My Tumblr

I have been neglecting my blogspot quite a bit lately, when I finish uni (2 days away!) I will resume blogging, it will be an even better blog!
Instead of larger posts which I do seem to always end up doing I have a Tumblr blog. I quickly post and re-blog all sorts of crap on that regularly, but it's often tv related (my true love), there are arty bits too though, check it out if you desire in the meantime :)

http://shaunaspace.tumblr.com/

Refraction Rainbow

In my house, the light use to shine through the window, hit the mirror then produce a lovely mini rainbow on the wall. But now we have blinds I noticed it was slightly different pattern as the light was broken by the blind slats. It looked cool so I took some photos then played around with adjusting the blinds to change the rainbow.
Reminded me a bit of Star Trek: The Motion Picture Poster hehe.

Kangaroo Cards

Here are some cards I made for a card sale at uni to raise money for our degree show. As Mothers Day was coming up I had the idea of cute mummy kangaroos and little joeys :)
I painted it with purple hair dye! haha! Was much brighter before i scanned it but I still think it still came out quite nice.

"Plump but not tasty"

Last week I finally finished reading "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. The last chapter was called 'Goodbye', about extinction, it was very sad. Here are some extracts:

"A rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some 1,300 kilometers off the east coast of Madagascar. There some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behaviour of human beings.
You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being - a species of organism that is capable of unraveling the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squarking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.
What is known of the Dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family ... It was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak-tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, digs and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683, and most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again"

"The lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America - parrots don't usually venture so far north, as you may have noticed - and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by the passenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easily hunted because it flocked tightly and had a peculiar habit of flying up at the sound of gunfire (as you would expect), but then returning almost at once to check on fallen comrades."

Those parakeets sound so sweet and cute :'( it made me cry reading about them. Poor green birds, the world would look so much nicer with them flying about the place. BASTARD HUMANS! Also imagine if there were still Dodos waddling about the place too, it would be so cool, poor defenseless creatures! So yes I was too sad to go to sleep after reading all that, I turned the TV on and watched an ep of Curb Your Enthusiasm, that distracted me and cheered me up enough to go to sleep.
I drew this in my visual diary to remind me of the day:

"Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers."

Our turn next. BRING ON THE TERMINATORS!

Black Eyed Peas - "Imma Be Rocking" music video

Today I happened to catch a bit of Black Eyed Peas new video for "Imma Be Rocking That Body". It's a pretty damn awesome video! I wasn't feeling the tune at first but after watching the video again now and making screen caps, it's grown on me already. But nevermind the song, look at the video, metal plated armour-like outfits, crazy futuristic guns, dancing robots, metal masks! Great outfits and visuals :D, god damn i love that aesthetic. I want Fergies outfit! The robots are a bit like harvester terminators only less terminate-y haha. The video is dead long, it doesn't properly start til 1.45 incase you don't wanna watch it all.





Whilst we are on the subject.. their last video was also cool :)

Futuristic Clothes from the book 'Fear and Fashion'.

I found an awesome book in the library a few weeks ago called "Fear and Fashion in the Cold War" by Jane Pavitt. It was just what I was looking for. It's full of photos of futuristic fashions, mainly made in the 1960s. I scanned some of the most interesting:

Frank Horvat, American man and woman in spacesuits. 1963: The kid makes me laugh, he looks like he just wants to get away from his 'weirdo' parents hehe!


Alice Edeling, tunic and boots in metallic fabric. the Netherlands, late 1960s:

Emilio Pucci, 'Space bubble' helmet for Braniff airlines, 1965: When I saw this I thought it was just some futuristic fashion shoot but no, the book says that this was actually worn by the air hostesses for a while (until they found it annoying)!! The idea was though that it would stop their hair from blowing all over the place when they got onto the run way, how cool is that!

Giji Bakker, neck ornament shoulder piece aluminium, 1967:

Paco Robanne, "Everything is made of steel", 1968:

Gijs Bakker. Emmy Van Leersum and Tiny Leeuwenkamp. 1970:

Models in metal sheets from the film Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo, 1966:

Vaclav Cigler, Circle Framing Face, 1968:

Haus-Rucker Co (Laurids Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter), Environment Transformers, 1968: This just looks so awesome and weird! I put it on the cover of my dissertation :D

Alan Fletcher Exhibition @ Cube

Yes thats right Alan Fletcher..
Nooooo not ^that^ one (unfortunately)! I have actually been to see THE GOOD Alan Fletcher and his band play ^_^. He reached over into the crowd and I reached over and touched his hand. yeahhhhhhhhhhh. [In case you didn't know..Neighbours is one of my top 3 tv shows, the other two being Home & Away and STAR TREK!]

