Foray into the world of pottery

Convex mirrors

Just a habit of snapping reflections in convex mirrors...

In the tunnel at Tulse Hill train station

At Highbury & Islington tube station

Fisheye camera

I bought a very cheap and basic fisheye camera (the Lomography Fisheye 2) and had some fun around London snapping stuff.

The Lomography Fisheye 2 camera

The Shell Centre

The National Gallery

A merry-go-round by the Festival Hall. I used a slow shutter speed for this one.

The London Eye

My 'babysittee' Harvey at Borough Market

The prison in my head!

I was introduced to the work of Piranesi (wiki link) by a co-volunteer at a charity I work for, which involves spending time with inmates at Wandsworth prison. Piranesi was a very passionate artist who spent a lot of his life dreaming about the revival of Roman cities and architecture. He drew fantastic fantasy prison interiors like this one:

'Drawbridge''. Etching from ''Carceri'', Rome, 1745

My co-volunteer found out that I loved the work of M C Escher and suggested that I draw my own fantasy prison. So I did! And I based mine on a fisheye curvilinear perspective, since that seems to be a recent interest of mine. Like the St. Martins picture, this is also just black biro on A3 paper.

Prison interior in ink

Detail

Fish-eye of St. Martins in the Fields

I took a picture of the church with my Lomography fish-eye camera that I really liked. I set up a fish-eye construction on a piece of A3 for the curvilinear perspective and built the drawing up from that. I used black biro because I'm lazy, but it made quite an effect! I sold the picture at a charity auction for £160!!

The original photo

Under construction

The finished piece

At the auction

I was bored, and other excuses...

I know it's immature, but I couldn't resist. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, we have a new idea for train companies to adopt to solve a problem caused by over-endowed passengers...

Droste pictures

I learned about Droste pictures after looking at one of M C Escher's works, namely Print Gallery (below). It's a grid that he's built a picture on top of, (the grid is shown below the picture). If you follow the picture he's looking at around clockwise, you end up looking at the roof of the gallery he's standing in.

Droste is the name of a brand of cocoa that employed the use of "echoing" the picture into itself (see below).

There's a guy called Josh Sommers on FLIKR (click here) who provided a tutorial on how to make your own Droste pictures. I used it to make the following pictures!