Those performance issues have now been fixed. That took me a little while.

This month's demo was on portraits in oils by Robin Danely. That's a portrait of some unknown in 2 hours flat. She has been on Portrait Artist of the Year which is a little more generous at 4 hours, but we can consider ourselves blessed by her demo, which was really good, except... I missed most of it as I had the honour of being the subject. I've never done that before. I sat parallised. An excellent evening.

Many apologies for the slow performance of the website. I've spotted the problem, but it may take a little time to sort out.

Because of a certain footballer, I'm switching the site name to an alas: Gray Pink. The name gives the same signature and I thought it funny to use two colours that constitute a valid name. The new website is: graypink.uk, and this one will shortly cease to exist.

Oops, 6 months since my last update. I have been painfully updating the new system to put back the delayed loading. This means that the street and reading room now load as fast as they used to. I have also created random tiling functionality for the street cobbles.

The walk from the reading room to the street now works again. I have spotted and fixed a problem with jumping to immersive VR. To my surprise, I found that the seascapes page now renders fast enough for the Oculus. You can now go and enjoy that sunset again. The kitchen is still not functioning. I may not fix this, but replace it.

A long, long time sinece the last update, all down to this major update... a major update that hopefully will have no visible results. I've lost the delayed loading, added a bug in walking from the reading room to the street, but fixed numerous other niggles. Was it worth it? This is all in aid of formalising a data model. With the data model I can now implement inline editing.

It's been a while, but I'm painting again. Once the current painting is finished, I'm considering doing several small, quick paintings from photos just for fun. I've also put the pumpkin back on the desk as it works better there.

A lot of work has just been done behind the scenes. The result might not be that obvious. However, all that work allows me to leave a book open and make the light switch much smoother. That light switch had been bugging me. Everything had to be reset just to switch the light on. Now it just works with no fuss.

It's all part of a larger plan to improve the ability to compose new pages. Unfortunately, none of this is very eye-catching, and won't be until it starts bearing fruit.

Something else I promise a while back: I have fixed the rotation on the planets. I have also stripped out all the rotate-around-objects such as the table and the planets. By default, dragging now only rotates the view point. Use control+drag to pan the view point, which can now be done anywhere. I also added click-in-free-space to move in that direction. All this was added to improve the mobile browser experience - I can do this now that I have a mobile fast enough to render my website!

Finally, I have put a bit of shine on the objects. In others I have now implemented full Phong rendering. However, I have not used the text book renderer as it does not work. It is very simple to get the shine rendering perfectly, but whatever reference I looked at, they were all wrong.

This is something I had meant to do when I was originally creating this website. So it has only taken me nine months to get round to it. I have added the ability to throw objects. If that doesn't sound to great then go to the planet page and find out the real reason for the teapot.

If the pumpkin patch was for Halloween then this is late for Christmas. This is primarily constructed for presenting townscape paintings, but grew... It currently just adds a gallery, but it has any number of shops which will quirky displays as I feel like it.

This has been in the planning for a while. I think just before Halloween is an excellent time to get this together. Every Halloween I have a go at carving a pumpkin, and I take a photo. Then I had this idea to project them onto spheres. That left the background. At first I was going to put them in a room, but I decided I needed a pumpkin patch. So... please enjoy this ridiculous bit of fun.

Here's one that I started in June, but got sidelined. I've spent a few hours over the last couple of days and got it finished.

I have added my favourites gallery. I picked the 12 paintings that meant the most to me for whatever reason and hung them in a new room. Each one also links to a paintings page that gives further details. Look out for new links on the table.

I have updated the mouse cursor so that the normal screen mouse gets replaced by a full VR cursor that hovers over the object under the mouse. This should improve the connection between the 2D mouse and the 3D rendering, and make it more obvious when an action is available. Currently, actions turn the cursor into an arrow head. At some point I will render a hand at which point I'll replace that arrow head with a pointing hand. Also, I want to replace the system NESW cursor with an outstretched hand when hover over a table or similar.

I have finally got there - my new replacement for my Blogspot page. The Blogspot was OK, but I could not work out how to flip through each version of my paintings at a click of the buttons... to make it easy to see what changes. I wanted better control.

Having decided on a website, I immediately took an excessive bite and plunged right into 3D. Well no one else seems to be doing personal 3D sites. I have an Oculus Quest which can land me in a fully immersive web page, and that was too tempting for words. Anyone with a WebXR-enabled headset should be able step right in. OK, that's not very many people yet... so I'm backing this up with a browser-friendly version. This is where the bite size gets particularly gross. So, a Web-GL version for ordinary browsers, and non-3D versions for anyone not quite as excited about VR. As a first bite I decided that was enough. Yeah - more than enough.

So here it is. I hope you think it was worth it. There are lots of great ideas and additions I haven't got around to, so expect lots of changes. So far, I have just concentrated on porting the pages I made on Blogspot, which means a heavy bias towards paintings. However, I am not restricting myself to the paintings this time. Instead the plan is to throw in the kitchen sink and give it a good stir with cross-links all over. As accident will have it, the first additional curio to look at right now is the planets. I was curious to see the Earth rendered in VR.