In May this year I ran into the former curator of the Elders / Elders-GM / Elders IXL / Foster’s collection of Australian paintings, which Foster’s sold in 2005.

This chance meeting is a spur to begin work later this year on developing a DVD to show most of the paintings and information about the collection - started in the 1950’s by Sir Norman Giles when he was Managing Director of Elder, Smith & Co., Limited.

He continued buying more paintings during his term as Managing Director and then as Chairman of Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited (incorporated on 19 April 1962 to merge the businesses of Elders and its rival Goldsbrough Mort).

As a start on my work to create a DVD about the art collection, I've created a slideshow.

The slideshow runs for about 8 minutes or so after it has loaded.

Art Collection Slideshow

This is a scene which I created in 2008 on my PC in Carrara, a 3D modelling program. The main use of the 3D program for me is to create titles (both animated and still) and backgrounds for videos.

The above was my previous Home Page for many years. The layout was controlled by Dreamweaver AP tags (Absolute Positioning) which are now frowned upon as old fashioned. At least they worked

Initially I used an AP tag on this page to position the Welcome section on the left of this sidebar, but it's now positioned correctly using CSS.

If you click on the images on this page (except the Streeton painting in the left sidebar) it will link to a larger image.

WHAT'S NEW

Sun 18 Apr 2010

The iPhone Apps page has been updated for many of the apps.

Welcome

Welcome to my website which has been around for years, but in April 2009 I scapped the old site and created a new one using Dreamweaver CS4, except for the WordPress Blog page.

To put it another way, my whole web site was created on my PC computer in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, which is an application on my computer, just like Word or Excel or Photoshop etc. But my blog page was created in WordPress which is an application on my website's hosting server.

As I result I can add to and change my blog site using any web browser on any computer - even yours

In December 2009 my single blog page bloomed into a blog site with lots of pages and more to come, thanks to a new theme I'm now using, developed by RichWP.com.

Self portrait - taken with a Panasonic LX2
and then adjusted with Nik Color Efex in
Photoshop CS4.

31 March 2010

And now for something different. This video was created with the aid of two 3D modelling programs on a computer. One was used for the modelling, and the other for the animation. Rather embarrassingly, I have one of the programs, but I've never been able to produce anything this good.

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

2 April 2010 (Good Friday)

This is one of those Mr Bean episodes which starts off quietly but he gradually gets himself into a growing mess.

and finally, if you liked the video by Cristóbal Vila above, here is another one ...

Isfahan from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.