outpost art festival, cockatoo island

     Cockatoo island is a post industrial center that has been reclaimed by creatives, to produce an exotic destination in the middle of the bay.

 The festival's main focus is on graffiti art, though it also includes music performances and skateboarding workshops for kids. Art is present in the tradition form of numerous wall murals, and gallery style exhibitions with established and emerging artist

Cops and Robins - Banksy

  The best thing about the festival is exploring old where houses, warfs, tunnels and other dilapidated structures in an art scavenger hunt

    See more art and structures from the island at the from this

outpost art festival web gallery

The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of blogger or our sponsor:

Sculptures By The Sea 2011

Bondi is where the world goes to the beach. And what better place to host an art installation then the cliff walk between the Bondi and Tamarama. Sculptures by the Sea is just one such installation, it features sculptures of many different types and aesthetics in a picturesque beautiful location.

On the opening weekend, I visited the exhibition under partly cloudy skies keeping the temperature for being too hot. There were people from all walks of life and regions of the work appreciating both art and nature.

And like many things Aussie, there is an exercise component of the event as well, the walk features many steps and is good way to get out and about and have some fun.

There are more pictures from scultpures by the sea available at in this gallery
https://picasaweb.google.com/112415123522641699177/SculpturesByTheSea

The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarialy reflect those of blogger or our sponsor:

Art Imitates Life

Recently took a life drawing course with Joe Manifold of the Julian Ashton Arts School. The class was a ten week night coarse with a live model. Usually we would start each class with some gesture drawings to loosen up. Joe encouraged me to focus and consider the fluidity of the line. We used three simple circles for the head, chest and hips. Arms and legs could be depicted with lines with triangles at the ends. A center line could also be drawing to note basic the direction and angle of the form.



Next we tried to expand on this concept by using simple geometric shapes to represent these anatomical forms. Instead of using circles we drew the three main body regions as cubes. The arms and legs became cylinders. The hands polygons and the feet triangles. The approximate leg radius became a circle. Some measurements and refinements were done to try and illustrate the correct proportions relative to each part. The three dimensionality of the cubes is meant to indicate direction and angle.









From there we continued to build, by trying to understand composition. Juxtaposing curved lines and straights. Letting the mind fill in the details, rather than trying to draw it all in. We also began to use shadow shapes to describe the inner form. Still very simple squares and straight lines, and filling them in with tone. We learned about hatching to indicate the direction of the light source. Our model for the class was Abby. Over all it was good to do some longer poses with a skilled instructor.

vivid sydney

vivid sydney is a winter festival of light, to illuminate the dark skies around circular quay. With the main focus being on the opera house, these photos were taken of the light sculpture installations around in an around the pedestrian promonade.



for these shots I was using a Nikon coolpix 12.0 megapixel digital camera. One thing that I experimented with was turning of the flash to try an capture more of the light coming from the sculptures and preserve the darks.

for those of you who would rather listen than read

The analogy that "reading blogs is like god listening to all the prayers before bed," I mostly agree with except for the listening part. To be more specifically accurate, up until now god must have been using some type of agreegator to read all the blogs. And since frankly not everyone out there likes reading, why not expand the audience and invite some of the non-readers to participate. So I wrote a little python script that can be used to listen to blogs. Think of it as podcasts for those of you on skimpy data plans that don't allow for downloading of multimedia content.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import feedparser


feeds2Read = ['http://cypod.blogspot.com/rss.xml']

for feed in feeds2Read:
  d = feedparser.parse(feed)
  entry = 5
  if len(d['entries']) < entry: entry = len(d['entries'])
  for i in xrange(0,entry):
    os.system('espeak "%s"' % d['entries'][i]['title'])
    e = d.entries[i]
    content = e.content
    os.system('espeak "%s"' % content)

espeak is an open source speach synthesizer, the script uses it to handle the text to speach stuff. Feedparser handles all the html grepping, it's a little messy with some formating getting into the stream if there is some interests maybe some of you uberneird readers can post a one up in the comments