Ryan Neal

In control

2010-07-04T02:46:00.001-07:00

Now here's a guy who's clearly in control of his life:

Letraset markers on A4 Brisol Board

Krystal 5 x 7 portrait

2010-07-04T02:44:00.001-07:00

Acrylic on canvas

A Question of Cosmology

2009-05-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

I'd like to offer this question up to the search engines that may do the amazing job to which they were designed and find this page.

Considering the speed of light, or "c" as is the common denotation, is 299,792,458 metres per second, it does not travel fast enough to give us an accurate visual representation of where very distant objects in space actually are. The usual example is that where we see the sun in the sky is actually where it was about 8 minutes ago as it has taken that long for the light from it's surface to reach us. Saturn is seen where it was 84 minutes ago (at least at time of Cassini's arrival, this changes with it's orbit) and the moon 1.3 seconds in the past. Our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is seen as where it was a massive 2.5 million years ago!

The Hubble Telescope's "Deep Field" picture taken in 1995 is an image that fascinates me due to the amount of "stuff", i.e. thousands of galazies and their contents, packed into one area. More food for thought is that due to the distance of these objects, what we are seeing is an image going back closer to the time of the Big Bang, almost 13 billion years ago!

One more important thing to consider before my question is that we know that the Universe is expanding and has done so ever since its creation. Not only is it expanding, but so too is the rate of expansion. Earlier thought would have it that it would gradually lose momentum from the Big Bang and possibly condense back together, but this would seem is not so. Without going into the reasons of why the expansion of the Universe is speeding up by plunging the topic of this text into the world of Dark Energy, I'll leave it there.

My question then, is that if the trajectory of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is known, could we then look back, deep along that trajectory to where it has been, to see our Galaxy in the distant past, possibly even to it's point of creation?

Discarded Illustrations

2009-04-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

Weep with me, my dear, dear strangers. For these are various illustrations deemed too stylish for Welsh speaking pre-school children. The very glimpse of their vectorized splendor will make the babbling little Tafflets explode with confusion. Fortunately for them, the said pictures were simplified, twice, until they were much safer for their retinas to absorb.

So for you, the more seasoned and probably non-Welsh language TV watching general public, I present the discarded penny makers:

A letter from Jonesy

2009-03-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

I found a document containing some literary brain farts I used to make in the form of diary entries of a fictional madman named Jonesy. Maybe I should make a blog for him, or compile all this crap into a book. I could sell possibly TENS of copies.

Anyway, I wrote a new one:

(BEGIN)

To anyone who would like to learn to read,

It was amidst a plethora of tintillating ponderings this morning that I entertained the notion of writing a short novel. It would mainly be about a dwarf, sorry, "little midget", and only contain words that exceed no more than four letters. My favourite letter of the English alphabet coincidentally is four letters long. It is the well known "Ellemenoepee", the letter proudly following "K". My novel will, although not necessarily in this oder, feature a beginning, a middle and hopefully an end, permitting that I do not exceed my word count, which is dismally low. All of this, of course, will exist solely in the depths of my fertile imagination, an asset nurtured through excessive procrastination and atom counting on the bedroom carpet.

In the time it takes to move to a new paragraph I have totally discarded the ambition to write a novel. In it's place I have decided to build an inflatable water bathtub, for when one wishes to bathe in the sea, not using the same water. Such is my nature, to lose interest in one pursuit only to jump joyously to another without hestitation. So, my friends, once I have built my toilet-copter, (I have already tired of the bathtub), you will be the first to know and possibly receive a prototype, providing that is that I first finish my novel.

It would be rude of me not to say goodbye.......

(jonesy)

(END)

John Locke Caricature

2009-03-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen...

John Locke!

Lost is such an amazing show and Locke is one interesting character. Usually, at this point in a post, I would attempt some flamboyant retort, but it is late and my brain has fallen over.

For this picture I mainly used pencils.

Sharp ones.

Please stop writing "LOL"!

2009-03-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

Once, in the days when I used to use Messenger (before the realisation that it sucks up your life), I was busy 'conversing' with a friend of mine who had his webcam activated. He made a comment, ending it with the seemingly oligatory 'lol'. What caught my attention was that his stone-faced expression on his webcam was anything but 'Laughing Out Loud', in fact the only 'lol-ing' happening was myself at the lack of 'lol-ing' on his end.

Why is it that we feel the need to add this little abbreviation? It's initial intention was to help portray the true feeling of the author where the text may not be enough, the same way that smilies are used. Quite often it acts as the little nervous laugh people do when in conversation, while either being polite or saying something they don't want to offend with.

Stop using it, especially in critiques! Lest we fall even deeper into a world of Orwellian Newspeak. It is ungood.

I was speaking to Krystal about this and we came up with another version of what it stands for. Whenever you feel the need to type 'LOL' (or even, I shudder to think, say the word) ask yourself, is the context actually funny? If not, remind yourself it could also stand for:

Low On Linguistics.

I'm actually in a really good mood. Lol.

