Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Gash back

An emergency flyer with a brief brief.

Can we have a flyer:
  • * With anything you like on it, as long as it looks amazing
  • * That shows that Florence and the Machine might play without saying it, as she may or may not be the special guest
  • * That's on the theme of "the 90s", as in the decade, as that may or may not be the theme
  • * All in the next ten minutes



No time to think or sketch (or live my own life). I instantly threw this up, bringing in flora and a 90s machine (see what I've done there?).


Then I did the old colour-switcheroo


  • * When we said anything you like, we meant put in the gash logo


Thursday, January 15, 2009

New year, old idea

The sketch-blog-o-sphere in January is full of people resolving to draw "for themselves" every day in 2009. This year amongst their numbers are some of my favourites like Frank Stockton and Stephen Collins, who's going the extra mile and making his look like finished pieces - rather than just midnight scans of shopping lists or phone doodles - and then putting jokes in too.
Publishing your resolutions - even when your readership is zero - transforms a promise to yourself into a promise to the world and you thus feel more compelled to keep it, or at least more guilty when you don't. Making private resolutions is basically saying "I'd like to do this, but I know I never will...", at least for me.
I too endeavor to do some sketchbook stuff every day in 2009 (except Jan 1-4, for that's when I watch my year's quota of shit movies) and to this end I have bought the nearest thing I could find to a sketchbook-diary hybrid, a Moleskine diary. It was about six times the price of any other day-to-view diaries in Rymans and the fact that I've shelled out over the odds alone should keep me going at least until March.







Sunday, January 04, 2009

LoveLetterstheBook.com

Love Letters, my weighty Magnum Opus of over two years in gestation (really, two years: look) is finally coming to term. And this bit is the the labour bit. I've made a website for the book: lovelettersthebook.com and it took bloody ages. It's a labour of love, I guess.


It's all part of my cynical bid to "go viral", ie. promote the book for free from my bedroom. All the ingredients are there for your classic promo-site: a Flash game, presence on a prominent social networking site, downloads, an embedded video... and ta-da! One delicious viral. Now I just sit back and start thinking of puns for my Booker acceptance speech. Or is that like dropping flour and an egg into a bowl and saying ta-da! One delicious cake? Perhaps yes. I'd like Alfie and Betty to be the Crazy Frog of 2009... but how do you beat an amphibian on a motorbike (let alone one with mental health issues)?
It's Darwin's birthday soon, and thinking about Crazy Frog... isn't that just one evolutionary step up from the succesful fish-on-a-bicycle campaign Guinness ran in 1996? So perhaps there's the answer: the next big thing with the kids will be whatever is one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a frog riding whatever-is-one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a-motorbike... an iguana in a helicopter, say. Don't skip a step though: one day we'll be ready for primates in rocket-ships, but not yet. Space Chimps taught us that much.