Creativity

From Biliwiki

Despite being well known as a down-the-line kind of guy, I do partake in a little bit of dabbling in creative activities from time to time.

Photography

My most engaging and reasonably well known interest is Photography. I like to take a camera around with me, and just capture what I see. Because I don't make a huge amount of effort to go places specifically for taking photos, my photo galleries are filled with things I see every day or things that exist in the course of my normal life. This isn't such a bad thing, since one can see 'art' in looking at things around us differently, but it is also limiting in that I do not have many exciting things posted. I would consider my photography mere art of the mundane.

Vectors

While I do like taking photos, I don't particularly like editing raster graphics for fun or profit (well, I might if I had some way of making profit). My love is creating vector artwork in Illustrator. I have been working with vectors since 2000 or so, though in those days it was with the very basic drawing tools of Microsoft Word. I would design album art for burnt CDs and the like. In 2004, I discovered Illustrator while trying to make a desktop background and have been growing along with each version ever since. My creations range generally between two extremes: Simple cartoon freehand drawings, or attempts at realistic monochrome representations of things.

I recently assisted a few of the wings at my college to create t-shirts which are then bought by the residents of that wing. Many of them started with a hand-drawn sketch, or a digital sketch which I then turned into a high quality vector file so that the screen printers can print without problems. See a sample of them here.

I also recently created my own, full-sized poster using Illustrator. I used cafepress.com to have it printed and delivered to Australia for about AU$27. The poster was parodying an old British Phonographic Industry ad campaign claiming that cassette tapes were killing the music industry. (Just like records killed radio, video killed radio, TV killed theatre, VHS killed movies and burnt CDs are starving artists at the moment.)