little update

I know I've been rubbish at keeping this up today but most of the action has beed happening over at the image a day blog (check it out here: http://imageadayiom.blogspot.com ) in other news I took part in an art festival here on the island called WOSAT which was a fantastic 3 days with plenty of visitors and plenty of sales too. I also reprinted some small press books, something I've not done for about 8 years. they went down very well,  so watch this space for more. the digital work produced for the image a day project is proving very popular and I will be making prints in the not to distant future. in the mean time I'm busy preparing for 2 shows, one a group show in New York city (details TBC) and a small exhibition here on the island in November (my first show in 3 years, here on the rock.

also here is a Guardian illustration I did a couple of weeks ago:

FINISHED MY MASTERS!!!

So here we are then, It's the 16th August a date which i thought would never arrive but has snuck up on me rather quickly it is of course the deadline for my masters project. I have handed everything in and feel weird, with nothing to do. I'm fairly happy with what I have produced, I have a debrief meeting on Monday, so i guess I find out then. results will be sent out on August 30th, I return to the island next week and have secured some part time teaching work for at least a year, so whilst I'm looking for work, freelance or otherwise, I will have something. just excited to be finished: here is the finished project:

WATCH THE ANIMATION HERE

Clara Barker: Fine Art and the Breslins

Well, so in amongst all this masters madness, My good friend and drinking buddy Clara, has been working on her second full length album and not only did I get to do the cover but also it's named after me too (wooooo!), one nick name I have is "Fine Art" and as some of you will  note the fellow who did the music for the MNH animation last summer was Steven Breslin, The Breslins refers to him and his lovely sister Sue, both of which are great friends, and awesome drinking buddies.
Anyway when the Album is released later in the year you should all go out and get it, it's fantastic.
Also it was so nice to do some real painting again, I hadn't realised how much I had missed it.

3D printing

So everywhere I look at the moment, I see 3D printing absolutely everywhere, so as part of my Personal inquiry (a sort of research project I had to undertake for my MA, which ends in a presentation of the findings) I chose to have a crack at it, in order to do this I used the imp-like character I used to use a lot for art and illustration (pre welcome to the neighbourhood project).

I then took the simple character sketch and began modelling it in 3D, everything I read about 3D printing stated that as long as the mesh is water tight (no holes) manifold (no open faces or shared edges) it should be fine, there was no mention to ngons or unquaded triangles (sorry for the tech talk, these are things to avoid when creating a model for animation)..

So I deliberately left both of these things in, I kept the model low polygon (it's under 2k polys) and did not equally space the polygons, again this is something not mentioned in any of the write ups I've read about 3D printing and so after an afternoon I had this:

I then took it to see the 3D printing researchers here at the NCCA (who are doing amazing things) and I printed it on desktop 3D printer they have in their lab:

This took 11 hours to print and is around 3 inches tall (i didn't have to be there the whole time, we left it printing over night) As you can see, the structure is there, but that's about it, most detail is lost, partly due to the printer used and the plastic not being hot enough at the start. an unusual wood like pattern appeared on the model too, though unexpected, it has a nice quality to it.

Convinced I could get petter results I sent the mesh to a commercial printing service, who produced this:

The detail is all there, even down to the un-smoothed polygons. this has opened my mind up to all kinds of possibilities. Many people have asked me about sculptures of my work and the main reason why I've never looked into it is because of the spindly nature of my characters, I didn't think they could stand up. when I'm finished with the MA, this will receive a lot of  more of my attention. look out galleries!!

A new website

As many of you know I've not had a website for quite some time now (I think the I took the old one down in 2007) largely because I felt I wasn't really getting that much from it and it was a giant pain in the arse to keep up to date with, partly why I started the blog, it's much more Juan friendly. anyway long story short I recently applied for a teaching job that required me to upload my artwork to a wix site, it seemed very straightforward to get together, so after a long time here is my new website:

you can get to it here: http://juanillustration.wix.com/juanmoore
Once I finish with my MA I will make a more permanent website, with an address that is easier to remember. incidentally I didn't get the job :(

A Quick update

well, things have been very busy over the last month or so, I had some work in an exhibition at ronaldsway airport on the Isle of Man, I've completed the bulk of the work on the zombie book with Yee (that was a good two months of working on nothing else but that). I'll post some stuff from that very soon.

The Sayle gallery (where a lot of my work appears) has closed for the summer getting ready for its big reopening in its new larger premises in the fall, I've just started work on illustrations for a music book with the Manx heritage foundation. I'm still producing illustrations for the guardian weekend magazine, the next one is in on the 19th so look out for that one.

and as a follow up to my "100 drawings" exhibition, I've just completed painting no. 1o for an exhibition of 100 paintings in feb 09 at the Sayle gallery. so yeah its all mad at the moment.

oh and if life wasn't complicated enough, I've just moved house.