About the various Dogsolitude_uk Artworks

My interest in art was first fostered when, at the age of 8, the discovery was made that one could paint a convincing forest using simple blobs of paint. Seven years later the accidental acquisition of a Rotring pen and a book containing the detailed line drawings of Ian Miller fired an angsty teenage imagination, and this led to an unfulfilled ambition to spend life drawing pictures of Judge Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock. Many a History lesson was spent doodling horrific monsters in the style of Kevin O'Neill and advanced robot assassins in the style of Simon Bisley.

Hardly any of these old sketches and pictures remain - sadly they've been lost along the way.

This interest in art and design lay in the background for the following fifteen years, with not an awful lot of time spent on it. Sadly creativity often has to take second place in a world dominated by rent demands and overdraft repayments. Thus the various pieces referred to here have been hacked together in stolen hours after Work, before Having a Social Life, between Household Chores and other obligations.

You'll have noticed a link to the Dogsolitude_uk Deviant Art Website. If you follow the link you'll notice two things about the work: the style and the content.

Style

The digital manipulation of photographs, complete with high-contrast lo-res appearance, has been described by one observer as being a bit like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. I've always been a big fan of Terry Gilliam

Other bits and bobs stem from whatever seems interesting at the time.

Content

It all went a bit Liberally Democratic recently, as a result of disgust with the Labour Party's insistence on tracking and labelling everything in the UK.

There's also some ongoing, spare-time work on photography too. Being able to take a decent picture is always useful, especially if images and textures are needed for design purposes. Yet another topic of interest is Mathematics, especially when combined with image manipulation and Actionscript.

Tools Used

Photoshop - for general image-making, cutting, pasting

Flash - for microsites and Actionscripting

Paint.Net - a very capable Photoshop replacement, which manages to improve on Adobe's offering in a couple of ways. And it's free!

GIMP - for those Linux moments. It's free too, and available for Windows as well.

Bryce 5.5 - for 3D objects should they be required. You can fake them in Photoshop, but they never 'feel' quite right.

Daz3D - again, for 3D rendering.

It's worth noting that lists such as the above can be a little misleading in terms of enumerating a skill-set, since familiarity with a piece of software is often easily acquired with careful study of documentation, experimentation with different functions and generally having a go with it. I loev learning how to use new packages and generally experimenting with things.