Sweet View: Kensington & Chelsea + Tweet View

As announced last week on our mailing list and our brand new twitter account, we at Sweet View towers have launched our tenth print: Kensington and Chelsea. It's a sweeping panorama of Sloane Square, taking in all from the Royal Court right round to Peter Jones (the corner shop, not the dragon).

It was literally made in Chelsea, with me spending hours leaning against the window of Tiffany & Co. whilst I got the lines down (it took a couple of visits, this one).

The colours - especially the lilac tarmac - are my homage to David Hockney's Garrowby Hill.

Here's a bit more detail: the listed 'Venus Fountain' and an Ocado delivery truck peeking from behind a tree.

It looks great printed, and it's available to buy now from sweetview.co.uk

Tweet View
So yes, there is now a Sweet View twitter account - we are catching up with the world. Follow us! (23 people can't be wrong...) We put up sneak previews and details on our events, like the We Make London Christmas Fair at the Battersea Arts Centre on Saturday 10th December (as seen on the Guardian website).

The next print for Sweet View will be Hammersmith & Fulham. No doubt we'll be microblogging our progress on that one too, as if you don't have enough reason to jump on the @sweet_view_ bandwagon already.

One Green Bottle

Platform Bar | Great Little Place

Dom and I went to the Platform Bar at the top of Netil House, a big old office block that's now a, um, creative block: full of studios and spaces and lithe extras from Dalston Superstars. We were there on behalf of Great Little Place. Dom, who is my flatmate and a funny writer type, later wrote a "piece" about the bar for them. I drew a picture on the night to capture the "vibe" of the place in my sketchbook, just in case his photos didn't come out right.

His review is well worth a read, click here.

Here are the virgin lines:

And some more sketch book bits from the same night. This is live-looping ukelelist Milly Blue, who closed her set with a stirring acousto-rendition of Beyoncé's Sweet Dreams. It was just different enough from the original to lure the crowd into enjoying it before their anti-pop sensibilities could kick in.

Thanks to the GLP team for having us on board. Hopefully Dom and I will be joining forces for more review type things soon...

Clothes Horse (a poem)

Oh, the humble elegance of the clothes horse.
A collapsible monument.
A quotidian sculpture.
With fine skeleton and rounded shoulders,
like a boy.
And four feet in coloured rubber shoes,
like two boys,
holding steadfast against the dead weight
of wet fabric
so we don't have to.

Pop bitch

This is Char (in Pisa airport I believe) slagging off a young female pop star. For her most recent release, you see, the singer has eschewed her previous creative team and gone out alone to make something a lot more personal and - Char says - worse. I won't name them here though as that would be indelicate.

Oh, alright: it's Laura Marling.

Sweet Preview

Sweet View #10 will be the charming Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. I finished the linework last weekend. Here's a little taste of it starring a couple of Kings Road mods.

(Sweet View is a series of limited edition London prints, for sale here.)

MoS: How Elvis Pringle Lost His Hairdo

The Ministry of Stories is "an organisation dedicated to the creation of stories by a new storytelling generation." They're pretty great.

I went along with Chisenhale Primary from Bow to illustrate their story of candy, crime and kidnap: How Elvis Pringle Lost His Hairdo. It was my first session at the Ministry (see shaky lines for evidence of nervousness) and it was a real privilege - fun too. You can read their collaborative opening below (feel free to finish it in you own time).


How Elvis Pringle Lost His Hairdo
Author: Chisenhale Primary School

Once upon a time, there was a marshmallow called Mrs. Marshmallow Woman and she lived in the Bermuda Triangle.

She was at the Elvis Pringle concert. Elvis Pringle was giving out Original Pringles when a deep-sea diver took Elvis Pringle hostage.

He took him to a large bag of Walkers’ crisps. The diver was Bob, the normal person. Elvis Pringle was very posh: he lived in a nine-bedroom semi-detached tube. He said to the Walkers’ crisps, “You lot are weirdos. You live in a bag.”

An hour later, Marshmallow Woman came bursting through the packet.

Bob the normal person bought the pack of crisps and ate all of the crisps. “What are a Pringle and a marshmallow doing here?” he said – and he chucked them out onto the floor. But were they all alone?…

So that was nice.

The eyes have it

An ophthalmology gif. That’s what people want to see on the internet, right?

How Not to Talk Like an Arse

How Not to Talk Like an Arse (available now) is the third book in the Richard Wilson's Arse trilogy, and the third one that I've illustrated. This time Richard's turning his grumpy old eye to the modern day vernacular, pouring a bucket of scorn on words like 'Ciao', 'Hurting', 'Staycation' - and then a bigger bucket on the people that say them.

Here are some of the drawings:

This one is Mark Lawrenson and the Chuckle Brothers combining to make a commentary dream team.

And here's "Man despairs as fellow passenger reads chick lit".

Something to do with "Any Time Soon".

An Apprentice contestant type (invariably the worst offenders, apparently) and that great Keysian phrase. The banana is something to do with alpha males (gorillas or penises or both).

An über-mum.

An über-mum sketch from when I didn't understand what we were talking about.

This one's obvious really.

News reader wears a scarf tied in the "new way". My joke headline that got a swift axeing: "SCARF ACE" (fair enough).

Clapham tosser does pistol fingers.

Theresa May in space (please forward on to Political Cartoonist of the Year Awards).

Power lady lulled to sleep by glowing devices.

That great portmanteau that noone has ever said.

And, er, that's it.

Sweet View press

Quite a few people have said sweet things about Sweet View - in online and print articles, tweets and emails. Now we have now collected most of them onto one very long press page on our website. Do make sure you put aside half an hour today to read through them all in detail.

OxPARC

I just finished a great project for OxPARC making about a million illustrations for their website. OxPARC is an NHS centre that treats rheumatoid conditions (arthritis, basically) in young people. I worked with their staff, the patients and the patient's parents to develop a cast of kids and teens to populate near every page of the site. They're a diverse bunch, as you might expect, and every one of them has a pet.













There are more illustrations up on my portfolio site, or you can see the full set as nature intended by clicking through the OxPARC site.

The Tiger's Wife

Child friendly alternative book cover for the Orange Prize 2011 winner (about a mythologised Yugoslavian history, not Tiger Woods' marriage).

What I did on my other holidays

In July Charlotte and Archie and Charlotte and I took a double-date trip to smug central in the South of France.


We stayed in Charlotte's family house in Le Vernet, a little village up in the mountains. All the villagers hated us immediately because we beat them at pétanque.


After one night we headed south to Sete - "the Venice of Languedoc" - where we set up camp for the weekend. We were there for the Worldwide Festival, showcasing the best music from across the globe - which happens to almost all be made on computers in Hackney and played with the bass turned up to 11.


We were staying in one of those European mega-campsites with big water slides and marauding gangs of children cycling between the supermarket and the table tennis tables. Heaven. (If you're seven).


The daytime section of the festival was based on the beach. It was like we'd wandered onto the set of those super sexy H&M bikini ads. The four of us just lurked on the periphery dragging down the average attractiveness of the crowd.


Back in the house in the hills, we played Scrabble and argued about words.


And on the last night we set up an Excel spreadsheet to calculate our holiday finances.


So that was nice