benjamin harrison

~ erstwhile painter of blobs, sketcher of portraits, mural doer, risograph enjoyer ~

...currently?

Practice on pause -- studio closed.
stumbling through a BSc in data science in an odd organic creative development from drawing to ideation...problem solving, systems thinking and applied statistics.

What's all this then?

I'm not sure what will be here now. Between studying and spending time with my wife and daughter I haven't time to be painting and drawing in the studio. I still take photographs, scribble ideas, and collage together unconnected things. Creative practice leaks in where it can and I'll probably share some of it here, maybe like a blog and a sketchbook... like this:

Row of urinals visually mirrored by halved boiled eggs.

Explore-page King from Tekken

Doing some shuffling of screenshots to make room in my phone and I re-discovered images from the time I tried to get my Instagram algorithm to create King from Tekken.
I spent a lot of time liking and saving pictures of big cats and also menswear models and bodybuilders so that insta would find more of them to offer on the explore page.
I wanted to get a body photo, with no head, turn up underneath a portrait of a cat, organically without me choosing and combining them.
a screenshot from an Instagram explore page, showing two separate images, a torso in a suit, and a lion, that seem to form a combined image looking like a lion in a suit. a screenshot from an Instagram explore page, showing two separate images, two topless wrestlers, and two tigers, that seem to form a combined image of tiger-headed wrestlers.

an afternoon in town with Lola

She's ruining the atmosphere in Siop Shop by gipping and spitting out the doughnuts

October 2025 – Python and Ffmpeg

so....I was helping make content for an Instagram account for a stoner/sludge/doom gig night, making slideshows of band photos with logos overlayed, also some patterns for backgrounds to text, that kind of thing. I really wanted a framework for the future as this aims to be a regular gig night.
I got to writing a script in Python using Pillow and MoviePy, which batch produces these things, so it would be a minor job for future events. I also ended up playing around creating displacement maps and morphing text, and then animating that for more reels. All fun, but rendering in MoviePy was taking a while and I learned that it uses Ffmpeg, which I could just access directly on the command line. Now for some reason this really appeals to me, no GUI, not even any loops or iteration, just giving Ffmpeg some inputs on the command line and getting an output straight to a .MP4 or .gif! lots of it has just been stitching together images and text, but it turns out ffmpeg can create stuff from scratch, text or patterns, colours, gradients, so now I plan to use it for any elements I might need. (I've not had Photoshop or Illustrator or anything like that for ages, it feels like some stuff has been re-opened to me that I haven't been able to do for a while). I've also been watching the work of Tim Rodenbroeker, his 128kb project and his move to open-source software away from Adobe etc;
also my philosophy around computers and web use is shifting away from large companies and social media sites, and more towards personal sites by weirdos and open-source projects, I think I have a nostalgic view of how the internet used to be.

Animated text 'bogfest' distorted like a sawtooth wave. distorted text reads nailed on records the text is wavy Bogfest text scribbled on a purple noisy background.