Mural Painting for Picturesque

I finished a painting a large piece of board for the upcoming exhibition Pictureaque. This exhibition shows the work of current and past students from the Diploma of illustration course at the North Melbourne Tafe.
Pictureaque is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program this year.
The theme for the upcoming Pictureaque exhibition is Identity.
My painting shows a super hero taking off his mask revealing his true identity.
From the other works I have seen the exhibition should be a cracker. There will be more small murals like my own, along with a series of old cigar boxes painted with designs and illustrations relevant to the theme of Identity. Roll on the Fringe Festival, I say!

Hung by the Sticky Bits

A little over two weeks ago I moseyed on down to Hosier Lane in the Melbourne CBD to check out the launch of the Hung by the Sticky Bits exhibition. A friend of mine called Rebecca Wheeler is the curator of the show. The exhibition included an international cast of concept artists, animators, graphic artists and illustrators.
It is an incredible show with the contributing artists offering a fantastic mixture of styles. Two stand-outs in the exhibition for me are the French commercial artist/animator Stephane Tarelin and the Swedish senior game designer Mattias Adolfsson.
Tarelin's sketches seem uninhibited, producing spindly and expressive forms that remind me of the work of Austrian artist Egon Schiele.
In contrast the work of Mattias Adolfsson is riddled with detail, often depicting highly detailed city scapes and crazy contraptions.
Exhibition also includes the work of Mark Moget, Taco Sipma, Hobo Divine, Flask, Miss Lotion and the curator of the show, Beck Wheeler.
This is a great show and as is very much worth a look if you are in the CBD of Melbourne over the next few weeks.
Hung by the Sticky Bits is running till the 29th of September at Until Never at the second floor, three to five Hoiser Lane, Melbourne.

Pixar Exhibition

I finally got my self to the Pixar Exhibition, Pixar: 20 years of animation.
It was an amazing experience. The Exhibition is a massive collection of original concept art, sculptures, storyboards and colour scripts. The exhibition also feature interactive screens that allow you to gain an insight in to just about facet of the film making process.
There is also a collection of short films by John Lasseter (one of the founding fathers of Pixar.) The exhibition also gave visitors the chance to draw some of there of characters or crazy environments with pencils, paper and computers with Corel painter available to use.
If you are remotely interested in animation, then do your self-a favour and go see this exhibition! Pixar: 2o years of animation ends on the 14th of October, and is at the ACMI at Federation Square.

Geelong Print Awards

Last weekend I made my way to sunny Geelong to check out some art. The Geelong Art Gallery was launching several exhibitions. The first of which, were the finalists’ pieces from the Geelong Print Awards. These pieces consisted on the top 42 prints decided upon by a team of judges. The only stipulation in this competition was that the arts work must be a print of some sort (ie lithograph prints, etchings) I found this body of work great, with a great mixture of style and content. This collection will be on display until November the 18th. This collection is definitely worth a look, if for some reason you suddenly find yourself in Geelong…..it could happen!
The other collection being launch at the Geelong Art Gallery included the work of Mark Schaller. Mark was commissioned by a local collector Rudd Munday to paint various land marks from around the Great Ocean Road. The only element of Mark's work that caught my attention was his use of vibrant colour. Mark’s work will be on display until the 16th of September.
For more information on these and other up coming exhibtions at The Geelong Art Gallery go to
http://www.geelonggallery.org.au/index1.htm
The image above is detail of View of Geelong toward great, great great grandmother Stinton's garden (lino cut) by Mario Manifold

Pixar Lectures

Well it has been a long time since my last post. Lets hope I can make it up with some interesting reviews of some events and exhibitions I have been to over the past few months.
In late June to coincide with the launch of the Pixar exhibition "20 years of animation." Three staff from Pixar came to Melbourne and presented some lectures on their individual roles in the company.
Firstly there was Elyse Klaidman. Pixar hired Elyse originally to give drawing lessons to the non-creative members of the Pixar Company. Later Elyse's role in the company grew into in house curator for in house exhibitions Pixar hold with in their studio.
Jerome Ranft spoke on the second day. Jerome is hired by Pixar to sculpt various proposed character designs for films in development. Jerome's work allows the director of the film and other staffs have a better understanding of what characters will look like in three dimension.
Paul Topolos spoke on the following day and he was by far the most interesting of the speakers. Paul creates beautiful digital paintings for Pixar. These paintings are used as backdrops for scenes or alternatively for the textures on digital created 3D virtual objects.
One the final day all three speakers’ answers questions from the crowd in a panel style arrangement.
All in all it was a great four days of informative and interesting speeches.

Art for Costa Rica

I just did an illustration for a publication called Revista Colectiva. These guys are based in Costa Rica. I meet them while I was working at The Hungry Zine, which was a similar publication I work on for about a year and a half with some fellow creative mates.

Revista Colectiva explores a new topic each issue; this upcoming issue will be games. I chose to do a piece about the board games my sisters and I would play as children. We played the classic games like Monopoly and Cluedo. Both of these games can be viewed as rather negative really; Monopoly encourages kids to be greedy and bankrupt their mates. Cludeo on the other hand is a light-hearted romp through a murder mystery, where every character in the game is a possible suspect. Well, so much for the innocence of childhood. Let me know what you think of the illustration world. By the way check out the Revista Colectiva at http://www.revistacolectiva.com

Hello World

Well it took a while, but I have finally created my own Blog. My main interests lie in illustration, graphic design, fine art and animation. I must say that while I may have a great interest in animation I am only now beginning to study it in-depth in my spare time.

As you could guess I am trying to churn out a living as an illustrator/ graphic artist.
It was only a month ago that I quite my part time job at a printing store, and decided to solely do freelance work.

So this Blog is not totally boring to the general public I have posted a sample of an illustration I did a while ago for a Melbourne based publication called Is Not Magazine. The theme was bigger is/is not better.
There it is my first entry for this Blog! Let’s hope I can maintain some form of discipline and make regular entries to this site. Thanks for reading.