Michael Palin caricature

2009-03-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

I love Monty Python. I believe it was on a Wednesday night after cub scouts I'd pick up a bag of chips and watch comedy that was totally different to anything else that was around at the time, or indeed following that. What I'd be really interested to see is a DVD/Blu-ray compilation of all the animations that Terry Gilliam made for the series, that would make me laugh so much that I'd have to watch some contemporary comedy just to calm me down. Easy now...

Anyways, here's a caricature of Michael Palin. I'd love to sit in a room with this guy and have him just talk to me for hours about his multitude of lifetime experiences he has gained pre-Python, during Python, Ripping Yarns and all his travelling around the world. Mr Palin, in the unlikely event that you'd ever read this, here's an invitation for a cuppa.

I've been told my tea making skills is second to none.

I really have to cut down on the caffeine.

Letraset

2008-10-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

The marker company, Letraset, kindly contacted me a while back asking if they could featured me on their website. Here it is!!!

http://www.letraset.com/design/default.asp

orrrrr....

http://www.letraset.com/design/shopcontent.asp?type=profileNeal

Woot woot!

FLASH GAMES!!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-10-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

Ello!

In true Sylar from Heroes style, I cut off the top of the head of an ActionScripter and learnt his abilites. As a result, I've been dabbling in the world of programming and making games!

True... true...

Well, apart from the head slicing bit.

Here's my firts finished game. It's a simple thing designed at training your ability to keep track of the order of things. OK, actually I completely ripped off the idea for this from a documentary about comparing the human brain to that of the ape. There was this incredible test involving a chimp (or was it a banobo?) and a touch screen computer. A sequence of numbers would appear on the screen one at a time. When the last number appears they all turned into marks, then the chimp would touch each mark in the order the number appeared. What was facinating about this was not only was the ape able to do this task, but it was able to keep in his memory a vast sequence of numbers and touch the screen at a blinding speed!

I've jazzed the whole idea of the program up (their program had white digits on a black screen), done away with a timer that I originally had (it was too pressuring) and limited the maximum amount of numbers to 20. Most people without any system in place will probably manage about 7 as the human short term memory can only handle on average 7 'chunks' of information.

Enjoy. I'm making more!

Dusty HDD folder

2008-04-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

I found this in my work folder, not brilliant, but hey, I'm happy to find neglected artwork!

Dave Young Caricature

2008-03-31T06:29:00.000-07:00

He has lots of hair!

Water hands

2008-03-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

Let the caricatures begin!

2008-01-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, completely bypassing December and straight into January... Here's two caricatures of two highly respectable citizens that just happen to work with me. Ben is wearing a hat from his Christmas cracker. Jon is wearing an eyepatch from his Christmas cracker and he is also not wearing any underwear. I was wearing a pencil.

Merry January everyone.

First Picture Post!

2007-11-21T04:47:00.000-08:00

Here's some old marker illustrations to get this page more visual.

Tada!!

Most of the stuff I've been drawing and animating lately has been for Dinamo Productions, so I can't post it yet, but hopefully I can soon!

OKFIRSTPROPERPOST...GO!

2007-11-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

Right, ok,
I have to admit that only portions of the following paragraph will be true. The majority of it is written mainly for my amusement and secondly to seem very funny and witty to the hundreds of thousands of blog readers that will grace this very page with their itchy red eyes, haha. Lol........ no lol. Don't ever write lol.

It says over there, to the right that I am an animator and illustrator and therefore I should probably begin by posting an amazing display of draftsmanship that would send every viewer's claw-like mouse hand hovering over said image and frantically right clicking and saving to their harddrive. HOWEVER, I am currently on somebody else's PC (a laptop no less) and evidently have no artwork available to post at this time. I am also running quite quikerllelely downhill as I being chased on foot by the very mountain-hut dwelling unfortunate that I stole this laptop from. God bless you Amazon.com for delivering Hewlett-Packard media-laptops and other fantastic technology worldwide to such remote, jungle covered, tribe infested places as this; Cwmaman, heart of the South Wales valleys, boyo bach.

It also says over yonder that I'm a musician. I use this term only as an excuse for my collection of 80's Casio keyboards that are beginning to clutter up my room. They bring phat beats.

PHAT.

Musically, when I'm not on the little keyboards playing the dunnuh-dunnuh-dunnuh melody from the underground levels of Super Mario 1 (and feeling quite smug about it), I find myself playing the guitar. In fact, I played a live acoustic set on Saturday at the Mount Pleasant in Trecynon, Aberdare with Ms Julia Coles (fantastic singer, crap juggler) as an opener for Jam With Robina. With that in mind, I'm going to leave this wordy post with two links to MP3s of myself and Julia doing some cover songs:

STICK THIS SHIT IN YOUR EARS!

Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)

Vertigo (U2)

YAY

2007-11-19T13:08:00.000-08:00

Postman Pat
Postman Pat
Postman Pat and his black and white cat
Early in the morning,
Just as day is dawning
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah van.