September 2014

Japanese Artist Creates Amazingly Realistic Miniature Dioramas

There’s something fascinating about model building. We all remember doing them as kids. Not having much patience and wanting them to be glued and painted as soon as possible. Of course real model makers have a lot more patience than that. When you’ve tried your hand at model making you can recognise when somebody has put an enormous amount of time and patience into a model. Even more so when that model is made from scratch with basic materials.
For real dedication and an eye for detail the following are excellent examples of a model maker who has lots of patience and skill.

miniature diorama of a garbage dump
miniature diorama of a garbage dump

Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.

Satoshi mostly uses Styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.

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Max the Curse of Brotherhood

Max the Curse of Brotherhood

I certainly don’t play as many games as I used to. I’ve played everything from Pong and Breakout (Atari 2600), Manic Miner (Spectrum & Commodore 64) up to Bioshock and Uncharted (Drakes Fortune, Among Thieves, Drakes Deception). The last console game I really enjoyed was The Last of Us. My taste in games is more in the adventure and story based line. Sure the likes of Destiny have a story but I’ll leave Joshua to play that. He’s currently on Level 21 by the way.

Microsoft have been bring out some good classic games (although with a little advertising in them). Such as Solitaire, Mahjong, Pinball Fx2 and even Jigsaw. Some of these games are multi-device and sync the players progress in the cloud. The player can stop playing on their mobile and carry on on from their laptop and vice-versa. Which is pretty cool.

When it comes to the free games you can download, you can end up being a little disappointed when they come to a halt and then say you have to pay to get the rest of the game. Well no such thing as a free lunch. But there are some exceptions. Although I have to say I took advantage of a limited offer in the Windows Store for a free copy of Max the Curse of Brotherhood and grabbed it so I could play it later.

It’s a 2.5D side scrolling platformer with a few inventive twists thrown in. Keyboard and mouse are used, with the mouse used for more than point and click. This is were you probably have an advantage over the Xbox player. When you run out of platform to jump on and off from, use Max’s magic marker to draw branches and pull up pillars of rock with the mouse to carry on. As it progresses you have to get inventive and put these and other skills to work together, if you want to go further. A good thinking platform game. It looks and sound extremely nice too.

Good for flexing my problem solving muscle(s) in a fun way. If they haven’t been flexed enough while working during the day sheesh! If the weekends are running a little slow then I jump on my laptop and play Max.

Max the Curse of Brotherhood is available on Xbox One, Xbox 360 and for the Windows PC on Steam.

If you get stuck, or you just fancy seeing what it looks like, you could try the walk through video below which has helped me a couple of times. Normally I watch how the expert gets past the spot I’m on, slap the forehead and say duh! and carry on playing with a smile.

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Solar Freakin Roadways!

Imagine you had a really good idea that could change the planet but nobody seems to be listening. How frustrating would that be?

Well instead of just getting mad you could do something that will grab peoples attention. Like create a video that gets to the point and is humorous at the same time.

To be honest I don’t know if these guys are being ignored and getting frustrated, that’s just the impression I get when watching the following video. But you never know solar energy may help save the world.

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Amazing Realistic Portraits by Olga Larionova

These portraits are by Russian artist Olga Larionova. They are even move amazing when you know they are not photographs but done entirely in pencil. Wonderful attention to detail and mind boggling at the same time.

If you want to see more of Olga’s work, you can find it on Deviant Art here.

Since I first post this the links to the pictures I had linked here were removed from the source. So for know I recommend going to the above link which (at this time) is still active. 

Or lets try this one for a while.

Light -FairyARTos

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Brand Yourself

If you are interested in pushing your on-line profile to new heights. I cannot recommend BrandYourself highly enough. It helps you get your other social networks together and make them present you to the world as one. Or in other words get the information about yourself on the various social networks you may be on consistant and help show how to do it better.

A very useful tool that even checks how well you present yourself and also helps to get you up the search rankings. Give it a try.

Here’s my profile.

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