Irish Weekend

I watched 'Once' and I made this background. Do note that the actual Saint Patrick's Day feast occurred on Friday, because of the coincidence of Holy Week and St. Patrick's Day. This last happened in 1940 and won't happen again until 2160.



The text is taken from a vision the saint himself had, where he read a letter headed 'The Voice of the Irish'.

Design Pigeon-Holed by Physical Object!

At church the other day, Sunday, I believe, I saw someone with this book:



And thought that the only way to feature the entire object and comfortably design around it is to center everything on the page. This is of course depending on the rules that the designer is willing to break or bend or even follow but just wants to look conventional or... orthodox. So I went home and sculpted, out of some Sticky Tac I had near, a similar milkshake glass from what my memory served:



Then I thought to break that mold of only being able to design centered-ly with that item the key feature by altering it the slightest bit:



This opened up all possible alignments to the object. Flipping it makes the Right alight and turning 90 degrees either way gives it a centered look. SO. How long until we have all sorts of rag left and right dishes and objects? Apple moved their headphone jacks from the center to the left of the iPod. Sony took push-buttons on their higher end tvs from the center to the right side. It was awful, not that I saw it, but 'Good Luck Chuck' moved their movie poster credit block from the center to the right. I thought the ad campaign for that was a welcome breath of (originally I had an anti-'Good Luck Chuck' rant in these parentheses, but I'm clearly only speaking about the posters.) fresh air in the theatre lobbies. So, I flipped it and filtered it and here was my somewhat final product, untainted by the conventions of the 'center-aligned' milkshake glass.

Handy-dandy Notebook

A sketch of the grating that makes up the Eiffel tower. It kind of hits on art nouveau in just this small detail, a detail that is repeated several thousand times.




The basic pose of the 'Man of Sorrows' Acadamia in Florence, right near the David. This painting depicts Christ in the tomb, waiting with the sin of the world on his shoulders.




This is a rocky outset? or beach off of Marseilles. I drew it in fear that my friends would be washed away by some rogue wave and I would be saying someday, 'this is where it happened...' Just down the road was Chateau d'If.




This is the view of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the view from the Tate Modern art museum. there's always something in the way of seeing something important in London, but that's history for you, if you don't set it off alone, it gets suffocated by the present.

Ambigram

A friend, Deborah Busch, asked me to look at some of her photos for a contest. I noticed this peculiarity about one of them and exploited it.

Valentine's Day

I took some doodles i had made, got some textures from a laundry bad and a sweater's shoulder pad. I found a color pallet on a website and re-colored all things. Then I had wrote all the letters. Also the heart shaped came from stock photo websites that i screen grabbed and edited. Put it into a 1024x768 format and bam. It came out looking like Kirby's Dream Land.
I had to take pictures of all these elements, it would be much easier with a scanner.

Design by Billy Collins

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the Arctic Circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.