Went for a walk with my father, after the rain. Sunshine glittering off the wet world.
Fiddles, Elephants and The Blue Danube: Victor Ambrus
23 Jun 2010 2 Comments
in Illustration
I found this Victor Ambrus in a second hand shop. I love Ambrus’s hairy, splodgy style. This one is a story about a little boy whose grandfather gives him a fiddle and teaches him to play the “Blue Danube” – so of course, he runs off to join the circus:
The ringmaster is not impressed with him, but allows him to join as an odd jobs boy, who has to wash the bear and the elephant: More
Winter’s Day Drawing
21 Jun 2010 Leave a comment
A rainy, wintery Monday spent drawing while listening to “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” audiobook. I start working again tomorrow. Today, I could forget about it for a while.
Drawing Swop with Josephine
20 Jun 2010 Leave a comment
Earlier this year, I got a charming e-mail from Josephine Ferorelli, with a link to her website and a request to do a drawing swop. ( Yes… I know. This is a post I should have written months ago.)
We mailed one another some examples of our work, and after some picking and choosing I sent this drawing:
and got this one in return – “Plants with pants”:
I love it – so cool and quirky.
Josephine also included this amazing postcard with an image by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo:
Thanks Josephine! And sorry it took me so long to write about it. Everyone else – go check out Josephine’s gallery. I particularly like her “solar powered” drawings which (I think) are made by exposing coloured paper to the sun through stencils and cut outs, to achieve a sort of “shadow” drawing.
Learning about Stop-motion: The Animation Stand
15 Jun 2010 8 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion
So far, I’ve written about the software and the camera needed for stop motion animation. Next – the “animation stand” – a special tripod for holding the camera in just the right position. An animation stand has to be really solid, to stop any unwanted movement, and it has to hold the camra (and possilby, lights) very securely.
I needed an animation stand that would hold the camera pointing downwards, because I want to animate using paper and small objects – which is easier to do working on a flat surface, with the camera taking pictures from above.
Brendon designed the stand for me. He based it on this very useful page on how to create an animation stand. The measurements were adapted for my needs – the shape of my camera and the size I wanted. He also got some help from this forum thread.
Here is his final design. The measurements were according to the camera I chose. When the arm is at it’s maximum height, and the camera zoomed lense zoomed back, the “view area” fills the picture exactly. (To see the measurements more clearly, click on the image to view it full size) More
Learning about Stop-motion: The Camera
13 Jun 2010 6 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: Animation, stop motion
One of my most difficult decisions in setting up for stop-motion was choosing the camera.
Most articles on stop-motion for beginners recommend that you start with a simple web-cam. It’s cheap and effective. But I already knew that I wanted to be able to be able to zoom into detail areas, so the images need to be fairly high res. Web-cams produce low resolution images, and so do most other hand-held video cameras. Also – a decent entry-level video camera is much more expensive than a good quality digital stills camera.
So I started looking for a digital still camera. These are the things to look for when buying a digital still camera for stop-motion: More
Learning about Stop-Motion: The Software
12 Jun 2010 3 Comments
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: Animation, stop motion
In my previous post on stop-motion animation, I got a little ahead of myself and jumped straight to showing my first experiments. I want to back track a little and start with what I learnt while creating a stop-motion setup.
Today’s post is about the software choices for creating stop-frame animation.
I’m using something called frame-grabber software. Frame-grabbers help to take the guesswork out of creating a stop-motion animation. When animating without a frame-grabber, you take a picture, move the object and take another picture. You need to guess how far to move things, and remember which direction you’ve just moved them in. Sounds simple until you have multiple things moving at different speeds!
Frame-grabbers work like this: More
Buwaaaaaaaaap!
11 Jun 2010 2 Comments
in Inspiration
It’s day 1 of the World Cup, so we took the train into town and went walking down “fan’s walk” to the new stadium. It was pretty amazing. The train was packed with excited people, hooting and tooting, and we piled out at Cape Town station to an absolute roar of vuvuzela’s, trains hooting and people shouting and waving flags.
Because it was still relatively early, the crowd was fairly thin, but well draped with flags. Vuvuzelas were droning all around, a great buzzing hum all over the city: Buwaaaaaaap bwaaaaap buuwuwuwuuaaaaaaap!
We walked all the way down to the stadium, where people were starting to gather. The match between South Africa and Mexico was going on at the time. It was quite something to hear the entire city go “WHOOOOOOAAAAAAH” all around you, when there was a goal. Here is the stadium glinting in the setting sun: More
Stop-motion Experiment Day 1
09 Jun 2010 1 Comment
in Animation, stop-motion Tags: Animation, stop frame
After many weeks of teaching, I’ve taken some time off to focus (at last) on learning how to make a stopframe animation. Brendon set up a basic animation rig for me, but I’ll write about the rig, software and equipment in a future post.
