Life Drawing

Life drawing. Always the most boring type of sketch-blog post.
My first week. I'm consistently shocked by how bad I am at this.

Generally I try to do proper pictures for a while- with charcoal and winking at my thumb and all that- and then treat myself to using pen, which I'm sure is in breach of some rule somewhere.



Where are the jokes? Where are the mild-profanities?
Oh, go on then:

IA: V

You'll no doubt notice the reference here to classic Hitchcock thriller Rear Window. Low-brow filth, indeed...

Obligatory shit halloween drawing

Sketch blog etiquette dictates a necessity for a wacky happy halloween drawing on this day.

I did this a few days ago. What's really scary is my apparent mid-nineties Britpop reference frame.
Actually, there's another rule that says you should celebrate your blog's first birthday by drawing a cute cupcake with a candle in it, but I missed that. It was on October 11th.

Wham, Bam... depressing.

A long time ago, it seems, I entered the Observer/Random House graphic short story competition. I'm pretty much relying on winning some such competition, some illustratorial X-Factor, to springboard me into career success. (And I don't mean just beating a bunch of nine year olds in a colouring in competition, as in my previous post). So I put a lot of time into writing and drawing this, and was then bitterly disappointed when I didn't win.
Looking at the winners and other entrants though (conveniently collected here) I'm less upset. Most of them are stylish and bleak and have a single figure word count. That's not really what mine is about. Mine's more Beano than 2000AD, or whatever it is serious graphic story-tellers are into. Mine's a comic, and I think that's what I prefer.
There are definitely far too many words in there though. I need to save those up for my novel. In Crumb, the Terry Zwigoff documentary about Robert Crumb, you meet his older brother Charles who is psychotic. You are shown Charles' cartoon strips he made as was growing up and see that as he gets older, and more mental, his panels become more and more crammed with words. The characters have to hunch down in the bottom until eventually the pages are just panels filled with tiny words. That's what mine reminds me of. That, but with more shit puns.

Virgin

I watched Knocked Up in the cinema and didn't laugh once whilst the rest of the audience fell about. Maybe I was bitter because everyone I was with booked seats in the middle at the front, and I had to sit on my own in the back corner. In a subsequent bid to get onto the Judd Apatow bandwagon, unsettled by my differences of opinion with the side of the bus and the internets, I downloaded 40 year old virgin and here we are watching it. It's still pretty dire though.



Now Ratatouille, there's a film...

Toonatic

The big news sensations of the modern age, the scandals, the scoops, the scourges, break right here in the blogosphere. It takes weeks if not months later for the real world, for the print media, stumbling from the cave and blinded by technology's bright lights, to catch up. It was true with Britney's transmogrification into a fat bald bad mother, and it's true here.
You may remember, several months ago this post of mine of some shameful Lily Allen fan art which led to me being mocked and ridiculed in pubs, on facebook and behind my back. Now skip forward a few months and what's that splashed across page 2 of London's favourite free paper? Just next to none less than Stella McCartney? Yes, it's my picture of Lily.

In the intervening weeks, you see, I saw advertised a poster design competition themed 'My Hero' being run by MTV and Penguin books, all to promote the new yoof-orientated Nick Hornby novel Slam. I casually sent in my picture, and it won.
A few weeks later Charlotte and I went to the glamorous Slam book launch at the Design Museum on the South Bank, where the shortlisted posters where all up on display. It easily surpassed the time I saw Adam Buxton in Nine Elms Sainsburys as the most glamorous occasion of my life. There were hors douvres. There was a bar with no cash till. There was John O'Farrell. Nick Hornby made a really funny speech and then announced the winner. I looked surprised, but I'd actually been meticulously pre-briefed. I skipped up to the front and Nick, as I now call him, gave me a new iPod (a nano, not a touch) a child's t-shirt and a hug and the Penguin MD handed me a bottle of M&S Champagne.
The next day my entry was in thelondonpaper, which pretty much everyone I know evidently reads as I was bombarded with literally three or four text messages of congratulations.
The poster is to be on display for all of November in the Design Museum. They asked me to write a few words about why Lily is my hero for the display, but apparently my submission- a cloying bid to scrape back some street-cred by mocking her- was not serious enough. Here it is:

"When I was younger, I didn't have posters of my heroes up on my wall. Lily Allen, however- despite looking, sounding and probably smelling like a chav- is a pop star I wouldn 't mind being in my bedroom. She's pop royalty and yet I feel I have a lot in common with her: we both made most of our friends on MySpace, we both like the Specials and both are pretty rubbish at playing the guitar. Most of my friends seem to think she's fairly talentless and has only been as succesful as she has because of her rock 'n' roll dad, but whilst I accept these are valid points I think she's alright, still. Plus, she's a lot easier to draws than Amy Winehouse."

So there you go.

Louis Theroux

On Sunday we watched Louis Theroux getting cosmetic surgery on television. Charlotte had to shield her eyes from all the cutting and bleeding and sucking and drilling, but I have had medical training and so was fine.

