Dblog is the interwebositry for all things creative, inspirational and elegant from D's world of art, design, cinema, T.V., comics, toys and pop culture. Drop me line or an interesting link any time...

31.5.12

D's Freezies

Pitch character concepts for a 'Slurpee' style product range, for one of the major chains (passionfruit, cola, lime, berry).

Movie Trailers

The Invisible War (A chilling Documentary on the worst issue for female servicewomen) Les Miserables (Rusty will do anything to sing...)

Video Game Trailers


Video games have changed. We have the AAA titles and we have phone apps and the middle ground (along with its developers) are fading away. But then there's those games which take a great 'little game' idea and marry it to some AAA, beautiful and well executed art direction and make something different all together. I hope the game is as good as this trailer for Deadlight.


This is not an awesome trailer, but it is a clever post modern one... By the folks who brought you one of the best trailers ever (video game, movie or otherwise), this is Mad Riders.

30.5.12

Photography: A Girl And Her Room

By photographer Rania Matar whose work focuses mainly on women and women's issues this is a stunning collection of photos revealing the havens of teenage girls from around the world. Check out her folio for the full series.
This project is about teenage girls and young women at a transitional time of their lives, alone in the privacy of their own personal space and surroundings: their bedroom, a womb within the outside world.

29.5.12

The Music Box


On the banks of the Mississippi, New Orleans there is a house they call the risin... No, it's called The Music Box; a shanty town that doubles as a living collection of instruments.

Interactive Story: Dragon Brush



A neat looking interactive story book in the works...
Based on a traditional Chinese folktale, Dragon Brush is the story of Bing-Wen, a young boy who loves to paint. When given a magical brush that makes drawings come to life, Bing-Wen must use his art and his wits to outsmart the greedy Emperor.

Illustrator: Bjørn Rune Lie


Illustrator Bjørn Rune Lie

Sculpture: Bruno Walpoth



Arresting figurative wooden sculpture by Bruno Walpoth

28.5.12

Advert: From Love to Bingo


A clever little advert by AlmapBBDO using 873 stock images to advertise... Getty's stock images...

27.5.12

Voice Actor Star Wars Redux


Long but marvellous; seven of the world's greatest voice actors team up to retell Star Wars, through the voices of some of their most popular alter egos (and then some) at the Emerald City Comic Con.

26.5.12

BriTANick: Boys Night In


I don't really understand what's going on in this short, but I was laughing out loud (technically NSFW due to some nudity but not 'full frontal') by a performance duo called BriTANick. If you enjoy it, check out their full video blog including a hilarious one with Joss Whedon.

Kozyndan at Jellyfish Lake

I just discovered Kozyndan's Flickr gallery via this stunning holiday shoot at Jellyfish Lake, Palau.

25.5.12

Dying man finds support on World of Warcraft



Not exactly a 'feel good story' but a surprisingly supportive article on the usually much maligned video game experience and the positive effect it can have for people... All the more surprisingly on NineMSN.

In the game of World of Warcraft, Patrice Anseline is a level 85 Blood Elf Death Knight called Sackmagraph, of the Dath'Remar Horde’s Hydra guild. In reality, he is a Victorian father-of-three who is facing the painful truth that he may soon die from prostate cancer, which has reached the lining of the brain and is inoperable.

History of Dice

The History of Dice

24.5.12

D's A-Z of Heroes

In 2007 I was part of an exhibition called Homage (including fellow Melbourne artists Tim Burke, Maya Graham, Trevor Molloy, Amanda Toniolo  and Antoine Toniolo); a group show and tribute to the comic masters and those they influenced. We mostly worked in isolation and I think were all pleased when we saw each others work together, all very different but working in harmony.

One of my works was the piece below called Icon, which was a kind of nod to the singular iconography of the superhero. I wanted to bring as diverse a group of superhero icons as possible into a single abstract pattern; to see if the strength in design cold remain after abstraction and displacement. I chose based on familiarity, obscurity and pure personal favouritism.
I rendered each symbol whole then placed and cropped until I felt I had created a kind of neutral mosaic. In retrospect I probably should have pushed the abstraction further but I think it finished up as a nice piece.


More recently we wanted to make a meaningful and memorable gift for our newly arrived nephew Cameron. I went back to the drawing board with Icon and decided to reinvent it as an A-Z of superheroes for the nursery! It was damned hard finding superheroes for every letter (I began with about half) that had both a definable symbol (not all do) and were well known enough to be worthy of inclusion (thanks to those who I asked for advice!)! I then rendered the remaining symbols and set about repositioning them with a slightly less abstraction than the original.


