASTIC weekend!
-Daniel

Tracey and the cat

Tracey has a cat. The cat's name is Gil.
He's a very proud cat. Some say looks quite regal.
That's why it was so funny when Tracey glomped him from behind one day. The expression on his face was priceless!



The cat also has a facebook page. Trace's gunning for 40 fans for him (because it's a round number apparently) So go ahead and 'like' him, if you feel so inclined.

DIY Shirt Prints

I've been meaning for a while to go through some of my old (and slightly grubby) t-shirts and put stuff on the front of them. (to cover the afore mentioned grubby)

The tricky thing is finding something you feel strongly enough about to have plastered on your shirt all day. So this first one is simply the (aproximate) hexadecimal RGB value of the shirt.

After trying to take photos of the shirt and getting an average value and comparing it to the shirt, I ened up taking the value from a character I'm animating at the moment with very similar colored sleeves.
It would've be slightly off due to lighting, shadows, and fading over time anyway.



Because I don't have any screen printing equipment and couldn't be bothered waiting for fabric paint to dry, I used a giant iron-on sprot number from Lincraft and cut it up. For the record, zeros give the most useable surface area.

Workstation Sketches

Random Sketches from around my workstation at work.

Vintage Arcade Machine

A little while back my good friend Christian showed me a bizzare blog of color photographs from 1900 Russia. What the photographer did was take 3 seperate b&W photos, each with either a red, green or blue filter over the lens. These negatives have since been composited together to create beautiful color photos of ye ole Russia! Seriously, check this stuff out.

I couldn't get the ingenuity of it all out of my head, so I tried the same thing (mostly the same thing) using a digital camera, cellophane and our good friend photoshop. This is an out of service arcade machine in the ping-pong room at work.


And these are the 9 layers of photos used to create the image. I ended up only using the three full color photos to control luminosity.

Backwards Compatibility

I'm currently putting together a video for my Sister's 21'st, and this is the setup I've got going to get VHS footage onto my laptop. The video camera in the middle can't actually record onto mini DV tapes anymore, but can still work as a webcam and (fantastically!) can have RCA input and Firewire output simultaneously!
Workarounds are awesome! Anyways, stay tuned as my first ever stop motion is also now captured to digital format, and shall be hitting the interwebs very soon! ',:)
Hope you're all having a fantastic weekend,
-Daniel