My piece 'Starfisk + Monster' at the "Letting in the Light" exhibtion, Stratford, East London, January - March 2016.

Biography:- (Skip the biography - show me the pictures)

Bragging rights:

In 1992 I was commissioned to co-design and develop three educational games for kids with special educational needs on the Commodore Amiga using Deluxe Paint and AMOS BASIC for the Nissan Centre in West Worthing. Much later I recreated two of them in Director as part of my 'virtual classroom'.

My virtual classroom interface, created with Photoshop and Director.

From 1992 - 1995 I was studying first Information Technology then Computing (Software Engineering) at Northbrook College, Worthing and the University of Brighton.

In 2000 I did a brief unaccredited course in basic Photoshop.

In 2001 I did a short course on web research and basic web design / development (HTML / CSS) via a local training agency. As far as it goes I'd had my own website long before this (initially made with Netscape Composer and an FTP client from a computer magazine) but this was a very informative course.

In 2002 one of my animated short movies, Polygonia (see below), was shown on regional television (ITV Freescreen). I did have a contract for another of my short movies (Spider Movie) to be shown but the show was cancelled. They were both created with Bryce 3D and Edit Studio (both freebie giveaways from computer magazine coverdisks). One ten second sequence from Polygonia took two weeks to render at 320x240 pixels on my 500mhz WindowsXP machine. The tunes that accompany them were also made with magazine giveaways.

In 2002/03 I studied Interactive Multimedia Design / Development at City College, Brighton (now Greater Brighton Metropolitan College). On this course I studied image creation / manipulation (Photoshop and Illustrator), video editing and post-production (Premiere and After Effects) and interface design / development, primarily for presentation of video, sound and other digital assets via CD-ROM. (Director and some Flash). Here are some of my interface designs (also utilising QTVR and Shockwave 3D in Director). The bottom three rows are all sub-parts of the 'Virtual World' interface.

In 2009 I made several animated 3D designs for various bracelet watches for w0tch.com. For these I used a combination of Photoshop, 3Ds Max and After Effects. A video with more of my animated designs can be found here.

W0tch videos copyright © www.w0tch.com 2009.

In 2015 I was offered a place on a masters degree in Digital Media Arts at the University of Brighton but couldn't afford the course fees.

Since 2015 I have had several pieces published in the 'Street Art' section of The Big Issue magazine (originally through Creative Future). I've also sold several prints of my pics through the Big Issue's online shop. I've sold a few prints privately too.

In early 2016 one of my pictures (top of page) was included in 'Letting in the Light', an outdoor light-box exhibition in Stratford, East London through Outside In and The Daily Life LTD, sponsored by Arts Council England.

In early 2022 I was invited to participate in a project using a 'Lightform LF2' projector and the Lightform Creator software to create something on the theme of 'wellbeing' through the Old Market, Hove and The HERA Partnership, sponsored by
Arts Council England. Two short videos, one detailing my experiments with the projector and the other showing the background animations I used can be found here and here. Here is a photo of the final outcome of my experiments.

The theme was wellbeing so, it's raining but it's raining smiles, the OM is a symbol of the meditative state and the rainbow is for inclusivity.

The final outcome of my experiments with the Lightform projector.

In October 2023 I was invited to exhibit some of my artwork at Shout London, The Ashford Place Mental Health Film & Arts Festival at the Crown Hotel, Cricklewood.

My pics at Shout London, Cricklewood.

History:

I've been using computers to create images, animations, video, interactive pieces and music since the early 1990's and I have a Professional Development Certificate in interactive multimedia design.

I've always enjoyed drawing and painting. During my early teens I was a keen model maker (Airfix kits etc.) and later was very interested in painting and modifying role-playing figurines (Citadel miniatures and the like). I like to think of these hobbies as a sort of apprenticeship in form and colour and different types of paint and painting techniques.

Some of my Citadel miniatures, painted in my late teens / early 20's.

I first got into using computers in my artwork writing programs in BASIC to generate geometric colour-cycling graphics patterns on early 8 bit computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and the Acorn Electron in the late 1980's, but more seriously when I got my first Commodore Amiga and Deluxe Paint. Since then I've been using a combination of digital and hand drawn techniques in my work.

