Progress

Mostly busy on painting at the moment, with a short time out to remaster the Gunstorm II song for its single release. The St. Andrew picture is underpainted but I've decided to rework the composition so I'll not finish that until at least next year. Pictures in progress include:

Domination of the Fishes. A small panel in the style of Half a Broken Heart about the depletion of fish stocks (Mmm, fish stock).
Eye Among the Pears. One of my few highly surreal pictures (because normally I pick an main idea instead of dreamily automise subconscious visions). This is a partial tribute to a picture called Christina's World.
Artificial Venus is a female figure study, originally a colour test for the St. Andrew picture. It has proved useful but will be a picture in its own right when I complete it.
Sunset with Petalliforms is also quite surreal and about the forlorn hope of romance.
Dead Bird says it all. It's a test of simply copying from a photo. I could have picked a live bird but: A. They don't stand still enough for me to photograph and B. My personality is instinctively contrary.

A few are in the very earliest stages, but the sketch is complete to a cover picture for a proposed music album of my game music called Stupid Computer Music. Over winter I'd like to get some music done. Hopefully finish The Journey with Steven, remaster The Spiral Staircase and perhaps write a sequel which is pencilled in as The Music Box.

One Day Shortlisted in the UK National Songwriting Contest

One of my 2005 songs, One Day, has made it to the semi finals of the UK National Songwriting Contest. Steven McLachlan's excellent vocals helped give this dramatic song the power it needed. A reworked Gunstorm II theme song will be released as a pop single in a few months. Perhaps I can persuade Steven to include One Day as a bonus track.

Sunset with Petalliforms

The underpainting to the large sunset with petalliforms picture is now complete.

Sunset with Petalliforms

The underpainting has started to Sunset with Petalliforms, the smaller of the two large pictures I plan to complete this year. A cold turquoise sky is lit by the flaming sun on an adamantine chain while a dead rose stalk rises like an octopus tentacle into a sky with falling petals. Warm meets cold a lot in this picture, the colours of which come from a very vivid and very colourful dream. Every force seems to have an antiforce to balance it. I can't help thinking that gravity must have a larger antigravity force that combats it. Like true antigravity mass would repel mass but not to such an extent to prevent the formation of the delicate gaseous structures of the early Universe, although, depending on the reach of antigravity, this might mean that distant matter would be lost forever at this stage. Gravity uses no energy, it is a spatial distortion of time into space, and I think that dark energy is a spatial distortion of a similar sort and not energetic. All galaxies are parting, so the Universe is called expanding. If this antigravity force exists then the universe on a smaller scale is not expanding at the same rate, for example the arms in galaxies are moving apart from each other more slowly than the galaxies are parting (and the difference can be used to calculate the strength of the antigravity). If antigravity does not exist, then local space is expanding at the same rate as distant space. So, this hypothesis can be tested.

Bugs

Ultrabusy at the moment working on some custom sound effects for a third party. I've also managed to locate and fix a long standing but rare bug in SFXEngine that caused mysterious crashes when I did things like Purge the Modulators. The bug took a while to track down but now the program appears as stable as its parent NS2. There are a pile of game reviews on Bytten to do too and they've all fallen on Steve Blanch's shoulders. Andrew where art thou?! Perhaps it's time to locate a new reviewer.

Update

A mix of work done over the past few days. I've got a few paintings in progress and a few planned too although the season, my busiest ever, is nearly over and the light fading daily. Today I completed the first glaze of a landscape with clouds made of rocks over a desert. Notably there are two large pictures left to paint this year. Five of my paintings are now in the Bickerton exhibition, and having helped to hang it I can confirm that my pictures stand out from the others. If I had the cash I'd buy them myself because I'm sure they will increase in value given my own increase in skill, invention and bravado.

The rest seemed to be standard village fayre: animals, flowers, landscapes (but I didn't see the final exhibition). Some were stunningly well painted BUT IF I had learned how to paint for five years and then painted a flower (or kitten or watercolour mountain) then I'd consider those five years wasted. I made an exciting discovery the other day and might have discovered a whole new genre of painting but I'll keep it secret until I can explore it fully. Next week, sound effect work.