250 - What a Relief!

Day 250. As I was waiting at Changi Airport tonight I found an activity table in the terminal, mainly designed to keep the kids amused, where you could use pieces of paper, crayons, and a set of bas-relief wooden frames to make your own artwork. Just place the paper over the wooden block and rub with a crayon to create a woodblock relief artwork. Cool.

As I was finishing my artwork I got paged to the information desk. I went across to see why they wanted me and it seems that I left my passport in the bathroom 10 minutes before and someone had handed it in. Getting this back was a much bigger relief! Thank you kind stranger!

195 - Blog Makeover

Day 195. First day back at work today and I spent a good chunk of it doing a blog makeover to all our junior school class blogs. Our junior school teachers have really embraced the use of blogs as a communication tool with parents this year and have been great at adding content, but the overall look and feel of the blogs used the standard Blogger defaults and was visually all over the place.

While I did not want to squash their creativity, we had a chat about it at the end of last term and agreed that we could probably redesign the blogs in a way that gave them some consistency without making them all look exactly the same.  The end result is that they are structurally identical, but visually different by using different coloured themes and the kids' own artwork, and I think it works well as a design idea.

157 - Excited

Day 157. I don't usually use the same tool back to back, but this Repix tool is pretty interesting. It really helps give a very painterly look to a photo. I used a Jot Pro stylus on this image too, which tends to help a lot when going for that brushed, arty look. It's a very cool app with lots of potential. I like the textures that can be built up with layers of effects.

156 - Art For Art's Sake

Day 156. I was playing with a new app tonight called Repix, a very interesting painting app for iOS. It has a series of brushes and filters that can be applied over a photograph to create effects that range from painterly to other-worldly. It's quite cool.

This completely abstract image started life as a small cropped corner of a larger photo ( this actually started out as a picture of a teacher and kindergarten kid using a iPad together, not that you can tell that now.) After applying a few effects and brushes it quickly distorts the image beyond recognition. I'd like to get my kids trying this app.

"But what's it a picture of?"

Nothing now. I just found it to be an interesting arrangement of colours and shapes. Does it have to be "of" something.

154 - Another Spoonful

Day 154. I'm in the Brisbane Convention Centre today for a conference and there is a beautiful piece of art hanging on the wall that I really like. It's a series of torn corrugated squares, arranged in a grid, made by an artist named Rodney Spooner. In the spirit of remixing, or appropriation, or making art based on other art, today's daily create is a series of close up photos of Spooner's art piece, arranged back into a grid using Diptic.

138 - Way Too Much Maui

Day 138. Linda and I are getting married next year in Maui, Hawaii. We are putting all the information about the wedding for family and friends on a website, soon to be published publicly.

I've been working on some ideas for the banner artwork to go across the top of the website, and I've come up with a few designs in Photoshop but I really can't decide which ones I prefer (if any!). So my daily create today is just to share some of the designs I've been working on.

You can enlarge each of these banners to full size by clicking on them.