PigPog

Jim Victor is a sculptor, who works primarily in the medium of butter.

Yes, butter, and other foods. His work is pretty amazing, though – mainly done for state fairs and farming shows and such like, from the look of it. I’ve not even seen all of the examples on his site, because there’s too many pictures for our puny Internet connection to handle, but they do look tasty. Well, apart from the Hershey chocolate – that tastes nasty. And the Kraft cheese is just a bit too orange to really look appetising – come on America, it’s time to make up with France – they could teach you about real cheese.

Anyway. He seems to have quite a skill for making them stay upright when they really shouldn’t – a butter cow, for example – the legs shouldn’t support the weight of all that butter, but they still do. Mind you, a real cow’s legs support the weight of all that beef…

• Jim’s own site with lots of pictures of his work.
• (Via Boing Boing.)

Christian Eriksson has put together a little step-by-step on how he mounted a couple of small Star Wars collectable miniatures in a display case, using the little risers you use to attach a motherboard to the case (should be very cheap and readily available in computer shops – there’s probably similar things in hardware stores too). The case itself was from Ikea, so can probably be got cheaply enough pretty much anywhere…

• Instructions on Instructables.
• Christian’s original blog post about it.

Another couple of pictures here, first – here’s another watercolour.

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Again, I used Cotman watercolour pans, Gerstaecker paper and Pentel Aquash brushes. This one was an interesting experiment – a sort of a ‘traced collage’:

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I traced various guitar pictures, brand names and other paraphernalia out of a guitar magazine, then laid the tracing over a background done with Copic markers. I finished it off in Photoshop by adding a bit more intensity to the black of the Strat. I might do more to this at some point, I think thicker lines and maybe bringing forward some of the colours from the background. I like it, it’s kinda quirky.

Time for another update on some little changes to PigPog. Nothing huge, but hopefully tidying up a few things…

• Added the link to our blogs back to the top bar again – we don’t want them too much ‘up front’, as they’re just our personal rumblings, but hidden away on the About page was a bit too hidden.
• Cut down the text on the IRC link at the top. Nearly did away with it entirely, but I’m glad we didn’t – a couple of people have dropped by when we’ve been in there, and we’ve had a couple of good conversations with people.
• Made the ‘RSS’ link to the main full text feed white-on-orange, to make it a bit more obvious than the others. I think some people have been subscribing to the wrong feeds, because there’s too much choice. I don’t want to take away the option of only picking up some subjects, but we don’t want people to accidentally subscribe to the ‘music only’ feed, for example, then wondering why they hardly ever get any posts.
• Merged ‘Search’ with ‘Keyword Lookup’, which will hopefully make more sense…

Before now, we had the search form at the top of the page, which took you to a nice extended search routine, where you could filter and refine your search. It was a big improvement on the basic Drupal search we had been using before. We also had the Keyword Lookup function, which we used as a sort of semi-automated link for terms we mentioned in articles that we thought people might want to look for further info on. The Keyword Lookup page, though, had a link to search PigPog, which used the old search engine, and gave different results to the main search form at the top of the page. Confusing and inconsistent.

Now, the link to search PigPog on the Keyword Lookup page takes you to the good search engine results, and the search form at the top of the page takes you to the Keyword Lookup page.

The downside of this is that searching on PigPog now takes an extra click – do the search in the top form, then click the link to search PigPog. The upside is that from the same page you can do the same search on Wikipedia, Google, Amazon (US and UK), Technorati and del.icio.us. So if you don’t find what you’re looking for at PigPog, hopefully we’ll make it easier to find what you’re after somewhere. When you see a green link in a post here (examples: Tablet PC, PDA, Moleskine), that’s a link to the keyword lookup for that term – links to other pages on PigPog and to other sites are blue.

Oh, and if you happen to find it at Amazon, and buy it, we get a cut.

It’s been a while since I showed off any of my artwork, so here are photos of some watercolour abstracts I painted in my new nifty little studio area that Michael made for me a few weeks ago.

[image:1549 size=small] These were originally intended to be backgrounds for an e-book I was planning, but the project kind of evolved in another direction, so I carried on just painting for painting’s sake. The project had a ‘fiery’ theme, so these paintings aimed to follow suit in orange, yellow and red.

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These were all done using Cotman Watercolour Pans by Winsor & Newton, Pentel Aquash brushes (the lazy artist’s best friend!) and Gerstaecker Aquarelle Block.

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More soon!