My hope is that Cameron will look and wonder at these mysterious icons and seek out the comics. I'm not a fan (or even knowledgeable) of all, but some of my favourite titles are there in the alphabet above and I hope that he gets as much enjoyment from them as I do.
Do you know all the symbols? 

You can now buy the print here on my Artflakes account.

Movie Trailers

Skyfall (007)


The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix? Sign me up!)



The Great Gatsby

Graphic Design


Pentagram is something of a near mythical centre for design excellence and it's a reputation well earned. I've been lucky enough top see a number of it's members speak at AGIdeas and they really do have an amazing catalogue, and story to tell; which they do tell above, celebrating 40 years of work with a clever little showpiece. Check out their website too...


 And speaking of AGIdeas, I've been to this conference half a dozen times over the last 10 years, though not this year (my wife however IS lucky enough top be attending this week!). It is an amazing, inspirational, insightful and exhausting three days of design in all its forms and I would highly recommend it to anyone in the field.
Established in 1991 by Ken Cato and developed and presented by the Design Foundation in Melbourne, Australia. agIdeas offers an extraordinary program of events that celebrate design excellence and promotes the value of design driven innovation.
Each year agIdeas brings 40 internationally acclaimed creative people to Melbourne, those who have pushed the boundaries and excelled in their area of creativity. They present in program such as design conferences, business seminars, workshops, panel discussions and are present at social engagements.




Broad reaching and inspiring London Design studio Graphic Thought Facility

Photography


Tomal Price

 The Stranger Project by Benoit Paillé; check out his full site for lot's of other stunning studies...

23.5.12

3 Ways To Design Toys That Boost Kids’ Creativity



As a parent and designer (and toy lover), I found this article very interesting: 3 Ways To Design Toys That Boost Kids’ Creativity on Co.Design
The answer, quite simply, is to take back creative play by reimagining it for the modern era. Kids create, learn, and share their ideas through imaginative play. With pirate costumes, dolls, saucepan drum sets, and refrigerator-box moon bases kids aren’t just practicing for “real life,” they’re training their brains to see new possibilities--building the “what if” skills that will be critical to their creative success in later years.

Skeptic Michael Shermer: Baloney Detection Kit


22.5.12

Video Game Trailer: Aliens: Colonial Marines


Aliens is one of those rare franchises that actually enjoys a pretty good history of video game adaptations and as Aliens is one of my favourite films of all time, I am definitely looking forward to Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Pub Dog


A classy, simple and very funny little animated short...

21.5.12

More of D's Star Wars Illustrations

A couple of new illustrations for my current game.
Vuul the Socorron Desert Guide and connoisseur of lizard meat...

The crew start a bar (Cantina) room brawl... again...

New Cover



I've been busy trying to catch up on a few classics (in between devouring the Dresden series of books) and had an idea to do this myself (now I've said it out loud, hopefully I'll get around to doing it!) but here's a great Blog by Matt Roeser, a Boston graphic designer who redesigns the covers of book's he's just read!

20.5.12

Neil Gaiman Keynote Address


This is a pretty inspiring key note address by the broad and brilliantly talented author Neil Gaiman with great advice for aspiring creatives.

Measuring the Universe


From 'Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos' an exhibition currently showing at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. I think I did learn something... And a nice little infomation to boot...

18.5.12

Video Game High School (VGHS) : Ep. 1


I'm a late comer to the stylings of Freddie W(ong), video game/pop culture Youtube filmmaker, but this is hot off his press; Epidode 1 of a new series called Video Game High School.

Ken Burns: On Story

A concise but very insightful look into his process and motivation, and a great interview with the documentary makers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason


Fingerings: Judith Ann Braun

 Judith Ann Braun's collection of large scale 'Fingerings' her term, not mine, essentially translated to 'finger paintings'.




17.5.12

D's Neopetsupials

While lead artist at Infinite Interactive I worked on Neopets: Puzzle Adventure. The Neopets universe is a MORPG for kids featuring little playable critters with varying anthropomorphisation (is that a word?) and a background with a lot more depth than I initially imagined. This is a little concept character sheet for some 'Aussie' pets we hoped to include which sadly, with all the usual time constraints of game development we weren't able to include... Were fun to do though...

