Home-grown, garden fresh chilies from my Mum, picked 1 day ago. It doesn't get much better than that!

Anyway - it's so easy to become transfixed by the news as it slowly updates on stuff.co.nz, but to keep a healthy outlook it's important to limit your viewing of images of tragedy, especially when there's nothing practical you can do to help (apart from donate of course.)

So - assuming you HAVE given some money, here are a few random items of interest to take your mind off things:

Firstly, here's something I picked up that was blowing around the local supermarket carpark today:

Great use of the word "all" I thought. Cute drawing too. Interesting to consider from the point of view of visual symbolism. Fat people are stick figures with massive tummies. The only distinguishing feature between the different characters, apart from height, is their hair. They're all fat though. I wonder if the author had specific people in mind as she (I'm guessing) drew them? This particularly appealed to me because I have recently started a fairly focussed attempt to lose about 12kg. (2 down, 10 to go!) Thanks for the timely reminder, mystery author!

I recently had the experience of playing a support slot for Sting's Synchronicity show at The Mission in Napier. I was a hired hand, as was most of the rest of the band, and we managed to present a fairly convincing performance despite being quite under-rehearsed. The highlight of the day though, is summarised in this photograph...

 Don't we all look pleased with ourselves?! From left to right: Me, Matt Parlane, Shelley Hirini, Sting, Dean Barcham and Iain Riddle. The only people missing from this photo are Rod Williams (who we were backing along with Shelley Hirini), and Iain's wife Carrol who was behind the camera, and to whom we owe our thanks. Without her tenacity we would have missed the photo opportunity altogether. Sting was very approachable and friendly, as were the rest of the crew.

Once our work was done, we were able to enjoy the main show thanks to the hospitality of Howard Page - Sting's front of house engineer - who invited us to watch the show from his mix position. Top fella!

I've been recently enjoying watching the live video feed from the International Space Station as the space shuttle Discovery undertakes her final mission. She is currently docked to the ISS and tomorrow the first of two EVAs (spacewalks) will be undertaken to do various maintenance tasks around the space station. The video feed is almost live (maybe 30s delay?) and seeing the earth slowly rotating below brings back lots of childhood memories of dreaming about spaceflight. I never imagined back then that I would one day be able to just turn on my computer and see the view outside the space station's window, or even chat with the astronauts (via Twitter). How's this for an office window view?

Here's the best link I've found to the live video - on USTREAM. Here's the live mission audio only, if you don't need pictures. And here's a link to Soma FM's 'Mission Control' radio station which blends the live nasa audio feed with ambient electronic music for those so inclined... :-)

You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of potential ISS flyover times for your location. Go to this page and click on 'Sighting Opportunities'. I got up at 5:15 this morning and watched it fly over Wellington. Beautiful. :-)

And as a segue, here are a couple of photos of Christchurch taken from the ISS after the quake.

Ok... time to get back to the latest headlines from Christchurch. 

Hi folks. I'm at the U2 gig with my family. We're waiting for proceedings to begin. Here's a pre-gig shot of the claw.

Here's a poster I put together a few weeks ago for the Saturday night Bluegrass Society gig.

Here's another cd cover I created recently. David Antony Clark is a local composer and audio engineer who has released a number of albums in the neo-primal genre, several of which I have created artwork for.

In this release he has combined his neo-primative grooves with Maori singing and chanting written and performed by Rawiri Toia, a lecturer in Maori issues at Victoria University. The lyrical content explores the feelings and experiences of the first Polynesians who arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand around one thousand years ago.

I like this cover. It's distinctly Maori, but doesn't feel cliched. I chose to use the oft-used Trajan font for the subtitles as it adds an air of historical authority and makes it feel like a bit of a museum piece.

I just heard yesterday that this album has been accepted for release by a world music distributor in Germany, so this week I need to make a new version with new barcodes and logos etc for that market.

Previous albums I have designed for David include 'Shaman Dancing' and 'Songs of Magic, Sex and War', both of which are featured in my gallery. Also check out his website, where you can hear audio excepts from all of these and more.

Here's a cd cover that I completed recently for UCA - one of my regular clients. It was a redesign of an older, already existing product. It went through a number of iterations until the distributor, the artist and the designer (that's me!) were all satisfied. Here's an earlier version if you want to compare. The bird is a Kea.

And here's another page from the same project. I really like this. The bird is a Fantail, or Piwakawaka.

 I'll try to post something each day for a few days until I've run out of new material. Stay tuned.

Man And Cat At The End Of The World from Scott Benson on Vimeo.

Wherein mankind makes its last discovery. Created and animated entirely in After Effects.

I'm going up by train which will involve the following schedule...

5:30am - get up, do usual morning stuff - but 2 hours earlier and in the dark.
6:10am - Walk down to local station and catch 6:33 train to Wellington
6:50am - Check in to Overlander
7:25am - Overlander departs Wellington Station

[12 hours of reading, laptopping, looking at wonderful scenery and several cups of coffee later...]

7:20pm - Overlander arrives Auckland Britomart Station
7:30pm - Walk up to Juice Bar in Parnell as quick as I can, via my accommodation to check in
8:00pm - Arrive at gig - hopefully without missing the start...

[Experience Imogen's innovative and honest performance... the way live music should be. :-) ]

later that night - walk around, slightly dazed, in my musical happy place until I find my accommodation and fall over unconscious.

Then I do it all again the next day... but in reverse... and minus the best bit.

I'm on Twitter these days so I'll try to keep my tweets up to date as the day, and the gig, progresses.

Here's my afternoon's work - an image for a cd cover I'm working on. Combined elements from 5 different images. 44 layers in Photoshop. Not finished yet.

I particularly enjoyed working on this one today as I have recently purchased a small Wacom drawing tablet. It makes such a difference! I've only had it a few days and already I can't imagine doing this kind of stuff without it!