Category Archives: Mine

My makeshift portfolio.

New blog: Rapid Notes

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Rapid Notes Yesterday I launched a new blog: Rapid Notes. It’s just hosted on a free WordPress.com account for now, and will probably stay that way.

I created this new outlet because I wanted a place to store and share the fascinating things I find online every day. I’m not going to put just any old thing up there, but it’ll be a busier blog than many of my others. Much busier. The idea is to help me identify what my real passions are by looking at the common themes of the items I post. I’ll be spending time getting the tags and categories — the taxonomy — just right. Then as the blog grows I’ll be able to look at my archives determine… well… something hopefully.

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Babylon 1999

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Warning: I’ve cranked the geek up to 11 for this uber-nostalgic post.

Buried Shadow (1999)

Buried Shadow (1999)

Recently I was reunited with a computer-generated image I created back in 1999 of a crashed Shadow ship from Babylon 5. I had submitted it as a cover image for the second issue of on online fan publication called Beyond Babylon. It wasn’t used on the cover, but it did get featured in the gallery. At some point I lost my original, so it was nice to be contacted out of the blue by someone who had a copy.

I have fond memories from those days of hanging out at the (now defunct) Babylon 5 Modellers Guild [b5mg.com] and the LightWave Group [lwg3d.org] (which evolved into the still-active Foundation 3D forums). Scifi-Art.com was another great community — I remember really liking their site design.

All this nostalgia got me digging around my old hard drives for more retro LightWave renders of mine.

Babylon 5 images

You can click on the small images below for a closer look. Not that I didn’t create any of these models myself, but the compositions, lighting and backgrounds were all my own work. Also, if you zoom in on that shot of Starfuries engaged in combat, you’ll see some of my own wing art designs. (Yes, that is Daffy Duck!)

Shadows over Jupiter
Fall of Centauri Prime
Starfury wingart
Centauri Primus
Babylon 4 attack
Babylon 5 launches Thunderbolt

The name of the place is ‘Babylon 5′ →

Thing a Week

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Thing a Week badge People who have followed me on Twitter or this blog for a while may be aware that back in June 2009 I started a Flickr photography group called Thing a Week. The concept is quite simple: To take a picture on a different theme every week.

Now the group is under new management and has a snazzy new website, it seemed like the perfect time for me to get all nostalgic.

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Galaxy class

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I’ve just finished watching season 1 of The Next Generation, and I’ve been inspired to get back into LightWave 3D to produce a quick homage (or two).

Enterprise D

View full size (1200 × 675) or in glorious HD (1920 × 1080) on Flickr.

This is a faithful reproduction of one of the most widely-used promo shots of the Enterprise D (see below for the originals).

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Four fantastic WordPress logos

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WoodPress logo For my recent post about the terrible quality adverts appearing on WordPress.com sites I created a nice high resolution blue glossy version of the WordPress logo. Then I was inspired to make a few variations.

They’re made avaliable here as 1000x1000px PNGs, with transparency, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Feel free to share and enjoy, but please remember to give credit (to Foomandoonian), ideally with a link back to this page.

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Logo design for a conference: Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds

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Last year I designed a logo for a conference to be held at the University of Birmingham called Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds [PDF], with a variety of talks and workshops on the subject of ‘developing personal and institutional narratives in support of LGBTQ students’.

Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds conference logo

I was pretty happy with the metaphor behind the final logo, and I think the conference put it to good use. You can see my exploration and development process below.

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The Lake District

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It’s been a while since I’ve exercised the old shutter-finger. These were taken back in July, and I only just got around to processing them. More on Flickr.
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Adventures in WordPress theming

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I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog and Twitter for a week or so now because I’ve been concentrating on a few personal projects:

A WordPress theme for hyperlocal bloggers

This one is just a Photoshop mock (the provisional name ‘The Local’ is going to have to be changed as I since found another theme with that name), but I’m quite pleased with the look and feel of it all. I wouldn’t usually do a mockup like this, but as I’m going to be learning WordPress theme creation from scratch, I didn’t want to have to be worrying about the design at the same time.

About halfway through creating this I realised it looked very BBC-ish. I’ll probably just try to give it a different default colour scheme to combat this.

The design has a lot of space for different widgets and I plan to give the nameplate area a lot of configuration options so no two of these blogs should look alike. 

One feature I quite like, but you can’t really see in this mock, is the image copyright ID icon. In the bottom right corner of the main cathedral pic, there’s a CC licence symbol. I imagine that when you hover over this, a full credit will pop up over the picture, with link to the source, etc. It seems like a neat solution to me, and not one I’ve seen elsewhere.

I’ve stalled work on this for the time being as I wanted to get my second project up and running first…

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Some fun Sarah Jane Adventures stuff I designed!

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Today was my final day at BBC Wales after handing in my notice last month. Though I still have absolutely no regrets, I have actually been enjoying more creative freedom over the last few weeks. If the previous two years had been similar, I may not have left…

Anyway, I thought I’d show and tell some of the things I’ve made. You can find all these in the SJA Fun and Games section.

Sarah Jane Adventures — Storyteller

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Paris, Photoshopped

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I’ve been working on another batch of my unprocessed Paris photographs tonight, and thought I’d share this one in its before and after states. I usually don’t do this much work to my images, but I thought this one would be worth a bit of extra effort. As you can see, I’ve shifted the elements into more pleasing positions and removed some distracting elements, then tweaked the colours a little.

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Toe Fluff

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Steve Rack is an artist. He designed a character called Toe Fluff, which he thought would be great toy. In fact, he liked Toe Fluff so much that he decided to base an exhibition on it. To shake things up he asked his friends to customize Toe Fluff as part of the show. Well, since Steve’s ‘call for submissions’, things kind of snowballed! The project is now open to all artists. All you have to do is download the template and get creative!

The July 15th deadline for entries is fast approaching, but there’s still time to create something fun. I’ve just entered one myself:

Toe Fluff bogey monster by Foomandoonian

To the left is the template everyone has to work from. It’s really worth looking through the other entries on the Toe Fluff website as there is some amazing work. You could also follow @SteveRack on Twitter.

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