Been looking to start developing designs for tshirts etc. This is the first design, really just grappling at straws for now but hopefully better things are on the way! 😊

Repurposing metal shoeworking tools into doorstops by painting them for decorative purposes is not something I ever envisioned carrying out but when the urge to paint kicks in at 1am, there’s not much else to be said. I always liked the painting style of John Nolan and this is where I drew inspiration for the painting atop the metal.

Back when I was 15, I was first introduced to the idea of breadboarding/protoboarding. I remember taking pictures like these because I thought it was so cool working with all the components and wires.

Even though I wasn’t following conventions but rather just pushing in components and hoping they would work and the L.E.D’s and buzzer would come on. Quite comical to look back on compared to more complex circuitry I have worked on.

100 Acre Woodworking

I wish allowed myself more time to paint, stress free among the grass, daisies and buttercups like this piece I completed last summer. There is no better feeling than when a piece comes out nearly exactly as you imagined it and this was one of the rare times it happened.

I picked up this table and chair for under £10 in a charity shop with crayon scribbles and stains along the top. Winnie the Pooh is one of my favoutite characters of all time and this isnt the first time I’ve featured Winnie and Piglet on an item of furniture.

Finished two of the endings in The Count Lucanor and despite some shortcomings my pixel art heart liked it <3

Fashion and feminism exhibit from the ulster museum

Got myself a funky Frida Kahlo top from Primark and couldn't pass up the oppprtunity to draw a pixel art Frida. (I tried) Bonus fact - My first introduction to Frida Kahlo was on a cover of Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips which I bought because the cover inrigued me

Tech as a creative medium - a short talk I presented to some peers 

I’ve always been inspired by flora and fauna and found the gesture of sending and receiving flowers among the most charming of traditions. I recently found myself researching all I could on the crossover area between technology and ecology – specifically flowers.Wikipedia defines ‘flower robot’ as “a simple electromechanical device with the appearance of a common flower.”  There are many motives that have inspired creators to experiment in this area from artificial flowers to promote pollination for bees to integrating semi conductive polymers inside the stem to generate electricity from photosynthetic processes and other designs and sculptures that have incorporated technology purely for aesthetic appeal.One of the earliest projects I found pertaining to this subject was an art/installation of a robotic flower garden by the Personal Robots Group at MIT’s Media Lab. This was developed in 2003 and coined the term Cyberflora. The flowers defined in this project all had different properties; Chromafant Blossom – capacitive sensing which will trigger swaying and glowing. Cobra Orchid and Dragon Iris – Movements synced to warmth. Violet Oscillies – Senses a hand passing over the top as the petals move.

Conducting experiments using electronic components and technical elements may raise ethical issues as plants are living things, extending into principles of biocentrism and plant rights. There are two types of approaches to cyber plants – adaptation of the pre-existing living flower or a digital product that mimics the properties of the living plant. The aforementioned artificial flowers to promote pollination take the second approach; known as the Synthetic Pollinizer it sits alongside real plants to try and lure bees in to gather man-made pollen from the robotic flower which is a safer alternative to pesticide infected plants. An example of the first approach is the experiment researchers at Linkoping University carried out creating a simple transistor circuit inside a rose. 

I think this is a very interesting sector to watch. The evolution of plants and flowers, not to mention the vast amount of species and variants means that we have a lot to learn and a long way to go.  Every day we are exploring new agricultural processes and expanding upon our knowledge, being able to communicate and collaborate on findings via the internet and means of modern communication will make a massive difference to the future of plants.

I can’t help but wonder what William Wordsworth would have said had he not been greeted with ‘A host, of golden daffodils’ but instead ‘A garden of more than 21,000 LED long-stemmed, white roses.’

My boyfriend took me to Paris some years ago where I finally got to visit the Musée d’Orsay. Seeing Starry Night over the Rhône and The Water Lily Pond reminded me of the egg painting competitions we used to have at home over Easter. Pictured below are some of my egg entries.

Algorithms & Rhythms

I wish I could sing – but I can’t. I sound terrible. I like music a lot though and wish I could make my own. Curiosity paired with tech based inspiration left me thinking – How much of the music process can be automated? Equipped with an automation framework and a Friday evening I started exploring.

I started out initially experimenting with digital music instruments – there are a range of sites that allow you to play digital piano, drums, trumpet and even pan flute. I started off simply by playing Jingle Bells on an emulated Piano, taking in the id’s of the keys and naming the variables after the notes so they could be called in a way that makes more sense contextually.  I created a method called playNote that would play the note and wait so that they could be differentiated as different notes. I could play around with this method more to play notes that are tied and to play notes of different lengths by controlling the time when the note is released.

From this I then created a random string generator using the keys on the keyboard that mapped to notes. I input the length at run-time so that a ‘song’ will be generated playing a pre-set number of random notes. I would like to expand this so that you can select the instrument you would like to be played at run-time.

I will inevitably revisit this project in the future as I still have so many questions and things that I would like to achieve. As the music sounds very mashed together I would like to be able to play chords instead of random notes and to use music theory to make it sound nice and realistic rather than a jumbled digital composition. I would also like to research genre conventions so that I could create music of a particular genre and record and store the output in a file somewhere. There are so many online music apps and resources that I would like to discover.

I tried to make a font was when I was about 15/16. In school I used to be fascinated by my peers handwriting and during book-swap peer reviews I would always keep a file page on my right and try to imitate the other students writing. I would try to figure what way they would move their hand to form the letter comfortably and try to figure out if they were right or left handed. This is probably not normal behaviour- I am aware. One night I was doing a peer review as an assessment homework and as I had the book home with me until the next day I decided to create a font from my imitation of their handwriting so that I could type out the sentences and compare them to the book.

I vividly remember finding a Disney font so I could learn how to draw the letters for the titles in my history book – which began to look rather out of place when writing about Irish History. Lately I have been looking and fonts more again and mimicking letters I see on webpages.

The font Magical Unicorn Neue Pro by Arthur Reinders Folmer (seen above) inspired this article as it is the first time in forever that I stopped to think about what a font actually was – in more of a meta sense than literally. It pushed boundaries, I have seen many fonts where the same animal in the same pose is attached to each letter but it shows real craftsmanship to mold the letters into a shape that works so that the animal becomes the letter or the likeness of the character.

From this I have selected five similar fonts that invoke the same appreciation of creativity yet are all animal-centric. There were so many fonts I wanted to include so I might revisit this topic again sometime.

Pussyfoot – A cat font that features cats in different poses – created in 1998 by Web Dog (ironically)

ANIMALFONT – which is composed of balloon animals and was created to raise awareness of damage to ecosystems and helped raise money for disaster relief in Japan.

Fabel – the animal alphabet, a font full of fauna. This fun font comes with lots of support with uppercase, lowercase, glyphs, mathematical symbols and more. I found this typeface very impressive.

KADinosob – Created in 1999 by KA fonts, you can see that it has undergone a face lift from the original version although the premise and style is very much the same

The Pug Alphabet – I couldn’t include a cat font and not have a font for all the dog lovers. Illustrated pug alphabet complete with pugs in different stretches and poses.