About AJ Graphics

Welcome!
I'm from Wellington, New Zealand. My original tertiary qualifications are in telecommunications electronics. I've worked in telecommunications electronics in London, as well as in journalism, broadcast television, graphic design, motion picture and television electronic and electromechanical special F/X and tertiary education.

Currently I live in the Wairarapa District and freelance in 3D animation, video, digital graphics, electronic special F/X, Linux and web design.

I'm also responsible for the audio/video requirements of exhibitors and conferences at Aratoi, the Wairarapa District's regional art gallery/museum.

I have exhibited in several galleries around the Wairarapa, either by myself or joint exhibitions with other Wairarapa artists.

I'm currently designing custom 3D on-line art galleries, created in Photoshop Maya 3D and implemented using HTML, PHP, MySQL and Javascript. I've already created a number of off-the-shelf galleries which artists can populate with their own art, and will add more over time. Such galleries are already available offshore, but mine is currently the only locally owned and operated solution.

I'm also interested in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) image creation programs like Dall-E, specifically how they can be incorporated into website and gallery designs.

In my spare time I restore vintage British Cars.

Here's the link to my personal online gallery page. It contains all the the artwork from my 3 public exhibitions. The galleries below showcase my past work in virtual 3D web design, regular web design, video, photography and animation. The tools I regularly use are Adobe Creative Suite, Maya 3D, and Libre Office.

Click any image to see a larger version, or open a web link as required. Click anywhere on the image to close it.

3D Galleries

Virtual 3D generated art galleries can replicate actual gallery spaces or create new ones limited only by the designer's imagination. 3D on the web extends established web technologies - HTML5, PHP etc, with a new set of tools - the 3D render engine.

There are several available and after some experimentation I decided to use Babylon.js, which is a free, open source real time 3D engine using a JavaScript library for displaying 3D graphics in a web browser via HTML5.

The original gallery space is designed using a 3D program. I use Maya 3D for this - the program used by WETA to make LOTR.

The artworks are then placed in the 3D gallery space, along with the metadata supplied by the artist (medium, size, price, title etc) and the completed gallery converted into a format that Babylon understands and finally uploaded to the internet. Below are links to some of the 3D galleries I've created.

Graphic Design

I started in graphic design back when waxers, rubylith plastic, scalpels, phototypesetters, enlargers and stat cameras were the standard equipment used for magazine production. That all changed overnight in the late 1980s with the advent of desktop digital typesetting using PCs and programs like Photoshop, Wordperfect, Pagemaker and Ventura Publisher.

I still use Photoshop for raster graphics. I use the vector graphics programs Maya 3D and Adobe Illustrator to create logos and imagery that must be infinitely scalable. I use Adobe InDesign and Libre Office for digital publishing.

The images below span over 20 years of work. Logos for bands, venues, events, political parties and companies. Book covers. Event promo graphics, album covers, magazine covers, calendars, certificates, book illustrations, movie and gallery posters in a wide range of styles.

My personal tastes run to art nouveau and art deco, which are essentially timeless.

Web Design

Here are some of the websites I've designed over the years. There are two main types of websites: static and dynamic, and I write both. A static HTML web page looks the same to all site visitors unless the web designer changes it. HTML is a set of universal rules used to determine how a web page looks on a screen or mobile device.

In addition to HTML, dynamic websites use PHP, a programming language, and MySQL, a database management system, to change webpage content on the fly, depending on what the user clicks. Managing how a page changes based on what the user does requires a content management system (CMS) which enables a website owner to update the site content without help from a web designer. I write custom PHP/MySQL CMS's too.

Web applications like Wordpress or Joomla are off- the-shelf CMS's, but they're easier to hack than a custom CMS.

I also write code using Javascript, which is a programming language used to make web pages interactive. 98% of all websites use Javascript: it's ubiquitous. I wrote my interactive 3D art galleries (above) in Javascript.

https://pamperedpaws.co.nz

https://dialogicpsychology.co.nz

https://wais.org.nz

https://grafia.nz

https://perrysmart.co.nz

https://scandinaviantrail.org.nz

https://naturalfantasy.co.nz

https://matthewabelart.com

https://2good.nz

https://freshstarthealth.nz

https://spacedart.nz

Photoshopping

Photoshop has been the program of choice for creating digital flights of fancy for many years. That's all changing now with the arrival of AI generated imagery using programs like Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

No-one is going to pay artists to generate imagery if they can get a computer service to do it for free. An AI program recently won the "digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography” category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Here's some of the photochopped imagery I've generated over the years.

