All posts in Illustration

25Jan

This is my PhD thesis, from 12 years ago…

Untitled-3

If you’d like to read all about the structure formation of natural opal, this is one of the most complete models of opal formation available anywhere.

Characterisation of Australian Opals β€” leslie dean brown

At the time I remember my supervisor said to me that it was one of the most well-presented theses that he had ever seen.

Not necessarily the results, but the quality of the illustrations and I guess you could say the “design layout”.

I always want to be proud of my own work and do things to the best of my ability.

Today I was able to open up my original word document file that was almost 12 years old.

To my surprise, it kept the original formatting and page breaks. And why shouldn’t it? Although I am not so keen on the changes that have been implemented to Microsoft Word between since then.

Okay so truth be told, the original word document came in at 281 pages and the printed copy came in at 282. So something was not right.

It turns out that one graph had to be pushed down by one line and the original date was also restored. I was so paraoid that I would forget to change the date, the field updated itself automatically.

The reason I am doing this and sharing it again here is that my thesis was finally digitised by the UTS library this week, but the quality ain’t all that great, because it was rescanned from the printed page.

Hopefully google robots will scour my site, find the pdf and index it so anyone can access it.

So I’m deciding to generate the pdf myself (I never got around to doing that).

 

23Jan

Grasshopper logo concept

I tried to pitch a new logo design to the original inventor of grasshopper3D software the other day, David Rutten. It turns out that it was not a great success, mainly because he is looking for a code-based intro/splash page. He did thank me for my design though…

Here is a part of his reply:

However what I’m hoping to get for GH2 is not so much a single image, as a stylistic language which is flexible enough to be applied to a variety of context while remaining recognisable. Also a certain 3d-ness and computationality should be part of the look. In short, I’m hoping to come up with something which is amenable to algorithmic processing, which means at heart it must be code, not graphics.

09Dec

New online shopping with redbubble!

I’ve decided to sell some merchandise online with Redbubble.com! Hopefully this will make the transition to full time illustrator a bit easier for me.

I do not believe in over consumption, so I will keep the products that I offer to a minimum. No rubbish. No junk.

The world just does not need any more crap ending up the ocean.

So at this stage, the shop will feature a selection of prints, greeting cards, t-shirts, spiral notebooks, ceramic mugs, travel mugs, draw-string bags and the odd wall clock.

In other words, I am only selling most of the paper-based stuff. I have very few plastic iphone cases and things like that. That way, at least I know it is biodegradeable and compostable.

05Dec

My next project… preview.

I’m still about half way through my abstract/faces/people/animals project.

The next project will be… Australiana… starting with… gumleaves. One of my next door neighbours when I was growing up was a porcelain painter… Gladys Gilbert. She was always painting Australian flora and fauna from their many outback trips. Based on the river red gum, one of the tallest/biggest Australian eucalyptus trees. Not a great or detailed sketch, a bit harder with digital than pencil.

gumleaves

27Nov

Abstract project!

This is a limited edition series of 72 abstract faces/animals. Originally I was going to make either 84, 96 or even 100 works. But I found it is better to cull some of the worst ones. So you will only ever get to see either 36, 48, 64 or 72 (I haven’t decided yet).

I’m signing this as “van den hooven”, after my grandparents.

11Nov

Some new illustrations in a special video for you!

I have worked all week on these drawings + vid; I hope some of you like it. It’s 4k resolution, 60 frames per second.

Not all computers will be able to play it the full quality… but I’ve often noticed that older videos look old because of the quality, not the content. So I wanted to future-proof it a bit.

I modified an after effects template by Stranger media, changing colour, typography, scale, with some additional panning effects to make it look a bit more like a jigsaw coming together.

Music by Ciprian Mihoc.

leslie dean brown β€” illustrator | designer background image