State Library of New South Wales

Inspiration by Design was an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales, an exhbition curated by the London V&A celebrating over 150years of collecting by the National Art Library.

I really really enjoyed this exhibition, with just over a hundred pieces of work that spanned such a vast array of disciplines it was just breathtaking. With sketches by Yves St Laurent, and sketch books by Picasso and Hockney it was just so inspiring to even be in the same room as all these pieces of works.

My favourite piece from this exhibition was the collection of books and illustrated stories, in particular this page from Beatrix Potter's, Peter Rabbit. The exhibition itself has collated all these into a book which is described below:

Word & Image shows how the distinct character of the NAL was formed, and how its collections created a new kind of bibliographical resource. From a fifteenth-century book of hours to William Morris's specimen pages for Jean Froissart's The Chronicles of Fraunce, Inglande, and Other Places Adjoynynge; from George Cruikshank's studies of Fagin for Oliver Twist to an Yves Saint Laurent design for the House of Dior; and from Bill Brandt's photographs to the Book of Nails by Floating Concrete Octopus, Word & Image explores some of the finest examples of 'book art' in existence.

Everything about these pieces of work are just rare jewels of inspiration and I feel so privileged to have seen this exhibition. What I found even more fascinating is that the V&A has this exhibition on for rent so it may be possible to see it again in the future.

This Gallery Space led onto another Gallery Space called Australian Inspiration.

Julie Paterson, Residency and Cloth Talk.

I went to a talk by a textiles designer at the library and it was really cool, it was like being in a room with you know the film About A Boy, well imagine fifty character's like the mum Fiona, all passionate about textiles and imagery and this woman basically told us her life story of how she got to where she was with her own studio. Even though it's not animation related it was really cool to see how her design work had been influenced by aboriginal art. To see her work go below, also she had an artistic manifesto that was really cool that might be worth reading, if you like poetic words about art.

http://clothfabric.com

Neon Skull

So the location of the first ever Leeds Loop was decided for Neon Cactus so as there logo is a skull I decided to model a skull in Maya and animate it cackling with neon lights inside glowing and pulsating. Then I'm going to use a still for the posters, and make an electronic advertisement thing, with Neon Cactus' logo the skull laughing and Leeds LoopdeLoop somewhere in it. 

So I started by trying to make the skull from a cylinder. This kind of failed, I inserted too many edge loops. See Below:

So Mat Clarke, showed me how to model from starting with a polygon, which I just couldn't get my head round, after inserting a couple of subdivisions there was too many points to map it out for my little head, so Matt showed me how to model from an image plane. I got a bit carried away with detail and my mesh was just outrageous. I got a bit carried away with the multi cut tool. But It was fixable with triangulation and then quad'ing and then I just had to get rid of all the long triangles and it looked something like this when mirrored.

And then I started texturing and adding glow lights in the eyes, and I got an image to do an image based lighting sphere. The animations still a bit off, I can't get the top part to move nicely with the lower jaw, but I got an amazing cackle off of freesound.org. 

 I tried doing lights in the eyes, but it wasn't working so I went for spheres that give off a glow. I think if I was to do this again I would have modelled it in Mudbox.

I didn't like how the glow looked after doing the sphere because i think it spills too much infront of the skull so I put in green planes to green screen out the holes and I'll do some pulsing colours in photoshop or after effects afterwords. I also want to do the neon cactus logo inverted flashing in neon colours which I'm going to do in photoshop, having it say Neon Cactus flashing, underneath presents, then loop de loop logo with the fuzzy glow light in neon colours on a black background leeds then the skull and the time date and theme. Then combine all the info onto an A2 portrait page for a poster.

State Library of Victoria

Australian Sketchbook: Colonial Life and The Art of ST Gill.