Photography

I started in professional photography shooting live music and bands for LA Rock Review, a Los Angeles alt music magazine, back in the 1980s. I've always used Canon cameras. First an AE1, then later a Canon EOS450D and currently a Canon EOS550D, which can also shoot 1080p video.

I even learned how to process and develop film and use a stat camera - both lost arts now, in the age of digital photography. The Canon's RAW image format gives the modern photographer the ability to post process images in Photoshop in much the same way that push processing and 'hypering" during the developing process could be done with film negatives.

AI is the next step in photography. It enables lost detail to be restored in compressed or blurry images, and it also enables images to be captured under marginal conditions. I imagine it will be built in to the next generation of cameras.

Miscellaneous

I've been shooting video since video cameras were invented. One odd consequence of having an obsolete video camera collection is that I can convert obsolete video file formats into MP4.

I also converted an old 8mm projector to use a powerful LED light source instead of the impossible to get and very short-lived tungsten lamps that the originals used. This gives me the capability to copy 8mm film to MP4 as well.

It's just a hobby project, but if you need format transfers, get in touch via the email form below.

One other obscure useful thing I can do is convert black and white photos back to colour, and fix them when they're damaged. There are a few examples below.

Edge of Time Exhibition

EDGE OF TIME was my first exhibition, and it was inspired by what I read about the Wellington region's massive Haowhenua quake which happened in about 1460 AD, shortly after Maori people arrived in New Zealand.

After the quake the channel between the island of Motukairangi and the mainland became shallow enough to wade across and soon silted up, creating the flat land where the airport is now. By the time Cook arrived there was only one entrance to Wellington Harbour and Motukairangi had become what we call the Miramar Peninsula.

By the time global warming reclaims the Miramar Peninsula and it becomes the island of Motukairangi again, we will be gone. These then are the two Edges of Time - before and after human settlement of NZ.

Earth has survived far worse calamities than we are capable of inflicting on it, and it will survive us.

The images that you see here show the Wellington coastline that existed immediately prior to our arrival, and a guess as to what it will look like after we're gone, based on the available science.

Tech Nouveau

TECH NOUVEAU was a joint venture between me and my friend and fellow artist Carol Banner. It's based in part on the Art Nouveau styles made famous by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha and the later work of American Illustrator Maxfield Parrish. The original Art Nouveau movement flourished between about 1890 and the start of World War 1. The Belle Époque (French for "The Beautiful Era") was the name given to this period in European history, and it has many parallels with the late 20th century. Expressionism and the graceful curves and flowing lines of Art Nouveau dominated this period. It underwent a brief revival during the psychedelic era of the late 1960s.

I've always liked Art Nouveau, even since I read Edith Howell's lavishly Art Nouveau illustrated children's books as a child. I became acquainted with the work of Maxfield Parrish when I lived in America. This exhibition mixes both of their styles and adds mathematically created digital fractal art and samples from Carol's beautiful and elegant original pastel artwork to create a new high tech digital version of Art Nouveau for the 21st Century. I got the idea for this exhibition when I did promo graphics for Carol's Prime Art Space solo exhibition in 2005, and was struck by how similar our tastes were.

In some of the pictures I have recreated high resolution full colour versions of the original designs but given them a modern twist. In others I have used the original designs as a jump off point and created something completely new.

3 Dimensional

THREE DIMENSIONAL was my third exhibition, the central theme of which was climate change. Based on the current seas level increase rate of 3.3mm a year, sea levels will rise about 2.5 meters by 2100, even if we do nothing to prevent further anthropogenic global warming caused by the uncontrolled dumping of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere - and it should be obvious by now that we intend to do nothing. Kyoto protocols, Paris Accords, global protests etc have all failed to put even the slightest kink in the graph of rising C02 vs. time.

Our atmosphere is now so thoroughly disrupted that even if we stopped our CO2 emissions stone-dead tomorrow, global warming would continue for a long, long time relative to the human lifespan. We are now past the point of no return, and it's time to simply look at the inevitable consequences of our actions, and this is the starting point for my exhibition.

What will Wellington City look like after 100 years of earthquakes, sea level rise and global warming? Averaged current projections predict that CO2 will reach between 600 and 700ppm by this time in the next century. Wellington will be several degrees hotter on average, and the weather will be far more extreme. A rising water table and quake liquefaction like that seen in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake will destroy all of the buildings on reclaimed land.

This, then, is the world depicted in the images you see here.