Anyway the exhibition was about the 2nd best Alan Fletcher - the graphic designer.
It was pretty good. You could take photos aslong as you didn't use flash, so the photos are pretty poor but you get the idea. Here are some of the pieces i found most interesting:





There was a series of these called 'This is a drawing' 2004. They just really interested me. I like that it's black and white, a line drawing, a pattern, confusing and the fact he says "Writing is you on paper". That very day i'd just posted a letter. Even though i don't like my handwriting but it doesn't matter because it's more personal however scratty my handwriting is. I did tryyyy to write neater. Ooh and look there's my reflection:

I like seeing inside artists sketchbooks, i like seeing personal and free things like this, it's good to know other designers do crazy scribble-y drawings too:
I really like this, so cool! -
This was interesting, really makes an impact. It said he was in NYC when 9/11 happened and purchased lots of postcards then later did this to them:

I like how unpolished this is, at first glance it looks like a kidlet could have done it, but it made me laugh. I like it being all muddled up with the colours and names, it's just random and cool :p:

a nosey at MOSI

I visited MOSI (Museum Of Science and Industry) on Monday. I'd never been before, but had been meaning to go for a while. The first time I heard about it was in first year of uni, from a German girl visiting Manchester, she went and thought it was awesome!
I didn't look around it all, mainly just the Air and Space hall. There wasn't that much space stuff anyway. There is a Chinese space exhibit on at the moment on the upper balcony thing. I didn't like the crappy typography they had, and the fact i could see loadsa cellotape on all the banners :S. I took a few photos before my camera died ¬_¬.
Can't remember what it said this is..but it looks damn cool! I love how angular it is and the little rivet/bolt things! I makes me think of some sort of alien/futuristic bomb/weapon! I think it spins around (a bit like the Xindi superweapon but not as advanced) and shoots lasers and dematerializes people/aliens/cats/penguins.

Here's a crappy picture in bad lighting of some models of rockets, they were a bit crap and look like they would topple over if you stood on a floorboard too close, they didn't though:

THE BEST thing I saw, Enterprise NCC-1701-D model! I nearly missed it as well. Deffo brought a grin to my face! My trekkie friends said it's left over from the Star Trek exhibition they had there about 10-15 years ago! Wish they had that again now!

I also went in the mini planetarium they have in there for a show of the stars, £1.50 thats alright to say the rest of the place is free to get in. I sat next to a mannequin in a astronauts suit and he was perched on a wheely computer chair, a bit weird. He wouldn't survive very long in space though because his arm was hanging off...

The Unknown

I've been getting kinda freaked out recently because soon it will be the end of uni and I have no idea what I'm gonna do. But It's ok because I just watched DS9 and listening to Sisko trying to explain human existence and linear time to the worm hole aliens made me feel better. If you look at it one way, not knowing what will happen is exciting.

"That may be the most important thing to understand about Humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day. And we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons or ideas, but to co-exist and learn."
- Commander Benjamin Sisko

Clip from the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, episode "Emissary Part 2".

"Day and night the same - blank. Precisely like death."

For the last project I did, the brief I chose was the Don't Panic poster with the theme of 'Resistance'. I decided to look at resistance and time. The area of this I chose was memory. I had been inspired by a tv show I saw on BBC4 called 'Time' presented by Dr Michio Kaku. One segment of it was about a pianist called Clive Wearing, who for 25 years he has been suffering from anterograde amnesia. This is when new memories cannot be formed any more. Like in the film Memento, 50 First Dates, also what Archer had in the episode Twilight from season 3 of Star Trek Enterprise. Clive's is the worst case known, he can only remember things for about 30 seconds or less before forgetting again. Every time he sees his wife it's like its for the first time in years, it's really sad. Here's a clip of it:


For my poster i'd decided to draw Clive in profile then have a representation of his thoughts going through his head in a strip. As well as that I had the idea of having a sieve behind him (memory like a sieve), I thought it would represent him forgetting and look quite cool and sieves are a bit strange for on a poster. My first thought was a film strip for his memories, I added a quote his said on top:

"I've never seen anyone at all.
I've never heard a word until now.
I've never had a dream even,
Day and night the same - blank.
Precisely like death.
No thoughts at all.
Brain has been inactive."

