Welcome to a journey where the past meets the future, where the classic lines of a 1928 Essex Super Six four-door car, whose chief selling point was “affordable luxury,” intermingle with the art of modern graphic design. I recently had the incredible opportunity to photograph this rare American vintage beauty in the car park of the historic Richmond Workingmen’s Club in Christchurch. Note that the gallery of images from the photoshoot is at the foot of the page.
Capturing the Essence:
The 1928 Essex Super Six was designed to be an affordable luxury car, making it accessible to a wider range of car owners. It was equipped with a powerful 153.1 cubic inch inline-six engine that delivered 55 horsepower, providing ample power for its time.Read More
A gallery of The New Zealand Nature T-shirt Company wildlife art prints of Chrissie Terpstra and Shaun Waugh.
Since Chrissie and I were a kids we have been enthusiasts of the natural world and as design pARTners since 1985 our New Zealand nature wildlife art designs are an expression of this.
I finished four years of study in Graphic Design at Auckland Technical Institute in 1983. After a five year career as an advertising art director in Auckland, Christchurch, Hong Kong and Reykjavik I was equipped through illustration, graphic design, drawing and painting to achieve our aim of creating a variety of stimulating visual images that originate from the experiences and knowledge of the natural world that Chrissie and I bring to our collaborations. We create wildlife art of native birds, reptiles, mammals, insects, trees, plants and landscapes at locations all over New Zealand that I photograph, and we research the image libraries of renowned New Zealand wildlife photographers in search of reference for iconic imagery.
The Surface Active New Zealand Nature T-shirt Company range of t-shirt designs has been developed since the year 1986 when we first started screenprinting on the kitchen table in our flat, with frequent updates of new designs between 1988 to the present. We display our latest limited edition wildlife art prints using specialist room mock-up software. Please revisit every few weeks, I’m sure there will be some fresh images for you to look at. As full-time professionals 1988–2003 Chrissie and I designed over 100 original wildlife art designs with New Zealand, Antarctica and African “big five” megafauna themes. Since 2003 we have continued creating new designs and during lockdown 2020 and 2021 we created a new design every few weeks.
Surface Active design pARTners Chrissie Terpstra and Shaun Waugh welcome orders to reproduce fine art prints from our collection of wildlife artworks, linked here. We provide archival/fine art quality reproduction prints of our works—perfect for your walls or as a gift.
The opportunity to capture wild Orangutan portraits was a rare treat
CAMP LEAKEY, TANJUNG PUTING NATIONAL PARK, BORNEO
ORANGUTAN ARE AN ALMOST exclusively arboreal species, so the glimpse we got of this teenage male named Mario, early in the morning from our riverboat before leaving the National Park, dipping in the river and posing like Tarzan on the ground just a few metres away, this was an extraordinary treat. Read More
Orana Wildlife Park is a great place for wildlife photography
ORANA WILDLIFE PARK, MCLEANS ISLAND, CHRISTCHURCH
WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE GENRE of photography concerned with the documenting of wildlife in their natural habitat, Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch, is New Zealand’s only open range zoo. Visiting Orana Park therefore offers a unique opportunity for the self-assignment of exercising your photography skills because in the wild animals are difficult to approach, predicting their actions is hit and miss, whereas the animals at Orana Park are not perturbed when viewed from quite close up and because there are mostly no bars or cages capturing great images of them in interesting situations just takes a little patience to be in the right place at the right time. Keep on reading!
After training in London at the Desmond Jones School of Mime and earning a living on the competitive streets of Covent Garden and at various international busking festivals, at age 25 Fergus returned to New Zealand to work full time as an entertainer. He needed a logo and self-promotional publicity kit to enable him to market himself and provide to talent agencies. This poster is a photo montage produced using old school paste up and photolitho methods. Inverting the chair handstand ‘fungustic slaprobatic’ trick into a free-falling Mr Fungus was to play with the audience with a sort of Irish parachute sight gag, and making a poster that could be hung “correctly” upside down and still not make sense. Keep on reading!
There’s a lot riding on the Mr Fungus (alias Fergus Aitken) business stationery system. It carries important information that must be clearly visible while overall making a good strong visual impression and being memorable (on a Scotsman’s budget). Keep on reading!
This terrific Tuatara illustrative design work evolves by focussing on the details, this is quite common
Surface Active Wildlife art – making waves in a sea of sameness.
To make digital art of New Zealand’s Tuatara, that has the look and feel of a natural line drawing, the editing, fussing process can take hours and while it isn’t easy it is a great deal of fun. I take pleasure in design and I enjoy using the computer to draw with the stylus, inking over the scan just as easily as I would with traditional pen and ink. The production of design work is an incredible drill when you are doing your utmost to make it terrific. I do my utmost to make sure that every design project I work on is mega. Keep on reading!
Popular Urban Art or vandalism of private property? That thorny contention was settled unequivocally in post-quake Christchurch 2011. What now is considered pro-social and broadly popular urban art has morphed out of counter culture to become one of the totems of the fine art world. The gallery showcases my comp entry and a selection from my Stronger Christchurch, and Rise street art photo libraries.
The front cover of my Watch This Space logo presentation document depicts the logo visualised screenprinted onto the back of a woman’s red hoodie garment.
Since the 2011 earthquakes Street Art is emerging all over the central city of Christchurch, like life it finds a way to vitalize empty sections and animate the bare walls that dominate the landscape with vibrant colour and youthful design. Keep on reading!
The product launch of the MagentaDot Brands renamed, rebranded and repackaged “Waitui Single Malt 6 year aged” is a critical time in the early stage of introducing this New Zealand Manuka Honey Small Batch Whiskey to the domestic and international liquor markets. Kiwi Spirit distillery is a small company so to create a big launch takes careful planning and sufficient lead time to organize all the contributing components. This is a company with small budgets and limited resources so there is a need to get as much value out of the budget and resources as possible. Keep on reading!
Jewelled Gecko limited edition large format art print
Surface Active | Making waves in a sea of sameness
Surface Active is an auto-printmaking design pARTnership established in 1986 by Shaun Waugh (boss) Chrissie Terpstra (bossier). Between 1986–2002 we were committed to producing original & indigenous designs of the highest design and screenprinting standards.
The technique of colour separating this design by hand involved breaking it down into eight separate designs, from which the screens are made. The separations are printed over each other, in layers to create the original hand screenprinted design. This crafty route is the only way to achieve the unparalleled vivid impression of the design. Keep on reading!
The “Wow!” factor of the stretch Hummer limo, the largest of its type in Christchurch, means that the vehicle is a real head-turner, literally its own best advertisment.
When waiting to pick-up or dropping off clients the unique Super-Stretch Black Hummer Limousine garners a lot of attention from passers-by. In addition to handing out the “Welcome aboard” brochure to prospective clients, the brochure artwork is designed to double as a pair of A2 promotional posters or advertisements. Keep on reading!
The product launch of the 
The “Wow!” factor of the stretch Hummer limo, the largest of its type in Christchurch, means that the vehicle is a real head-turner, literally its own best advertisment.
MagentaDot Brands 