Hello! I'm an illustrator from Jersey (the small Jersey between France and England), currently living in England. I've been a freelance illustrator for 7 years, working on children's books, advertising campaigns and editorial commissions.

So hello, I'm Josh, and I'm a photographer living in Seattle.  I take pictures of the city and of industrial places around the Pacific Northwest, but you wouldn't necessarily know that from looking at my work.  I seek out rusty, weathered surfaces and crop out the surroundings, mostly, so though there may be a small identifying detail that gives a sense of size or place, for the most part the images just become pure abstractions of color and form.

And that's what I like about them - they're pretty and gritty and fun to look at.  It doesn't need to go any deeper in meaning than that (unless you want it to, of course - be my guest!).  I want people just to enjoy them because they're neat looking! Plus I think it's cool that they kind of look like paintings, and I love printing them out on huge stretched canvases to emphasize that effect. I'm ridiculously new at this, and 2010 marks the first year that I've decided to make my work public.  Even though I grew up in a household with a photography professor and an art historian/art journalist for parents, I was always dissuaded from pursuing any sort of career in the art world (strange, right?), so I sort of kept my light under the proverbial bushel until recently.  And how do my parents feel about my work now that I'm in my 40's, you may ask? I'm happy to say they've come around and they're extremely supportive. Hooray!



clearing - I love the little patch of blue just aching to open up amid all the rust and become open sky.

I've been collecting maps for almost as long as I've been making art with a computer, close to ten years now. When I initially had the idea of making collages of maps into fauna, I couldn't bring myself to cut up the objects I treasured so deeply. From the colorful lines to the assortment of fill types, the tattered papers had been preserved for too long for me to destroy them with scissors. Even if I were to create something new from their destruction, the world would be with one less artifact. It's at this point when I truly saw the beauty of using the computer, the benefit of the truest sense non-destructive editing. Incidentally this allowed me to overcome one of the largest hurdles I had faced while making digital art; the maps added texture and depth to a medium that I have often struggled to make appear less flat and lifeless.

I will be having my first solo exhibition, From Here to Over There, on July 9th at Chop Suey Books in Richmond, VA. This will be followed by another show, The Atlas is Painless, opening on July 15th at The Renaissance Center in Dickson, Tennessee.

Here is a peek at some of my work:



Yellow Eyed Junco

The first piece I made using this new digital technique. I tried to emulate aves in poses reminiscent to field guides or old Audubon illustrations. The first series I began working on contain a hodgepodge of maps. I was more concerned with connecting color and texture than location.

It's easy to tell Pete the squirrel from all the other squirrels. He's the purple one!

Teachers and pupils at Meoncross School in Stubbington, Hants, were amazed when they saw the creature through the window during a lesson.

Since the squirrel, now nicknamed Pete, was first seen, it has become a regular fixture at the school but no one has been able to say whether the animal has fallen into purple paint, had a run-in with some purple dye, or whether there is another explanation.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Solent News and Photo Agency)

Update: Loooks like it might be printer ink. -Thanks, Kyyria!

A shark at at the Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas jumped out of its seawater enclosure onto a nearby water slide and slid down into the swimming pool! No one was in the pool Tuesday morning when it happened.

"Yesterday morning at around 9:30 AM, prior to the resort's waterscape opening to guests, a 12+-year-old female reef shark jumped over an 18 inch wide and 1 foot high sustaining structure into the resort's Leap of Faith water slide.

The Atlantis Aquarists believe the shark was startled by an unusual circumstance that we have no way of defining completely. In the over ten years guests have experienced the Leap of Faith, the reef shark itself, harmless to humans as it is fed regularly by our staff, had shown no previous incidences of leaping out of the water in the marine habitat ...

The aquarium staff immediately retrieved the shark from the pool, but the chlorinated water had already poisoned the fish. She died shortly after. Link -via Simply Left Behind

You want to talk about a niche blog? Here's one for tattoos of owls. And nothing else. Owl Tattoos has an extensive collection. Pictured is a tattoo by Valerie Vargas. Whoooo knew there were so many owl tattoos? Link -Thanks, Patrick!