The film strip wasn't quite working out. I then came up with a great alternative! Musical note lines..i'm not a musical person at all, can't remember what they are called but you know the things, 5 horizontal lines the notes sit on. It was perfect! It fit in much better with the style of the poster which was simple line drawings. I studied what the different parts meant of the sheet music and decided to just use the horizontal lines, treble bass and the end thin and thick vertical lines to show the end of the 'song' or memory in this case. I then had the cool idea to repeat the end lines 2 more times along the horizontal lines to represent that memory being forgotten and totally at its end. I placed the quotes in a way which looked like strike through because Clive sometimes writes in a diary but forgets after he has written a line then crosses it out as he doesn't believe he has wrote it. It's all there in my poster.


I'm really pleased with it. It shows his brain resisting new memories and himself trying to resist forgetting. His memory is resisting normal time, to him it is as if he has been unconscious for years and in a way he has time travelled to the future, resisting the normal passage of time. This was the personal project, and it was personal because I too took on the theme of resistance and resisted my usual urges to crowd pages and make them really colourful, this time I tried being more minimal and simple.

Snow-woman

I got back to Manchester yesterday and there was still loadsa snow in our backgarden so we went out and had a play. I stayed out longer though, 2 hours in fact, and built a snowoman :D








I was pleased how it turned out. In my head I had decided I wanted to make an Aenar just so I could put antenna on it but when i built the snow column tall enough and added shoulders and boobs it soon transformed and i decided to leave it sans head. It looks pretty freaky!
I recommend building a snowman for exercise, back and forth grabbing snow from all over the garden for 2 hours, i've bound to have burnt loadsa calories, awesome!

A Short History of my Christmas Holiday

Bird feet and cat paw prints in the snow!

22nd December 2009: With flash.

With flash again..

Without flash.. 1am, the sky was peach and illuminated, it looked so eerie and cool! I think we are on Mars, thats the colour the sky is there! It was like day time! It went dark after about half an hour though when it stopped snowing.

My cat Simba is bonkers. I had my suitcase in that same place and he sat on it, then my backpack too! I think he likes that location near me on the computer :)

I have a very intelligent cat:


New Years Eve, I wasn't out partying, I stayed in..well not quite..I went out in the back garden at about 8.30 in my dressing gown with my telescope and gazed at the moon. It was so bright and full, and the sky was so clear. It was freezing, I couldn't feel my fingers! I tried to hold the camera still and take a photo, this was the best outta the bunch, better than my usual attempts of photos of the moon anyway:

Today. I bought this plastic squirrel in a set with a mini plastic racoon from home bargains years ago, I wanted to screw them to the mantel piece in the living room but my parents wouldn't let me, pffft! My Dad put them in the garden instead, and so here is poor Mr.Squirrel covered in snow :(

I thought it would look nice to hang christmas tree baubles on snowy branches outside and add some colour to the ubiquitous white:

I started reading a new book on the train from Manchester to back home. The book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. I'd been meaning to read it for a few years, I came across it in the charity shop a few months ago and ever since it's been in my book pile waiting for me to finish "In Search Of The Edge Of Time" by John Gribbin which took forever! I do like to read but it always seems to take me forever coz I read in bed and i'm always too tired so usually I manage about 5 pages then put it down and try and go to sleep. I've been trying to make more of an effort with this book and yesterday I came across some people who get through about 94 and 120 books per year! I really have to pick up the pace! So i've been trying even harder and read during the day instead of watching TV, and got through about 60 pages in the past 2 days, better than 10 in 2 days! I'm a third through the book now, it's really good. Next up after this book is "The Physics of Star Trek" which i'd wanted to read and finally found in a charity shop a few days ago for £1.99 :). Anyway back to the current book, I learn stuff every day from it, the other day I learnt what a Micron is, one thousandth of a millimetre (or equivalently one millionth of a metre or one thousand nanometres). There are lots of cool names for things, here's a paragraph I read last night:

"As physicists build bigger and more ambitious machines, they began to find or postulate particles or particle families seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higg bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons."

There are interesting and funny facts and stories about crazy scientists and such like this

"John Dalton was an exceptionally bright student - so very bright, indeed, that at the improbably youthful age of twelve he was put in charge of the local Quaker school. This perhaps says as much about the school as about Dalton's precocity, but perhaps not: we knew from his diaries that at about this time he was reading Newton's Principia - in the original Latin - and other works of a similarly challenging nature. At fifteen, still school mastering he took a job in the near by town of Kendal and a decade after that he moved to Manchester."

And we have a building at MMU named after him! Now I know all about who it was named after. There are a lot of scientists who ended up in Manchester from all over it seems, from reading this book. And this next guy is from the same place as me:

"Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumed that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retreived the head and rushed out again."

This is funny/weird:

"Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar."

He didn't find gold but instead found phosphorus.

I recommend the book anyway.