Recently we happened upon a TV countdown of “the 100 best cartoons.” Some aspects of it were extremely annoying – the presenter for one, and many of the “talking heads”. Nevertheless, there were some fantastic animation clips that I was very glad to see. I was smitten with “Noggin the Nog” and “Ivor the Engine”, by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, aka Smallfilms. The drawing and animation style, plus the tone of the stories really appeals to me. I also love the beautiful Noggin book covers.
Work in progress
July 13, 2006 at 5:00 pm (animation, technology)
A little sketch of a cyclist is now online. Most of my time at the moment is spent learning CSS (cascading style sheets) as I redesign the site. It can be frustrating – if you are used to page layout software, it feels ridiculous to have a block of text jump to the wrong side of the page, or get hidden behind an image. It is a rather blunt instrument to work with. Then, of course, the pages have to be tested in several different browsers to make sure nothing strange happens in any of them. Geoffrey has sent me a link to a good site offering hope that yes, you can produce an attractive, complex page using CSS, the CSS Zen Garden. Ohm.
Almost July
June 28, 2006 at 9:58 pm (animation, recreation)
It’s still light out at 9:45PM – I do like summer. I’m way too interested in watching the World Cup – there is a brief respite from it today and tomorrow, then the action starts again on Friday. I have also (between matches) been doing some work in Flash – a rough animation of a woman cycling has been my first project. Difficult, but not as harrowing as I’d anticipated. The plan is to to work on various individual elements that I can incorporate into Flash movies later… things that I never have time to work on when I’m rushing to do the Tate illustrations. I’m also trying to develop a logo for the new site – I’ve moved from advent-calendars.com to catwholaughed.com and want a good graphic look for a site redesign. One benefit is that I lose the hyphen, the other is that I can broaden the appeal of the site a bit, beyond the annual December story (which I will still do of course…). I was hoping to blog some photos of our garden, but either the weather has not been cooperative, or I have had the laundry drying out there when it’s sunny. I will persevere.