The view is breathtaking, but... do you feel safe? deputy dog has a roundup of scenic overlooks that are as safe as can be made, but still make you feel like you may fall at any moment. Pictured is The Top Of Tyrol overlooking a ridge of Mount Isidor in Austria. http://deputy-dog.com/2008/12/6-vertigo-inducing-viewing-platforms.html

These orange slices are made of jello! Instructables tells you how to make them. This might be neat with lemons and limes, too. It would certainly impress guests at a holiday party! Link -via Unique Daily

In a survey of really rich people, the Wall Street Journal found that 80% of millionaires who have secret lovers will be cutting back on gifts and financial support during the economic crisis.

The survey–a subset of a larger wealth study–polled 191 individuals with a minimum net worth of $20 million who said they had lovers of at least a year or more (this to screen out the one-night stands, etc.). About two thirds of the respondents were men and one third women. All were married and all had personal control over their finances, meaning the women and men surveyed were the primary wealth holders in their homes.

The most surprising stats in the study relate to gender and what might be termed “length of service.” Fully 82% of men in the study said they planned to lower the allowances to their mistresses, while more than three quarters planned to provide fewer gifts, less expensive gifts and fewer perks, like jet rides, resort vacations and top restaurant meals.

Women were far more generous to their paramours in the face of financial crises. Less than 20% planned to lower allowances, gifts and perks, while more than half planned to raise them.

It appears that in hard times, it's better to have a sugar mama than to have a sugar daddy. Link -Thanks, Mark!

(YouTube link)
The Goblin Shark {wiki} has mostly pink skin and jaws that can protrude out of its skull like the creature in the movie Alien. In this video, the shark is trying to defend himself from a scuba diver. -via Ectoplasmosis

Find more information on this shark in a previous post at Neatorama.

You've seen the text that explains how the human mind can read scrambled words, as long as the first and last letter of each word is correct. Now you can scramble a webpage in the same manner! This picture is of the previous post on Neatorama. Can you still read it? Use the application to convert text on a site of your choosing. Link -via b3ta

You always thought that octopuses had eight arms, right? It turns out that they have six arms and two legs!

A study by scientists at Sea Life centres across Europe found that the invertebrates move across the sea bed using their two rearmost limbs, leaving the other six free for the important business of feeding.

Researchers who observed the creatures in action found they push off with the "legs" and then employ the other tentacles to pump themselves along.

The study, the largest of its type carried out, was designed to show if octopuses favoured one side or the other.

But it found that octopuses are ambidextrous, though many seem to favour their third arm from the front to eat with.

Link -via Arbroath

As you watch Olympic diving, you may have wondered how the camera follows the divers every inch of the way from the platform to underwater. The answer is extremely old-fashioned: they drop the camera!

"Ideally," Rob Brear said the other day, "the diver and the camera drop at the same time." Mr. Brear, who is the DiveCam's chief dropper, was in Beijing's colossal "Water Cube," the National Aquatic Center, standing behind a plastic screen on a ledge built just below the diving tower's 10-meter platform. Between him and the platform, the DiveCam's pipe hung suspended by a chain from the roof.

Mr. Brear, a 54-year-old Australian, was warming up -- with the divers -- for the first platform events of the Games on Monday and Tuesday. "After the camera drops," he went on, "what you do is you pull it up again." Ken East, another Australian and Mr. Brear's teammate, sat behind him on a stool with his hand on the pulley's brake. "It's called gravity," he said.

There are some other factors. The camera operator has to drop it at the right time, and a bungee cord is used to keep the camera from smashing against the bottom of the pool. The Wall Street Journal has an interactive graphic that shows how the tracking works. Link -via Geek Like Me

The New York Times has an interactive timeline/map/infographic that shows the medal count of each country for all of the Modern Games since 1896. At the link, select a year, then click on each country's circle to see the medal count. Link -via Digg

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford University graduate students, working on their Digital Library Project, later known as Google. They needed a lot of storage, and the largest hard disk available was 4 gigabytes. So they connected ten of them together and built their own 40GB drive, in a case made of of Legos. It is now on display at the Stanford University Museum. Link -via the Presurfer