Daily Draw: 02.09.09 - 06.11.09

Sketchbook pages from the last two months: pretty much sixty days of either looking at laptops or looking at people looking at laptops, apparently.



London Zoo.


Into the wild.







Strictly come dancing.

Charlotte's bike: it was stolen from outside Vauxhall station but the next day she found it on Gumtree and persuaded the police to go and get it for her.



Welcome to the dollhouse.

Emma.

Occasionally I have work meetings in pubs, which makes me feel pretty cool.


For some reason I thought Patisserie Paul was the poshest place to buy a croissant in London, until I went inside. It's actually just like an expensive brown version of Greggs.

TV burp.

Curb your enthusisasm.


The thick of it.



Surfing in Wales is probably the most fun thing I've ever done - even in September. And it's right on our doorstep - only 200 miles down the road from London.


Don't tell the bride.


The thick of it.

I passed my driving test, just about. And then, as if to prove a point to myself, the next day I drove 130 miles on my own- 60 miles of which were in the dark- and shat myself so much the whole time I'll probably never get behind the wheel again.



Right then, now I'm off to Colombia for four weeks. And boy do I need a break after this abuse! (In the comments.)

iHasta lluego! etc.

Putting myself on the map

I've drawn a big map of Witney, a little town in West Oxfordshire. It took a long time, but it was fun.


Thousands of copies have been printed and are all over Oxfordshire. If you find one, you can see me on it down by the river struggling with the scale of the bloody thing.


Alternatively you can click round the whole thing on this nifty website.


There was a lot to draw. People often never ask me how I draw so many trees and still have time to do so many valid and worthwhile things. The secret is to create a generative system. Simply by combining five drawings of trunks, and five sets of leaves I get twenty five trees. Genius, eh?

Cheesy Gash balls

Here is my flyer for last week's Gash!.

I didn't go but instead stayed in and made Jamie Oliver's cheesy surprise meatballs (spoiler alert: the surprise is that all the cheese disappears) and ended up cutting my finger really quite deeply. Isn't that ironic, don't you think?

This is my original biro drawing.

A final thought

Here are some of my favourite illustrations from Don't Even Think About It.

Think About It

Don't Even Think About It, the Richard Wilson book I illustrated earlier this year (see previously), is out now.

And I only found this out when I stumbled across the book in Sainsburys a few days ago. I hadn't even seen a copy before then. For all I know it could have been released weeks ago amidst a flurry of Dan Brown style fanfare, with copies in guarded cases until midnight on the release date, and me having just missed it all - probably because I've been so busy getting excited about The Lost Symbol.

It's all about Professor Robert Langdon uncovering a secret cult of computer game kids that have discovered the secret to infinite extra lives and then hidden it in a shoebox. From the front, it looks like this:


And from the back, like this:


And the official blurb looks like this:


It started with sketches. I quite like the one on the left, but the middle one was chosen as it strengthens the connection with the first book.


And this was the next step. The young chap looked too ill, apparently.

Cooperation

Dear blog,
I was commissioned to pitch an illustration for a global-hyper-mega corporation, about working together and growth and that.
This is what I drew. It's people in suits tending a garden ie. growing things. Geddit??!
Hope you're well etc.
Yours sincerely,
Jack

Daily Draw: 19.08.09 - 01.09.09

This week I moved house, and in the process my sketchbook was sealed in a suitcase for several days with a couple of vestigial power chargers and some wooly jumpers I never wear - that is boxed up with all the other useless tat Im doomed to cart around with me for the rest of my life - and so I didn't draw on those days.

I've moved now, temporarily, into Charlotte's house. I'm not sure if anyone's noticed yet though, since I was always around anyway. Indeed I was on this pre-move Thursday while a lot of attempted guitar playing was going on, as it often does.


When we were on holiday both Charlotte and I read Waste by Tristram Stuart, about the "global food scandal" (summary: everyone's wasting food, particularly supermarkets, and it's bad). The book has changed our lives, not least by making us very bad dinner guests as we doggedly misquote waste statistics at anyone near us. We even tried a bit of freeganing (aka dumpster diving), and managed to liberate a couple of cartons of Orange Juice from the back of the Kings Road M&S.


And look, on the bbq: sustainable fish from a proper fishmongers.


And then the empty days begin...




... and then I'm installed. It's nice here (temporarily).