IA: K, L , M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U...

The Inappropriate Alphabet: it's back. I should have this filthy childrens book ready soon. Printed up and on the shop shelves, or at least, printed up and in my desk drawer...
Charlotte's away in Italy this week, leaving me home alone. And whilst this does give me a break from the endless drudgery of married life (lawnmowing, bickering, Big Brother, Big Brother's Big Mouth etc.) and chance to work on "projects" like this it has been pretty lonely knocking round the house on my own. The two shootings pretty much on my Stockwell doorstep in the last week and a half have ramped up my paranoia from it's default code orange, which still means that when I'm home alone I mute the TV every five minutes because I think I can hear someone creeping up behind me (though I do this a lot less since I realised we have surround sound installed) all the way up to code FLASHING-FUCKING-RED. Utter, all consuming paranoia. I've been spending most of the days urgently, nakedly and armed with a non-stick frying pan pacing between the many windows and doors of the house, checking to see if the human hairs taped across their openings remain intact.
Living in complete isolation has driven me slowly insane.
Within about an hour of Charlotte's leaving I was arguing bitterly with an avocado onto which I'd drawn a disapproving face. I have entirely abondoned ablutions and dressing and just sit, for hours on end, dizzy with the heat pulsating through the closed blinds above my desk, flicking emptily through porn (as research) and that is it. My life alone. Sweaty. Filthy. Disgusting. Scared. I even did my shopping in Iceland.
Still, I'm off to Italy to join her tomorrow, so that's alright.























I'm not sure about V, W or X. Any suggestions?
I also recently did this elaborate sketch of a pretty girl, and idly started colouring it on the bus to work. It looks shit and off-balance now- not helped by the complete lack of lips, but may turn into something quite pretty. Then I'll ruin it by drawing in the rest of her, tromboning some old pervy Chris Langham type.

Trafalgar Square

I've got a new widescreen sketchbook, and yesterday I took it to Trafalgar Square.

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:

Keep it indie family

Here's a new strip, about an ageing trendy indie dad bringing up his son in his own mould. A music based strip might be easier to get in to magazines, I'm figuring. Any feedback for these would be greatly appreciated. Should I keep going?

Research, but not in the Pete Townshend way.

Here's an over-elaborate post for an under-whelming illustration I did a few weeks ago. I'm not sure why I saved process shots so regularly. I guess I must have thought I was onto something really interesting at the time. How wrong I was.

This is the reference photo I took on Easter Sunday near Rottingdean. Something about taking a photo of a little girl playing on the end of a big rock thing and shrieking as she tries to avoid the salty foam, and then going on to post said picture on the internet feels wrong.
I wanted to capture a wave crashing against the rocks and rising up, but could only wait for about ten seconds, what with the very real threat of arrest.



I built up the drawing in layers, on four or five sheets of paper, and somehow the girl, being the hardest bit to draw, just got left out.
Here's the first layer, simple pen and ink:



This spray I made by flicking ink on a page, and scanning and colouring it. It probably looks best at this point:



Some block colours:



Shadows made up of scanned painted ink, coloured and overlaid at varying opacities. This really didn't work as well as I hoped it would, and the colours are wrong too.



And then, just to make sure it was definitely rubbish, I put in a load of silly flares.



So there you go. Pretty shit, but hey, at least I didn't design that 2012 logo!

Coach

I'm writing this blog entry on a coach with wi-fi, and in doing so: I am tasting the future. I am tasting the future and it tastes good. Cold, metallic and good. This must be how John Logie Baird felt when he watched television before anyone else, pushing at the very boundaries of technology, standing at the very edge of science and peering over the edge into the abyss. Probably with a Grand Designs repeat on More4. I am a 21st Century Fox. I am Robocop. I am James Dyson. I am Levi Roots.
The trouble is I've recently checked the BBC news and facebook (the me-me-me news) so I'm slightly at a loss as what to do.
The coach is taking me from Oxford home to London. You see I've started doing the old switcheroo commute: London to Oxford. Last week I did three days of work experience at a Graphic Design company, which was fun, and kindly they've asked me to come back regularly and in return have offered to give me a small amount of money to help me pay for t-shirts and cider and rent. It sounds like a job, and it is really. It's only two days a week though; I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It means a five day weekend, I guess, which is only two days short of the ideal.
Graphic design is surprisingly fun- almost as fun as internet on the bus. Already I've taken a logo from ink-marks to photoshop re-touchery to large prints to mounting and done a small illustration for the cover of a book. It's also a training type position, so I'm learning industry secrets all the time, and when I leave I'll have all the skills to pay the bills.
In preperation for the work experience, I knocked up these logos speculatively for the Brighton based Latenite [sic] Lounging record label as a kind of practice.



Which is nice.