I am not so good at making resolutions. Part of the problem is that I don’t know when should I make them? I have lots of opportunities:
1 Jan – the beginning of the calendar year and my wedding anniversary
28 Feb – my birthday
1 Apr – the beginning of my tax year
25 Apr – my spiritual birthday
1 Sep ish – the start of the academic year when my wife and children go back to school
11 Sep – the anniversary of my moving to Turkey
Then there are seasons which have arbitrary beginnings and ends (See Too many winters). I could make plans and resolutions for those times.
Or maybe I could make plans at the start of each new month and try to keep a habit for 30 days.
I usually find myself procrastinating the making of resolutions until the next significant date on my calendar.
This Christmas, 77% of my close extended family is getting together to celebrate and my mother has asked that her children and grandchildren create decorations. With the short notice and the long distance between us, I have created this DIY papercraft Santa decoration that you might like to make yourself.
Santacraft yourself, Digital design (A4).
Download the Santacraft yourself PDF, print it out and create your own last-minute Santa decoration.
I am in the midst of my 53rd Winter. So far I have experienced 50 Autumns and 48 Springs, but only 47 Summers. How old am I? Why am I procrastinating Summer?
The seasons I have met (pie chart), digital image
One of the benefits of international travel is that I can spend time in different hemispheres, experiencing the different food, culture, and people of the world. I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere where Christmas is in Summer and the school year matches the calendar year. But, 14 and a bit years ago I moved to the Northern Hemisphere for work and a different lifestyle. I now get a real Winter Christmas and the academic year spans two calendar years with a long break in the Northern Hemisphere Summer/Southern Hemisphere Winter.
One of the drawbacks of living on the other side of the equator from family and friends is the opposite seasons. With my immediate family in school, our local long Summer break is the only practical time for us to visit our antipodean whanau, who are then in the midst of their Winter.
The seasons I have met (stacked), digital image
Unseasonal days experienced during the season have not been counted, only prolonged exposure to the season experienced by the rest of the hemisphere at that time.
For the purposes of my calculations, a season is counted if I was in a hemisphere experiencing any part of that season at the time. If I visit an opposite season and return before the end of the original season, the original season is only counted once – for example, I left the Northern Hemisphere Summer in June 2016, had four weeks of Southern Hemisphere Winter and returned to experience the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere Summer; earlier/later in the year I had another whole Northern Hemisphere Winter. I have only counted a season if I experienced it for at least one week – I do not remember any of the 21.5 hours of the summer of my birth.
I am using the Meteorological definition of seasons: Southern Autumn / Northern Spring: 1 March to 31 May Southern Winter / Northern Summer: 1 June to 31 August Southern Spring / Northern Autumn: 1 September to 30 November Southern Summer / Northern Winter: 1 December to 28 (29 in leap years) February [ Source https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/aboutseasons.html ]
Sometimes it is good to have a rest from creating art. But then getting back into creating art again can be a struggle and a battle. Rest wants a bit more time. Art wants to return. Procrastination sets in. In this quirky typography animation, rest and art battle for attention.
Can you solve these simple equations and find the pattern?
No. Digits (Just Equations). Digital Image
This was the question I posed to friends on Facebook. Thanks to them I found some missing brackets and corrected the above image, representing digits as equations.
From this, I created a simple book reminiscent of a child’s counting book or math exercise book with a number represented on each page by its equation. If you include the answers to the equations (left as an exercise for the reader), each statement has all of the digits from zero to nine appearing only once. I created the book from a school desktop flip calendar, giving it a distressed old school look by painting the pages with a mixture of gouache and acrylic house paint. Letting the wet pages stick together before separating and applying a second coat produced the rough surface for the equations in pastel, sharpie and pencil.
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The title of this work No. Digits is a play on the idea that “Number” is often abbreviated as “No.” and for each equation there is no digit for that specific number until you solve the equation.
What would happen if certain countries did not exist?
One of the items in Theo’s procrastination list (since 2014) is an geographical education computer game called Country Thief.
As someone who comes from a country (New Zealand) that is often left off global maps, I decided to create a game where countries are disappearing from the map for various reasons (evil dictators, nuclear war, economic collapse, alien invasion, meteors of unusual size and shape, global warming). Players race against decreasing time limits to find the missing country and identify it. Can you beat the clock and save your country from disappearing?
Given recent current events and environmental concerns, I am releasing this concept design image for people to share on social media and make their own comments.
Approximately Phi, Acrylic and Gouache on Ikea Lack Coffee Table, 90×55 cm
Approximately Phi, Acrylic and Gouache on Ikea Lack Coffee Table.
The mathematics of the golden ratio [phi (ɸ) ~1.61803399] and of the Fibonacci sequence [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …] are intimately interconnected.
At 90 x 55 cm, the dimensions of the Ikea Lack Coffee Table are close to two consecutive terms of the Fibonacci series, and give a ratio of 1.63636363636 which is only 0.01832964761 or 1.1328%more than phi. Our coffee table was in need of refurbishment and so I painted it with this exaggerated approximation of the fibonacci series / golden ratio spiral.
I was fascinated by the dictionary as a child and I especially enjoyed reading the abbreviations section. Here are some of my definitions for abbreviation, acronyms and mnemonics.