One of the colour-cycling patterns that I made with my Acorn Electron, recreated in BeebEm (BBC emulator).

During the 2000's and 2010's I made a lot of interactive pieces and simple games using Director and Flash. This often involved quite complex coding in Lingo and ActionScript. During this time I also really got to grips with 3D modelling, animation and special effects in 3Ds Max using the built-in tutorials, books and internet tutorials.

Flight of the Dragons

Blinding Flash

Boperooni

Bleepy Boo

Psychedelic Fighters

A Forest

Some of my experiments with 3Ds Max and After Effects

Inspiration and influences:

I'm greatly inspired by surrealists like René Magritte, M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali, abstract artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, a lot of 'pop' artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and 'op art' artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely.

I'm also very interested in ideas surrounding geometry and topology (the juxtaposition of regular and irregular polygonal shapes, symmetry / asymmetry and tessellation) and concepts from fractal maths (endless repetitions of similar but non-identical shapes and patterns etc.).

My other influences come from many disparate sources such as comic books, mostly British science fiction comics like 200AD, Tornado, StarLord, Starblazer and The Eagle but also some Marvel and DC stuff too, science fiction and fantasy art (H. R. Giger, Chris Foss, Rodney Matthews etc.), album covers, tribal art from around the world, body art, graffiti and stained glass windows. I love using a lot of bright, contrasting colours in my work.

But what does it all mean?

My work is mostly about internal states of mind I have experienced, from dreams and nightmares to altered states of perception, euphoria, delirium, isolation, alienation, paranoia and psychosis. I am in no way trying to create photo-realistic images from the real world, but rather to interpret some of the things I have been through in my mind in a visual and hopefully pleasing, although sometimes disturbing form.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in getting prints of any of my pictures or copies of my CD's. Alternatively a small selection of my pics can be purchased from The Big Issue online shop (60% of the money goes to help the homeless).

My artwork falls into eight main catagories:

1) New Deluxe Paint Images.

2) Hand drawn and digitally enhanced pictures.

3) Digital photo-montages.

4) Images created entirely in Photoshop.

5) Early PC images.

6) Early Deluxe Paint images.

7) Early hand drawn images.

8) Discography.

Colour-cycling Deluxe Paint animations.

Part 2: Hand drawn and digitally enhanced pictures

These are some of my hand drawings from the last twenty years or so (the last couple of rows are much earlier), digitised then colourised in Photoshop.

Part 3: Photo-montages

These images represent some experiments I've done with photo-manipulation and compositing images in Photoshop. There is a piece of written work to accompany the top left image and a tune that goes with the top middle one (with samples taken from Jeff Waynes 'War of the Worlds'). Top right is a montage of some of my early doodles and middle left is mostly screen grabs from when I had a TV capture card. The next two were made in response to the American and British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000's. The first is about going to war and the second about returning home. The bottom two rows were created for a college project in 2002 on the theme of 'six images about yourself'. Each of these represent different aspects of my interests, starting with music then movies, sci-fi and fantasy books, old school games, technical stuff and finally my 3D work.

Part 4: Digital Photoshop images

With these images from the early to mid 2000's I was mostly experimenting with representing 'depth' and 'texture' on a two dimensional surface. To achieve this I've used multiple layers with abstract shapes and patterns, various special effects, layer styles, blending modes and opacities in Photoshop.

Part 5: Early PC images

A number of surviving PC images from the late 1990's and early 2000's. Mostly created with early graphics programs now long defunct including Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint (an early predecessor of Photoshop) and Bryce 3D. Some of them were made on my old '486' PC under MS-Dos. With these images I've made heavy use of early Photoshop compatable 'plug-in' effects and filters such as 'Vortex Tiling' and 'Eye Candy'.

Part 6: Early Deluxe Paint images

A few remaining Amiga images from the early 90's. Mostly recovered from corrupted Amiga floppy discs. The first row were made with an Amiga 500 and DPaint III the rest were made with an A1200 and DPaint IV AGA.

Part 7: Early hand drawn images

Various hand drawings and doodles from throughout the 1990's.

Albums Before 2008