Symmetry bird thing

I’ve been working hard in my sketchbook, I’ve also got some posts planned for the future on customizing your workspace for digital art.

Some are studies of anatomy I made from “Anatomy and Drawing” by Victor Perard, some are studies from a book about animation and other’s are studies of animals and also various things from my head.

I’m just going to lump them all here as a gallery.

I honestly can’t say I was into the “web design” area of websites till quite recently (after 2007) as the coding part was at first a challenge for me so I didn’t seem to get round to it.

This first one is possibly the first web site I coded in 2004- shocking stuff!

I had even disabled right click.

Unfortunately I didn’t keep a screen shot of another website I had done around that time which had bouncing mushrooms in the menu. I might implement it again one day.

Heres the splash page for that website (yes a splash page!). I sort of like the splash page more than the actual website.

These are the screen shots of the changes I made over the years.

This one used table-less CSS skinned code. I also used PHP includes for the first time around 2006. The “design” is GREEN (my favorite colour you see…)

Here I did the “dark layout” thing. Not a fan of dark layouts to be honest.

This one reminds me of ice cream.

I don’t know why I didn’t stop at this one, I really liked it.

My attempt at “Minimal” or me being lazy.

I got fed up of minimal and had the equivalent of a website mid life crisis at this point.

I’ve decided that it would be a good place to put my research concerning mythology and folklore and indulge a few more fairies and monsters than I’ve allowed myself here lately. I may as well put all my obsessive research to some good use.

Currently it’s only in the planning and technical stage at the moment though.

Any thoughts or suggestions are most welcome 

I now have a new part time job which I am enjoying very much: it’s easily the best job I’ve ever had, and am also in the process of getting ready to move to another area of the country to be with my fiancé. Lets just say life is looking a lot better than it was 2 years ago. I may write a post/essay on that one day if I have nothing better to do with my time (perhaps not then).

I took up my martial arts and yoga again over the past 2 years and sorted a few things out with my confidence and fitness in general which hopefully will one day reflect on my artwork. I can nearly kick my head again, but not quite.

I’ve also been working since last year on a WordPress CMS website project and a picture book project to keep my skills up and learn new things. I will go into more detail as the projects develop later in the year.

Here’s a few useful things I found on the inter-web recently for you as you’ve read this far:

Useful WordPress plugins

PHPEnkoder (automatically encrypts emails on web page to stop email spam)

WP-Cycle (J Query image slide show)

Members (I’m keeping my eye on this one, looks very promising for user management)

Free Software

Backup tool, FreeFileSync (useful for flash drives and secondary hard drive backup)

Password manager, KeePass

This one went a bit big bird gone wrong unfortunately.

sketchbook pro self portrait sketch

I bought a new web cam because I was not very impressed with the last one I got (Microsoft Lifecam), this one is a Hue HD web cam and is a lot better and it looks cute too.

I think Sketchbook Pro is really good for sketching so far, I haven’t had it for very long but it wins against Painter for that purpose.

I’m wearing my big headphones in this picture, they may make me look silly but they block all sound out and make music sound brilliant.

I thought using WordPress would save me time to paint more but I have become more than a little obsessed with it.

I’ve been really busy working on a web site project for a local Parish Council as well as tweaking my web site some more (I know I should stop at some point), so I haven’t done that much painting lately.

I can’t show the Parish Council website yet because it hasn’t been officially launched yet, but I’ve really learned a lot from working on it.

I have also been learning a lot more about web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). It is very interesting thinking about how many people may view one web page in a different way. I’ve implemented many of the techniques on this web site and the Parish Council project I’m working on.  I’ll have to write up an accessibility statement at some point I guess.

Yesterday I went to the Festival of Quilts ¹ at Birmingham International with my aunt and mum. There were loads of really beautiful arty quilts everywhere and I had a good time looking at all the buttons and beads. I might be inspired to do some more sock monkeys at some point. There was one thing in the whole place that really caught my eye- it was a Korean exhibit: Chunghie Lee: Pojagi & Beyond – My Cup Overflows, I just thought it was beautiful.

Today I mowed the lawns and saved a butterfly.

Now for tea.

I thought it was a bit tatty (it is quite old), so I scanned it in and had a play in CorelDraw X4 to straighten and spruce it up with vectors:

Dizzy is the copyright of Codemasters ^{1 2} though they stopped making the Dizzy games a long time ago to my dismay.