MMIX ID

For when the time comes,
Happy New Year.

Enjoy Yourselves. Xx

Birthday Wishes: Nick

You've narrowly avoided being shafted by Christmas, you lucky thing.

This shall be arriving in the post soon Nick.

Boys & Girls & Girls & Boys in the Snow.

It's almost here.

Frostbite

I am obsessed with her...

...but can you blame me?

Vomiting Thoughts

The last couple of days I've been working on a sign for my door, as I still feel my room lacks character even after living in this flat for a few months.

Nothing says "welcome to my room" more than a cartoon portrait of one's self.

It's just one of the things that will make my room eventually feel like it's mine.

Finished: Now come on in and...

Ah, to go with all the festive cheer, I added little optional Christmas hat, I think I'll give him a memento for each holiday approaching whilst I'm around in the flat... I guess next is Valentines Day.

That's always a good day.

Mis Luchadora

I know nothing about wrestling, I just love those masks.

I'm not completely sure what it is about masks that I love so much, but I do have a little idea. I don't think it's the fact that they seal your identity, I think it's their ability to let you assume a completely different persona. They're dressing your face up without the makeup.

Whatever it is i'm constantly drawn to them.

Out of all the different types of masks I've come across, Mexican wrestling masks seem to intrigue me the most. I like the way they're used to symbolise images of gods heroes and animals, along with how beautifully and intricately designed they appear to be these days.

Also they're killer in costumes.

All in all I just find designing masks, any kind of masks really fun, when I look back at my work it's sometimes a little ridiculous how many times I shove masks in there haha!

Now a little fun, I found this site that generates Mexican wrestling names for you!

Mine is "Caballero Magico", which translates to "Magic Knight," oh if only I were!

What's yours?

Bug Rolls

Today (well if you wanna get all technical on me, yesterday... sheesh), was the last day of term, and what can I say, it's been great, yet typically I've basically shown you none of the work I've done. Right now I'm playing catchup, and as you've probably worked out that's a regular occurrence here!

So yeah, a month ago we had a group animation project, we had to create a 10 second animation based on a pet peeve. So we went with my friend Caspar's obscure hatred of toilet paper hanging the wrong way in bathrooms.

Enjoy 10 seconds of pure toilet critter madness:

Despite it being at 20 frames per second the animation didn't take as long as I thought it would, well it didn't seem to, time flew right by. The sounds a teeny tiny bit off, as we recorded it the day before we filmed it, and didn't really get a chance to refer to it whilst we animated. Ah well, I still think it works pretty damn well. Take note of Caspar's "plop" sound at the end... I still can't figure out how he does it!

Now a couple of things:

I fear I may have gone a little over the top with the storyboard...



Naturally I found myself illustrating quite a bit for this animation.

This was the first time I'd ever done collage stop-motion, and I loved it! Hope to do some experimenting with that in the near future.

Computerboy Sleeps

So, it's 4am, and now seems to be the only time since last week I've been awake, free, and it's not too noisy from the rain to record that video I was talking about. Finally did it, so enjoy!

Now, a few points to clear things up:

• I lied, I didn't do it in a week, it was more like 2 days...

• I hate my voice too.

• It's drool, not jizz.
  

So yeah, just to summarise:

No noise: Computerboy Sleeps.


A little noise: Computerboy flinches.


Too much noise: Computerboy pissed off.

Now I know you got it the first time, I just really wanted to put these drawings up.

Hibernation

[1985. A secret tree house. Two children disguised in animal costumes experiment on reviving a bee. But they are searching for a way to bring back something much bigger.
A magical and moving story about a journey of discovery and revelation.]

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across this award winning short film at short&sweet, it's one truly beautiful piece of film, and if you don't well up, just a tiny bit, at least a little on the inside, I might be inclined to declare you're lacking a soul.

Compose This.

Err 4

Ever since I worked on that music video I've been in a love affair with televisual heads, it's just one of the things I've been drawing a little too unhealthily.

I started drawing this for an E4 competition, but never managed to finish it in time! (mainly because I started to draw it on the deadline date...)

So it turned into an illustration to do for myself, something that I feel with the course now coming into full flow I may not get to do much more in the future. Of course I don't hope that, so we'll see.

Just finished this today, to my surprise if feels DeviantArt worthy.
How did I forget that place, how did I forget that I'm the cliffybiroguy....

Breakfast: Add Scissors & Glue

Oh dear I can't believe I almost forgot!

What's that? "Where can I get those templates? Those guys look like they were having so much fun! I wanna make my own paper breakfast!" I choose to hear you cry...

Well don't worry, you can download them here!

Have fun, do with them what you will! And if you feel like it, show me the result!

Download Templates

Hopefully I'll be doing more papercraft to download in the future!

Breakfast: Don't Add Milk

So yeah, as I mentioned before, I started my course at csm a few weeks ago, well about a month ago now, it's been rather busy, I've had barely any time to put work up! But to make up for it, this post is pretty image heavy, and I gotta admit, a little different.

This was my first project, the summer project, it had a simple theme, breakfast.

That's right, a paper breakfast.

We had to represent breakfast through five pictures. I had an instinct to make paper templates of typical breakfast things, as I didn't feel like going for the real thing... and to be honest all holiday I'd been itching to try out some papercraft!

So I decided to document some beautiful people making breakfast in an entirely different way... Here are the 5 photographs I went with for the exhibition. In these pictures we travel from the original templates to the final breakfast items. Smiles all round.

Unfortunately there were some pictures that didn't make the cut.

Yeah MILKY!

And of course, there were some outtakes...

Hell yeah she's gonna kill me...

It's quite easy to see we had fun...

The tutors liked it, but informed me I'd done a graphic design answer to a photo brief... whoops! Still quite pleased as I wouldn't describe myself as that fictional word "graphic-y" at all.
Maybe I can do something besides illustrate and animate after all!

Ah well, it was just a bit of fun! God I love papercraft!

Nom Nom Nom!

Something To Tell You

A general if not slightly generic life rule I've been trying to stick to recently. It's kinda hard to follow.

People worry far too much, especially people attempting to break into the art and design world, there's such a strive to be original. Naturally I'm one of them.

Earlier this week we started what is known as "The London Project." (Yeah, obviously I've started uni, a few weeks ago in fact, but I'll get into that another time.) The aim is to do anything related to the Thames, and I mean pretty loosely. That's right, we can basically do anything.

Before we set out to walk to the Thames the other day, our illustration tutor Rachel Cattle gave us a little briefing on drawing, naturally with a few hand outs. The final one simply had a medium length quote, all in block capitals, which read:

"Nothing is original.

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.

In any case always remember what Jon Lu Goddard said:

"It's not where you take things from - It's where you take them to" "

- Jim Jarmusch

Now I don't condone stealing artwork, but as I read this I still thought to myself,

my god,

he's right.

E Plethora Yo Chocola!