Movie Trailer

Gangster Squad

The Good Doctor
The Do-Deca-Pentathalon

16.5.12

The Lego Gender Gap

A very interesting article on Sociological Images by David Pickett about the historical perspective on the Lego gender gap.
Part 1
Part 2

Video Game Trailer: The Last of Us


Trailer's Maketh not the Game, but this is a pretty nice little 'teaser' (rather than a trailer) for The Last of Us that certainly captures everything I love as a Zombiephile about Zombie fiction...

14.5.12

Johnson Arms

Johnson Arms, where the nerf guns get nerfed and pop culture arms come to life. Check out the blog's gallery.

10.5.12

Short Film: The Eagleman Stag

D's L's Invite

It's my daughter's 7th Birthday soon and she has a 'monster' party planned... I had great visions of creating a stunning invitation with some fun characters in picture frames, like a wall of photos from the Adam's family and thus set about playing around with a few sketches...

However... My daughter, budding artist that she is, saw my initial drawings and decided to do her own... The results were frankly quite spectacular...
Looking forward to doing this little project myself I initially had ideas of weaseling my way back into the role, but after watching her carry that sketchbook around all day, churning out one amazing monster after another; my black heart melted and I instead was content to take a back seat...
We scanned her images in, set her up with Photoshop... And except for a few minor tweaks, the entire menagerie below is all her work!

Note the Zombie (top left) with dismembered limbs and flies and 'smell lines' on the large Zombie (middle right). My favourite is the grey creature (top row third from the left) which was the only one I couldn't immediately identify. When questioned, she informed me sagely that it was a 'mutant koala'.

I could practically weep with pride...

Movie Trailers

Beasts of the Southern Wild  
End of Watch
The Amazing Spiderman
Killer Joe
Argo

9.5.12

RIP Maurice Sendak



As you probably know by now, legendary author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, known of course for such children's books as Where The Wild Things Are and his unique, dark but wonderful expressions of childhood has passed from us... Enjoy his hilarious and sharp final 2 part interview on the Colbert Report.


Illustrator/Designer: Andrew Neyer



Illustrator/Designer: Andrew Neyer

3.5.12

Every 45 seconds of Children of Men



Hopefully it goes without saying just what a breathtaking film Children Of Men is. One 'feature' of the film is it's famous long shots, but it wasn't until I came across this little montage that I realised just how many there is; 16 shots over 45 seconds, 6 of those over 90! Alfonso Cuaron's new film, 'Gravity', will  have a 17+ minute opening shot- Mind boggling...

Enjoy them above. If you haven't seen it, watch it (before watching this)!

Instant Date


Improv Everywhere force a date on a hapless couple in central park...

Animated Short: Will


Watch this moving, stunning animated short in a moment of peace away from the office. Incredible: Will

D's Star Wars: Rogue Traders

The following article contains nerdity, reader discretion is advised.

One of my hobbies (or in my case 'Life Style choices') is that I play roleplaying games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons).

As part of a Star Wars game I'm currently running I use an interesting community site called Obsidian Portal to help me manage my game; essentially a repository for information, rules and player journals. This site has literally thousands of other such 'campaigns' and each month they nominate one site as 'Campaign of the Month'... This Month, it was us... Star Wars: Rogue Traders. Now a big part of that award goes to my players who keep a weekly journal of their antics in the game and it is pretty awesome reading (if you're into that sort of thing) but my contribution, in addition to managing the site, has been the artwork.

Essentially this has been a bit of an epic personal project for me, creating characters and 'scenes' from the game sessions. Below is a selection, enjoy.








Movie Trailers

Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (A Superhero movie about bats)  
Mansome (Mr Spurlock and the search for manliness)  
Elena ('Taut' Russian Drama)  
Hick (Chloe's at it again...)  
El Gringo (Either a violent, Rodriguez/True Romance inspired farce... or just stupid, not sure yet...)

2.5.12

Photography: Christian Stoll


Behind the scenes of epic spaces, lot's of other great photography too!

Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments of Teaching



From Brain Pickings, social critic Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments of Teaching
  1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
  2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
  3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
  4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
  5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
  6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
  7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
  8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
  9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
  10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Designer: Emma Laura Jones

Graphic Designer: Emma Laura Jones

Photography: Toylusions

Some amazing photography using toys... by Vesa Lehtimaki

History of Whistling by CDZA


As a habitual whistler myself, this is pretty infectious...