I’ve realised recently that I should profile some of my absurdly talented friends and colleagues. Kicking off this series is Lilian Darmono who has just done an interview with Australian Edge and talks about her aesthetic style, her life and general philosophies.

Lilian describes her own style in the interview as;

“…cute, colourful, so-sweet-it-makes-your-teeth-hurt characters/enviroment/situations, the kind that fills you with hope and positivity when you look at them, and the flipside : organic and natural forms which fills you with awe and dread at the same time.”

I love Lilian and partner-in-crime Mungo’s designs – they’re so much fun with a great sense of whimsy and I’m very much looking forward to Lilian’s short, Dusk, which we are getting a taste of in the image above.

This article caught my eye over at iso50 talking about Alex Roman’s work on highly realistic architectural renderings. Earlier this year I saw some very similar work by Alessandro Prodan and was amazed at the quality of the work that is being produced by a single person with off-the-shelf software and technologies (3DS Max, Maya, mental ray, Vray, paint effects etc).

However, it is the lighting – as these images illustrate – that is nine-tenths of the law in creating a realistic render. The light in these images is glorious. And it’s the imperfections in that light that make these images. The light blooms in the sky, the highlights clip on the leaves and the lens creates chromatic aberrations and vignettes (must look in to those mental ray lens shaders…) which is what takes the images from ‘kind of nice’ CG to ‘amazing’ CG.

More work from Alex Roman can be found over at Third and Seventh.

Basically I just want to know what the 30 year old me would say.

You should all go out and buy the really cool New Internationalist 2010 planner that was designed by my talented brother, Matt Walker. There is some really great photography, art, and of course design in this little number. You can buy it either through New Internationalist or Amazon. I know I’m getting one.

I stumbled across the work of Christopher David Ryan via the iso50 blog, and have completely fallen in love with this guy’s work. A selection of projects can be found at atmostheory.com, while cdryan.com is more a collection of random visual thoughts. The colour palates CDR uses are soft and gentle, so everything has a dreamy quality… It’s mildly-retro aesthetic of day-dreams and whimsy with a bit of science thrown in makes for a really nice over-all look-and-feel. Mylittleunderground.com has prints available for purchase which I fully intend to buy… after I get back from Europe. More about that later….