I'm Publishing My First Book!

Last month I began working with IFWG Publishing Australia to design the cover and illustrate writer Kaaron Warren's upcoming novel The Grief Hole.  Kaaron's book will launch in Canberra, A.C.T. on August 27th 2016 at the Canberra Writer's Centre during the 2016 Canberra Writer's Festival -- this has been such a thrilling project to work on, with Kaaron's writing talent and the publishing expertise of Gerry Huntman at IFWG -- I can't wait to see the launch of the finished book later this year!

In addition to this, I am currently negotiating with IFWG to publish a separate book of my own illustrations and sketches to accompany The Grief Hole.  I will be putting the book together from illustrations to design work and layout -- making this my first officially published creative work. Adding to the excitement, the book will open with a forward from one of Australia's most celebrated artists, to be announced shortly.

Both books are tentatively scheduled to launch in August at the Writer's Festival, so stay tuned and hope to see you there!

Fantasy Art Portraits

Hello! I am trying something new today, and am going to try tagging my project updates to my other online accounts. Here is an image from my most recent work, I have started a series of Fantasy Art portraits. This has become an excellent opportunity to research digital illustration techniques further, and I've been learning all about applying gaussian blurs, using layer filters and digital oil paint. I will be exhibiting these drawings at Canberra's Science Fiction convention, Conflux, in October along with my first independently published book, Vesper: Notes from an Interstellar Medium. Hope to see you there!

Vesper: Notes from an Interstellar Medium

While I've had to put some of my larger creative projects on hold while studying Psychology full time, I have been working on a small book, which I'm excited to be publishing in August.

Vesper -- Notes from an Interstellar Medium is a collection of poems, sketches and musings on themes of alchemy, metaphysics and pagansim, in the spirit of good humor. I'll be selling the book at local Canberra alternative bookstores as well as at a few places in Melbourne and Sydney, and as an ebook. I'll get some links up once the work has gone to print.

Cheers Dears!

Student Artwork Group Publication

In light of the number of extraordinarily talented students turning up for classes, I am currently negotiating with the Canberra Institute of Technology whether we might publish a small bi-annual anthology of creative works to be sold locally. If you are a current or former student reading this with an interest for showcasing your art, by all means get in touch!

This would be a great opportunity for aspiring artists to get their work seen in print.

The project is still in the works, so stay posted for now =).

New Art with Harmonograph Oscillations

For those who were unaware, the local Canberra Science Centre has a state of the art Harmonograph that is open for supervised access. It's a platform that creates a beautiful pattern of intertia against the friction of the pen onto a paper when pushed, ostensibly creating a much more complex version of what you might have seen from your Spirograph stencil kit as a kid! Here's a link describing how it works.

I've been teaming up with the friendly staff at Questacon to create a series of patterns containing perceptual constancy illusions and the 'McCollough effect' color illusion - and there's certainly an art to getting a fine overlapping pattern, not as easy as it looks at all. I'm working on a series of artworks with these images now for a future exhibit. Meanwhile I've been studying the human brain and visual-perceptual system, so needless to say it's been a real inspiration for looking closer at how we process images and artwork too.

Grapher software can create the same images digitally and also in 3D, though I've not tried the program yet. If you are interested in generating similar images to these, I would highly recommend checking it out.

Where on Earth am I?

Well now everyone can know!

If I seem to be waffling between a faint blip and total online and offline obscurity, you can bet I'm doing something interesting  . . .

If that something interesting happens to exceed a minimum threshold of utility to others, I may mention it here. Any indignation or insult resulting from what constitutes 'useful' or 'entertaining', I can only promise you was unintentional. So please, have a laugh at my expense so you can forgo my mistakes if ever endeavoring along a shared path of interest.   = )

Cheers!