Writing about Stories

I started taking a couple of units through Coursera over the Summer. My favourite unit is Fantasy and Science Fiction:The Human Mind, Our Modern World by Professor Eric Rabkin from the University of Michigan. One of the things I wanted to work on with these units is my written argument skills, as they're the area that needs further honing to get me through the PhD candidacy process.

So what I love about this unit is how grueling it is – there are ten set texts, and each week requires a 270-320 word essay on the week's text. The turn around time and brevity of each essay really has been forcing me to develop and articulate my arguments with great efficiency.

Over the next couple of months I'll be posting my short essays on the following texts here:

1. Grimm — Children's and Household Tales (Lucy Crane translation with Walter Crane illustrations)
2. Carroll — Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
3. Stoker — Dracula
4. Shelley — Frankenstein
5. Hawthorne & Poe — Stories and Poems
6. Wells — The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, "The Country of the Blind," "The Star"
7. Burroughs & Gilman — A Princess of Mars & Herland
8. Bradbury — The Martian Chronicles
9. LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness
10. Doctorow — Little Brother

Pretty Perth Plumage

 Some of Perth's brightly coloured birds.

Banksias and Black Cockatoos

A pattern featuring endangered Carnaby's Black-Cockatoos, and Banksia prionotes. I'm happy to live across from a reserve which sometimes features the former, and always the latter. I'm very fond of the native wildlife.

Hello Possums!

A little experimentation with possum illustrations and logos.

Some Orchids to Brighten Up Your Day

Various orchids - an Oncidium, Laelia and Vanilla planifolia, the orchid responsible for producing lovely vanilla!

Prisms of Phantasm

Development work on a mural for Curtin Student Guild's Queer Department using fantastical creatures as a metaphor for human diversity. Each creature is white, representing white light through which a rainbow of colours emerge prismatically. The mural is being painted in acrylic paints, and is expected to be completed mid 2013.

In the Kitchen with Web-Design

Within my master's I'm creating several prototype websites to demonstrate how illustration can effectively fulfill the roles of visual imagery online, and one is a cupcake bakery website. There are approximately thirty businesses in Perth that sell cupcakes as a primary or secondary specialty so it's an opportunity to prove illustration can differentiate entities in saturated markets.

To create the web-site for this fake cupcake bakery of course I need the rights to product images. Rather than buying cupcakes and photographing them, I decided to bake and decorate my own so I've been having a lot of adventures in making fancy cupcakes, with edible glitter generously sprinkled throughout these experiments. Luckily those who would call me mad for going this far for a prototype have been soothed by my delicious research and development.