This guy was sitting right outside my mother’s place in Noosa, Queensland one night. He’s so wonderfully fat, and those perfect martian invader fingerpads – daww.

It’s kinda like wild kingdom there sometimes. One time, I was sitting in the loungeroom working on my computer, and I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Going over to investigate there was a baby Blue-Tongue lizard all of 3″ long, which seemed to have walked almost all the way through the house. As soon as he saw me, he raced with his stubby little legs as fast as he could. That would have been a great plan, except for the polished tile floor. He basically sat there, paddling furiously and going nowhere. So I put him outside, after recovering from fits of laughter.

How adorable is that? When I was in America, a friend and I were walking through an orchard (ok we were sortof lost having wandered into the forest) and the apple trees were being irrigated with big rotary sprays – think lawn sprinklers, but huge. Anway as we’re walking down the dirt road I notice something almost underfoot. Looking down I thought “ooh lizard” until the lack of legs became apparent. That was right about when it started striking my boot. Now I know snakes can stretch and unhinge their jaws, but that was perhaps a tad over-ambitious.

UPDATE: according to Dr Pete Ducey of the State University of New York at Cortland, it’s a northern water snake, Nerodia sipedon.

Those big black profile stripes behind the eyes aren’t just great camouflage, EWDs communicate or make territorial displays by holding their heads up and bobbing them up and down rapidly. It’s hilarious to watch.

I was about 3 metres (10 feet) away from this guy when shooting this. You know, there’s a reason wildlife photographers use those big fuckoff EOS soulstealing lenses. They do like to watch you when you approach them, keeping an eye pointed in your direction. There’s a reason these are all profile shots.

Eastern Water Dragons are one of the more kick-ass reptiles in the Sydney area. Growing up to almost a metre long, and with mouths full of needle sharp teeth, they’re everything a predatory lizard should be. You find them in the middle of suburbia, really anywhere that has water and some bushland will be filled with them.

Geckos who can hang upside down on surfaces. It’s rally amazing how they do this, microscopic hairs that exploit molecular attraction, sort of like atomic velcro.

One of the funny things about Queensland is the suburban wildlife. At noosa for example, you have scrub turkeys (imagine a normal turkey, basically a wild version) wandering around the main street in the mornings. The other thing is geckos. Little, tiny, semi-translucent geckos.

Well, here we are with the new version of golgotha.com.au. All database driven, and running in wordpress. This was done as a proof of concept – that I could use a readily available free platform like WP to provide the back end engine and all the post-design editing functions.

While I’m not going all out to do web design as a profession now, on occasion if an interesting project comes along, I’d like to be able to concentrate on the design, and base it on an engine that allows the client to manage the content themselves once my work is done (so I’m not doing 1 paragraph edits for ever afterwards).

It’s been an interesting journey getting this working – interesting in the Chinese sense. The biggest obstacle has been due to a rather nasty rendering bug in Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of the Safari, OmniWeb and iCab browsers. But, eventually I found a workaround, and now all is working well. If you do encounter any problems, please contact me and let me know.

This poster was produced for the 2007 Sydney Supanova convention. I was a tad uneasy about this one, since it deviated from the thematic elements I’d preferred – angry female characters wielding blunt objects. Still, I’d had a few people asking for images that were less in that direction, a couple specifically asking for some sort of “cyber chick”, and thus, this image. I think this one worked worked really well from a volumetric perspective, and the character has quite a different body type from the other two, far more solid (to my eye, at least).

What I like most about this one is the compositional alignment of the cog with the knees and shoulders.

This image was printed by our new printer and is even more lustrous than the others. Again, it’s a limited run of 50, on 200gsm stock, A3 size and available from the store.

This is the most popular of the poster images I’ve created, and was done in tandem with Blank for the Sydney Supanova convention in late 2006. The character shown here may or may not make an appearance in the sequel to Surfing The Deathline, Nations.

The initial designs for the character date to 2002 when I was studying animation, during which I created a walk cycle animation of her. During a break from Surfing The Deathline I revived her for a sort of fantasy project, based around the idea of exploring queue rage – hence the name “Cliche”. As I rediscovered my enthusiasm for Surfing The Deathline I shelved the project, but who knows I may still pursue it.

Like Blank, this was a limited printrun of 50, signed and numbered. It’s printed on 200gsm stock, and A3 in size. There’s less than 10 remaining, so if you like it, go visit the store – they tend to sell pretty quickly when I do an event.