Still As Life

Here it is, the all new Still As Life design on Wordpress. Check it out at blog.stillaslife.com or head to the new portal page at www.stillaslife.com!

This old Blogger blog will remain here, accessible at stillaslife.com/blogger.html so that the articles on it are still available for everyone.

The new Still As Life blog also incorporates a gallery system for my fractal art and wallpapers, which are free for anyone to use as their desktop background and so on as long as my little copyright statement remains intact. The gallery is of course, very empty at the moment as I have not yet put many of my completed ones up, and I am re-rendering some of them at higher quality on the new computer. There will of course be new ones as well as time passes.

That's it for this blog. I'll see you at the new one!

Labels: art, code, design

I have gotten a few months behind on Ctrl+Alt+Del, but I finally caught back up this evening which is most excellent.

With this catching up, I've decided to add a "Awesome Comics" link section to the navigation as well, of the comics I try to keep up with on a regular basis, and also regularly forget about.

Rhi sent me a new comic a couple of days ago called Questionable Content which she found and loves reading.

It's taken me significantly longer to get through the archives than it took her, probably because I've been doing a fair bit of other stuff, and I'm still nowhere near through them, but I have to say, it's one of the best comic's I've read in a while. Jeph, the artist behind it, has combined a lot of witty humour with words and in context's that would often not be understood. One such word that I came across in his comic that I love is defenestrate, which means to throw out a window. How awesome is that?

He has also managed to create a set of characters that I can recognise and relate to which is awesome.

It's definitely not an 100% family friendly comic, no doubt if it were a movie it would get an M15+ rating, but it is far better than a lot of the comics out there.

The third comic I currently have in the list is XKCD. XKCD is definitely not based around the art, as much of it is stick figures. XKCD uses science and creates humour out of it. It is really quite interesting and funny to read. It comes highly recommended from me, as do the other two comics I currently have in the list.

Note: They aren't listed in order of awesomeness. They are in alphabetical order.

Labels: art, internet

I don't know what the name of the artist is that does these, but these chalk drawings are absolutely amazing!

Have a look!

neue 3D Strassenzeichnungen

Labels: art

It's very unusual that I import the photo's from my digital camera (Olympus FE-210) and get a surprise.

As one would expect, as it is my camera, I generally know what photo's will be on it, seeing as how I took them.

Last night though, I was importing the photo's from throughout Christmas day, and find myself surprised with a photo of my contorted sister.

I soon found out she had taken it with a friend of hers, so she isn't really contorted. Nonetheless, it was quite a surprise.

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!

Catch ya.

Labels: art, other

A year old now I know, but I just came across this article on the Northern Rivers Echo website from the end of 2006 when I found my best mate Rhi, another of my class mates, and myself, selected for the NSW state-wide Art Express Exhibitions for 2007.

As I said, it's a year old, but hey, it was exciting for me to find my art being exhibited all over the state including places like Albury, Orange, Grafton, Newcastle, and Sydney.

I did a fractal animation to a song by a friend of the family, Dennis Nattrass (or Wah Wah Willie). Wah Wah Willie has done some really great music. It is guitar based ambient and shows off much of his skill on the guitar. I highly recommend his album entitled "Cinema". It adds a very unique twist on more common ambient music and is very complimentary to fractals.

I created the fractals using Apophysis and rendered them in Flam3. It was really quite an interesting experience, as I had created many fractal's in Apophysis and had a fairly good understanding of how the software functions, the effects of different triangles and so on, however I had not done any animations before, so it was all new. I have since done another animation as a birthday present for Rhi, for which I have also created the audio.

The theory behind my animation was much deeper than what is outlined in the article in the Echo, as I explained in my film and write up, it was based on the chaos theory. My thinking behind it is as follows:

The Chaos Theory
The study of phenomena which appear random, but in fact have an element of regularity which can be described mathematically.

"Trust me...There is order here, very faint, very human."
-Michael Ondaatje

"There can only be one right answer in mathematics. Fractals are an art form, based entirely on maths. Like anything though, when the human element is added to math, it becomes imprecise, there can be mistakes, errors, many right answers.

Variation becomes limitless, but order remains.

From the chaos theory, fractals are born.
Trust me, there is order here."
-Matthew Brown

To my knowledge, neither of my video clips thus far are available anywhere on the internet. The first one probably never will be unless agreed to by Wah Wah Willie, but my new one just might be one of these days. Just have to wait and see.

Labels: art

All I can say is wow!

I just discovered Guido Daniele's website, completely by accident, and I have to say, this guy is quite the amazing hand painter. Most of his art is pretty cool, but I strongly recommend checking out his animal hand paintings.

They really are stunning, and they are amazingly realistic! If you get a chance, they really are worth having a look at.

Enjoy.

Labels: art

So it's the end of the semester, and thus the end of university for the year. With this I begin this blog. This blog where you will hear about things ranging from work, university, current projects, design's, fractal's, bass guitar, and more.

Web design, web development, computers, games and anything technological describe the majority of my interests.

I offer web design and development services through TerraMedia and sub-contract my services through a variety of other companies.

I am currently studying a Bachelor of Information Technology, majoring in Web Services and Applications, and a Bachelor of Creative Industries, majoring in Communication Design at the Queensland University of Technology. This gives me a background in both web development through the BIT and a background in web design through the BCI.

Having spent this week at uni working on assignments, and when not at uni, at home working on assignments, this weekend has finally come, and with it, I can have a break. The assignment I have been working on is for KIB102, Foundations of Communication Design 2. It's my final major assignment. Put simply it is an interactive Flash web site based on a movie that we studied for earlier assignments. While this is my first shot at a Flash based website, and I am far from a Flash expert, I will be posting up my completed assignment in the next few day's and will also be going through some of the thing's I learned that I had a hard time finding information on while I was doing the assignment, so hopefully they will be useful for someone else.

Of course, like many student's, I left too much to the last minute and so there are things in the site that are uncompleted, but you know, it happens. You would think I would have learned by now to start things sooner...

And with that I leave you as I have to get some sleep so I can spend tomorrow night and Sunday working on yet another assignment that is due on Monday and study for an exam that is also on, you guessed it, Monday. Busy busy busy.

Labels: art, music, software, university