Today was all about remembering how to use the camera and the frame-grabber software, and fine tuning the animation stand, so I just made some very rough animations using salt on glass.
For the uninitiated, stopframe animation is when you animate objects or drawings by taking a picture, moving something, taking another picture, moving something again, and so on. This job is made a lot easier by using frame-grabber software that let’s you preview how to move the object before you take the picture. The camera sends a “live feed” image of the scene you are animating to your computer, which is what makes all of this possible. But.. I’ll explain how that works in the upcoming post on the software setup I’m using. 🙂
Lessons learnt today: More
Got no money – but there are some advantages
08 Jun 2010 Leave a comment
in Inspiration
One of the best things about not having a full time job any more is that I can walk the dogs any time I like. So I was able to take advantage of a break in the clouds today, and have a quick, and rather damp walk on the Rondebosch Common:
My companions: Pippin the great – More
Finding “Fire upon the Deep”
29 May 2010 2 Comments
in books Tags: science fiction, vernor vinge
This morning, we celebrated our return from flu-land by strolling down to a nearby second hand bookshop – where I found this:
A copy of Vernor Vinge’s amazing “Fire Upon the Deep”. It’s what I think of as “proper” science fiction, with fascinating ideas as well as an excellent story. Also, some of the most interesting aliens I’ve ever read about.
Just the right book to read on a sunny Saturday morning :).
You can read a description of the book here.
I guess I must be feeling better
28 May 2010 6 Comments
in All my drawings Tags: drawing, flu
I guess I must be feeling better, going by these drawings. For the past two weeks, Brendon has had a terrible cough and we’ve both had infected eyes.
Today’s drawing:
Yesterday’s drawing: More
For no reason at all
23 May 2010 6 Comments
in All my drawings Tags: collage, drawing
One of the worst things about being an adult is this constant feeling that whatever you do, must be for a reason. If you are not making money, you should be improving yourself, or helping somebody, or…
And its so difficult to just get lost in a drawing in the way I used to when I was a child. So I’ve been getting in some practice at doing things for no reason at all – and collage is just perfect for that.
I found some new magazines to snip apart – some about birds, and some about aeroplanes 🙂
Hacking at Magazines
20 May 2010 6 Comments
in All my drawings Tags: collage, drawing
I’ve been doing collage again – the none digital kind with scissors, glue and a pack of glossy magazines. I was inspired by a character from Jacqueline Wilson’s “Lola Rose” – a little girl who lives out her fantasy life by cutting bits out of magazines, birthday cards and stickers and constructing images from them.
Those images sounded so cool I had to try making one myself – quite crude, as it turned out:
I had to add a drawn background as the collaged version I tried first time round came out thoroughly depressing.
Full Moon Shower Songs at Richard’s
02 May 2010 2 Comments
in Inspiration Tags: acoustic, music, shower songs
Shower Songs just did another house concert, celebrating a full moon night at our friend Richard’s place. The audience was small – I think most people were still recovering from Africa Burns – but it went really well.
“Shower Songs” is Brendon on mandolin and myself doing vocals, performing the kind of songs we like to sing in the shower:
We do a really eclectic mix of everything from folk to punk with bits of jazz in between. Most of the songs are quite dark, and tend to feature coffins, prisons and guilt. For example, St James Infirmary…
I went down to St James Infirmary
And I saw my baby there
Lying on a white marble table
So cold, so sweet, so fair.
When I die, I want you all there to bury me
In my box top Stetson hat,
Put a gold piece on my watch chain,
So the boys will know I died standing pat.
Get six gamblers to carry my coffin;
And a pretty girl to sing me a song –
Put the three ball on my hearse wagon,
And we’ll raise hell as we roll along…
Or that fabulous song from the movie “The Triplets of Belleville”:
I won’t finish my life in Timbuktu
Cheeks so tight my lips are turning blue
I’d like to be wrinkled
Utterly wrinkled
Wrinkled like a Triplet from Belleville!
I won’t be an old woman in Singapore
Playing Scrabble and eating petits-fours
I want to be wicked,
Utterly wicked,
Wicked like the Triplets from Belleville!
The “house concert” idea works really well. The host invites a number of friends, and we show up and play right there in the lounge. It doesn’t need a lot of space – we’ve played in some pretty small rooms – and we don’t use a lot of equipment – just Brendon’s acoustic amp. It’s very informal and friendly. Richard and Catherine created a lovely cosy space (thanks guys! ❤ <3).
And thanks also to Niklas Zimmer for the excellent photographs – all photos in this post are by Niklas. You can see his Flickr portfolio here.
Masha du Toit 
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