Cityscape

Stellated skeletal dodecahedra

For some reason I've grown very fond of stellated dodecahedra. Escher played around with this as one of many other regular polyhedra, but for some reason, this is my favourite to draw. I did this first picture on MS Paint to show how they are drawn. The rest were all freehand biro skeletal versions.

Mandala doodle 1

Samaritans volunteer doodle pad

These are photos I took of some of the A3 blotter pads in a Samaritan volunteer's phone booth. They get turned into massive collaborative doodles!

OK it's not technically (all) my own work but fascinating nevertheless, so I thought it deserved to go on the blog. I remember seeing a feature ages ago about these as well, in the glossy that comes with the Sunday Telegraph.

Click the individual pictures for bigger images, although the resolution isn't great unfortunately.

Doodles

Trefoil / Möbius Knots

A few trefoil knots I've drawn: all are just freehand and made with a black Bic biro (and pencil-line construction).

My most ambitious one yet, combining four parallel Möbius strips and a spiral tube running continuously round. This one was very challenging and took me a few days, because the fact that you can see through the structure meant that I had to show the back of it through the gaps in the front. The three cross-over sections were the trickiest, but I was pleased with the result overall!

A square-sectioned knot with hollow floating sections.

A square-sectioned knot with cube connectors. This one was quite easy because all elements are solid and opaque.

My first proper attempt at a trefoil knot, combining two interlocking parallel Möbius strips and circular ribs. The ribs aren't very evenly spaced, but the overall effect is pretty nice I think.

Cityscape doodle

Click on the picture for a bigger image

A fairly busy five-point curvilinear perspective I drew on the back of my notepad at work with a biro. You might spot some buildings inspired by real ones, (Empire State Building on the left, Canary Wharf in the middle, kind-of-the-Flatiron building on the bottom in the middle...) And if I look REALLY closely, I can see my house from here!

Elaborate doodle

A slightly more elaborate doodle than the last one...

Doodle

Doodle in biro, based on a stellated dodecahedron.

Movies

I've made a few little movies in the past, a couple of which got lost when my computer sadly passed away and took them with it to silicon heaven. But I managed to upload the others to YouTube beforehand. Here are a couple of them: click on their names to watch them.

All in a Day's Work - a short film about the persistence and tragic comedy of a door-to-door salesman.

All in a Day's Work

Wishlist - what happens when you write down a wishlist of what your Perfect Woman would be like?

Wishlist

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!