Quick draw

I did that thing a few nights ago where you go out for a few quiet drinks and a game of backgammon and on the tube back you decide that you're sober enough to read when really your not at all, meaning that next time you come to your book you can't remember what's happened, where you are or why it's covered in sick. I've ruined many books for myself this way over the years. Though thinking about it I suppose one way round the trouble would be to get drunk again so you remember it.
So though I'm determined to re-read the bit I've forgotten of my current book (Kafka's The Trial, which is most enjoyable) I can't be bothered to do it now. This left me at a loose end on the bus back from Oxford tonight, so I decided to set myself a challenge: to draw, photograph, bluetooth-to-my-laptop, colour and blog a picture before I get to Victoria. I started quite late into the journey too, so I've had to do all this in about twenty minutes.
Unfortunately the drawing (another embarassing pop star, why?) is pretty horrendous, and so is the picture I took before my phone battery died. The colouring's shit too, come to think of it. But, boy, did I bluetooth it to my laptop well!
Anyway, I killed some time.

Lily bloody-Rose-bloody-Beatrice-bloody Allen

This is probably the most elaborately coloured thing I've ever done. All gradients instead of block colours and polychromatic line work. There are a few bits I'd like to change, but it's alright still. I need some celebrity likenesses in my portfolio, you see.



Lily and I are MySpace friends (which I realise doesn't make me that special) and I think I'm going to put this in her comments bit, but I'm really not sure. It's a bit embarassing and teenage, even if it is ironically teenage (which it's not).

EDIT, a few hours later
I couldn't resist putting it on there...

Tourettris: sanitised

I thought I'd resubmit a family friendly version of this.


And whilst I was there put the sandwich on, filling time.


Edit, a few days later
Tourettris was rejected again, the sandwich is in but I don't expect it to do much.

Lily Allen

I don't know why I've drawn this. No doubt something to do with that dream I had.

jacknoel.co.uk

jacknoel.co.uk 2.0 is live. (Though I'm not sure about that numbering system, or my use of the word "live"). It's still pretty lo-fi and shoddy. It's built almost entirely around a free programme, Simpleviewer, which basically makes a whole flash website for you in about six seconds, but it's not too bad. Considering it's all made by me, just a mere boy.

The 'big idea' is the concept of a sandwich. It's a kind of recurring motif from my comic strips dating back to this, my first proper strip, which also conveniently symbolises the coming togeher of many different elements combining to make a better whole. Which is what I do you see, you know: combine average drawing skills, a puerile sense of humour, a naive world view and a dose of completely unjustified self-importance.
This blog, you'll see above, is the bacon. The idea was to have each gallery as a filling bookended in the menu by a 'home' and an 'about' as slices of brown bread, stupidly though I didn't put in enough fillings and so had to sacrifice the home button.
Oh well, have a look, and tell me what you think will you?

(just click the sandwich to go there).

Sara

There wasn't much work for me to do at work today, which is a bit annoying what with the sweaty slightly-hungover three hour commute I made in for it at half six this morning. Getting up so early really does mean you get to see the best part of the day, it's just that I'm invariably too tired to enjoy it. This morning I spent the whole time I was "catching the worm" (not to be confused with burping the worm) desperately scrabbling to remember my dream from the night before and, specifically, the joke I told Lily Allen in it that made her fall in love with me (the punchline is "I believe that he's called Alf Resco...")
Luckily though mine is not the kind of work where you're given some pointless task like alphabeticising the junk mail just for the sake of having something to do, so I was free to just read the blogs of strangers about cats and their correspondance with Argos and play around in CS3 (it's not that different).
This morning I bought a digital arts magazine in Victoria station, and almost immediately started weeping with it's shitness. I should have taken the six pounds I spent on it and with them paid the London Lite man to roll up one of his awful papers and repeatedly poke me in the eye with it. It's that bad: about a dozen glossy pages of trite vector illustrations of skulls and cutesy pirates and a free CD containing a video of the three designers it features every issue and the editor pointing and laughing at you. Anyway, the theme of the issue is collaboration and this reminded me: I've been meaning to work with Greg now for a while, whether he knows about it or not.

Greg, my old housemate, put this pencil drawing of his girlfriend on his blog and claims that he plans on adding to it soon, but I know (from loitering on his facebook and myspace pages- that's right, he has both) that his life is a bohemian blur, as flooded with friends as Gloucestershire is with floods, and he'll probably never get around to it. So whilst I was not working at work, I started idly adding colour and textures to it.
It felt a bit weird working with the loving drawing of Sara, and is probably the kind of thing I should be doing for my own girlfriend instead. Still, Sara is quite lovely. I'm sure I could make her fall in love with me if I could just remember that bloody Alf Resco joke.


There's really no skill or attention required to colour something in like this, it just involves several layers and an internet connection for stealing textures.

Latitude

We went to Latitude festival at the weekend, which was nice.

Day One
The journey there was a bit difficult.


and the same in muddy colours.


Day Two


Day Three

myspace.com/wildbeasts - see them if you can.

and another sketch book page from last week.

We all went on a Summer holiday

What a delightful holiday I just had in Orgiva, Southern Spain with seven of my best friends for life.

Day one...


...day two...


...day three...


...day four...


...day five...


...day six...


...day seven...


...and then home.


I'm saving up for a camera. If I had taken one, I may not have drawn my experiences but captured them more accurately in pixels. I may have taken photographs like these, which I stole from Will via facebook (or librocara, as they say in Spain).



I tried briefly colouring some of the drawings:



This one's okay:



But this is much nicer I think: