One of my main plans for the website in 2011 is to start producing "behind the scenes" style videos for the various projects I'm working on.  One thing that I love more than watching movies is watching their "behind the scenes" videos. I find it fasinating to see what goes in to making movies and they're a great teaching/learning aid too. So I figured if I can produce video content for the site that interests, helps out, inspires, etc... at least one other person then "mission accomplished" and I'm sure I'll learn alot along the way as well.

To do that I obviously need a half decent camera so at end of last year I joined the DSLR movie making bandwagon and brought myself the Canon 550D that you can see above, along with the Zoom H1 to cover the audio recording side of things.

I'll be posting up separate blog posts showing the Follow Focus Lens Gear Rings (available from Half Inch Rails) that I'm using and also my DIY Audio Shock Mount in more detail soon.

I'm sure I'm just new to the party and they've been around forever but I didn't find out until recently that you can get acrylic based transparent paints for airbrushing (I previously thought you could only get transparents with solvent based paints).

So I brought a set of 10 this week, COM ART colours - Transparent Kit E. The set comes with a decent selection of colours:

• Bright Red
• Orange
• Cadmium Yellow
• Emerald Green
• Kelly Green
• Ultramarine
• Royal Blue
• Violet
• Sienna Brown
• Black

I've not tried them out yet but these should greatly help with doing subtle shading effects, especially on the Avatar piece that I'm currently working on.

Demon to some. Angel to others. To me it's a cool looking puzzle box.

This is by far the most complex airbrush masking job I've done to date.  It took an hour for my plotter just to cut the masking film. Then came the tricky job of taking those masks, which I had to do in three separate A4 sections, removing the hundreds of little parts that were to be sprayed through and finally aligning them on the board ready for airbrushing.

Thanks to zaretti.com photography for taking the digital image.

A little while ago I got a Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet, which I'd highly recommend as it really is a great piece of kit. I got it for two reasons really, firstly as I wanted to try my hand at digital art, something I've not really done much of in the past. Secondly, as I suffer from RSI, it's a great alternative pointing device to using a regular mouse.

This started out purely as a black and white sketch which I later coloured to produce what it looks like now. I had never used a graphics tablet before so this was just the result of me missing about, trying it out for the first time. Nonetheless I think it turned out to be at least a half decent attempt.

Forget about the chicken, enough time is already spent on their road crossing antics! This is a way more important philosophical question that needs to be addressed...