Firstly I would like to officially announce that we will be holding the second Art fo Gravity show for one week from the 8th of October this year. The venue will be the same as last time (Kitahama, Takamatsu) but this time membership has swollen to 8 artists. This was obviously a nice surprise and as with last time we have all bases covered as far as genres are concerned - silver accessory design, clothing, bags, sculpture, photography and of course some graphic art from myself.
This time the show will be sponsored by Graph Design, who fittingly enough I came in contact with through the first show. I am hoping this will become a regular thing with an ever expanding/changing group of artists.
The finer details have not yet been decided but I will post them as soon as they appear.
One of our new members is Hamada-kun who hand crafts silver accessories of the skull and bones variety. The level of detail shown in his work is intense and each piece takes a considerable amount of time. Amazing work considering that he also holds down a full time job and humbly suggests that his silver work is just a hobby. Anyway take a look for yourself.
Below are 2 videos from the legendary Welsh band The Super Furry Animals.
SFA have a long term relationship with one of my favourite artists Pete Fowler, famous for his monster designs produced through his Monsterism label.
Pete was responsible for a few of SFA’s jackets and here you can see a full animation for the song Hello Sunshine.
The second vid is also from SFA and I just liked it because it looked like the kind of game I used to play when I was young. The song is Lazer Beam.
This week we made another trip to our new favourite zoo Shirotori.
The reason being that the time before we had missed the opportunity to meet the 3 month old Bengal tiger cub Hachi. Visitors are allowed to play with Hachi for a limited time each day and we decided that this was a chance not to be missed.
We were certinaly not disappointed. As there were hardly any visitors there, we got to spend a good half hour with Hachi and must have taken over 200 photos.
Hachi was rejected at birth and was raised by the French bull dog Nana who you can also see in these pictures. Hachi has already outgrown her new mother and we were a little worried that one day she would swallow her whole by mistake.
If anyone has the chance to go to Shirotori now would be the time to go.
The release of a new series of Medicom Toys’ Bearbricks is always an exciting if not dangerous time. It is the only time when I go truly overboard and buy a whole box of the things. The reason being that they are blind boxed and a whole box brings the possibility of a lucky find. This time I was not as lucky as the last, but I did manage to get a basic full set.
The range of designs in this series is as intreaging and varied as ever and I particularly like the simplicity of the pure gold “Basic” bear.
I am planning to cut down on my toy consumption in the near future as I really am running out of space, but things like Bearbricks make it hard. At least they are small I suppose…
Here is the second piece in my Retro Demon Series.
One of my long term design plans is to create a whole pack of cards, but I will have to make do with these 3 cards for the meantime.
This is a photo sequence of my favourite British artist James Jarvis painting a mural at Meltdown Comics Gallery in Los Angeles on July 28th 2006. I believe most of the characters are from his first full length comic book “Vortigern’s Machine and the Great Sage of Wisdom“. A whole range of huge and wonderful toys was also produced in connection to the book by the very fine Amos Toys. I highly recommend both.
Paper craft has come a long way since I was a boy.
Gone are the days of badly constructed paper bangers and fortune telling machines.
Here are a few examples of the new breed of paper crafters that I have stumbled across on the web.
The best thing about all of these sites is that templates are available for download so anyone can have a go at creating their own unique paper toy.
I think this could be the next step for Horrorwood…