Three laps

Bored and depressed, on an early morning bus trawling through outer London with my trousers grey-rain sodden, I pull out my moleskine sketchbook to distract myself by sketching my surroundings. With pen poised I look around to realise that of everything around me: chairbacks carpeted like classrooms, chewing gum rocks with set dental records and the backs of peeling septegenarian heads, the most interesting thing to me is my own lap. On completion of my uncomfortable drawing I leaf back through the pages and see the previous two drawings are pretty much exactly the same. This initially prompts a brief internal crisis about my own inability to take interest in anything other than myself, but I think it's more just that recently I've only been sketching mindlessly out of pure boredom, and as a last possible resort.



My life really is vaguely exciting, certainly exciting enough for me to not always be prepared to ruin it by stopping to draw the good bits. I don't want to end up like the tortured artist at my Uni who you'd often see sitting in the back of nightclubs scrawling poetry on discarded receipts or wraps and generally being too angst-ridden to function. He probably thinks of himself as a kind of Junglist Wilfred Owen. I imagine his poems go something like:

I'm in a drum and bass club,

it is early mornin',

everyone's dancin' and happy,

don't they care 'bout global warmin'?

Amy, why not?

I'm still not sure where to go with this bloody promotional postcard, so to waste time I tried redrawing the Any Winehouse one.

Can you read the 5-a-day bit? I don't want the serious healthy-eating message to be lost...

Joe Blogs

Several months ago I answered a call for illustrators from online magazine The Thing Is. The thing was, and is, it turned out, actually a project run by fellow Brightonian Bristolian Afro Jimmy, also known as Jimmy Tidey. I'm not sure which of those is his real name and which is a nickname, seeing as he doesn't sport an afro or come across as particularly tidy. Really nice guy though, and his thing is nice too.
The article I was to illustrate was written by Jimmy (thinking about it, maybe it's the Jimmy bit that's the nickname, maybe he's actually called Afro Tidy and has a predilection for crowbars). The article is about how now the blogging culture is apparently so widespread now there is a huge amount of personal information out there, so psychologists and anyone else interested have a huge bank of information open to them like never before.
First off I was really keen to do something really elaborate and moody with highly technical overlaid transparencies like Matthew Woodson would, but when this came out I was pretty disappointed- it just looks like one panel in a rubbish strip about ghost doctors.


The next day, on the bus to Oxford, I sketched out a design for another version. The bumpy ride made it all the lines wobbly and free. I later scanned it in and next time I was on the bus I coloured the sketch, with the same loss of control. It ended up being one of my favourite pieces.


Blog etiquette meant I couldn't post it until the magazine came out, but then I forgot all about it. But then it has been on my website for a while. Here it is in context:


Which is nice.

Purple face and sweet potato

Two sketches drawn whilst I've been waiting for something else, programmes to load or sweet potatoes to cook.

Promotional Postcard

The next stage in my post-graduate evolution from number-crunching ape to fully erect illustrator, following building up a portfolio and setting up a website, is, I'm told, to order the printing of hundreds of self-promotional postcards. A dozen or so of these are then to be sent to prospective employers, the Guardian, say, or the "internet". After that, the plan is, I'll be comissioned to knock out a few anarchistic post-feminist comic serials, move in with Damon Albarn, design a cartoon pop band and go on to draw a Chinese musical.
A promotional postcard traditionally has to encapsulate within it's scant 139mmx107mm every aspect and dimension of an illustrator's supposed strengths. Apparently though these days that's not quite so important, as the postcard works as a shop window enticing the viewer to look at the associated website. Now your image needs just be the foreplay whereas once it had to be the full service: foreplay, kissing, topping, penetration, climax and post-coital embrace.


This was my first idea, thinking to put in a celebrity likeness(ish) and a nod to topicality.


And this unsettling image was my second. It's supposed to look like a tart card, and so is deliberately a bit shit with it's terrible font and cheap pink/red colour scheme. Though this may be a bit of a counter-intuitve way to promote myself.

I don't really know what angle to go with, I wanted to post three on here as a testing ground before ordering the printing, but can't think of a third design. My last blog post- a hungover Sunday scrawl titled "Meh" and tagged as "rubbish"- has had two positive comments from strangers which is the most ever comments by two, so I guess I really don't know what, if anything, of mine is good anymore. Hopefully some readers of this blog, maybe even both of you, can tell me where to go with the postcards. I'll thank you from the top.

Meh.

Three controllers and winehouse

I hope Jamie T wins the Mercury prize tonight. Amy Winehouse is in the papers enough as it is. The anti-drugs league shouldn't worry about her being a bad role model though: she's helping them by looking as so weird as she does. She's a one woman scare story. What with her tiny wire frame body covered in cheap tattoo transfers, her burly uncontrollable sideburns like a rocker, stuck on mrs potato head eyes and lips all topped off with a greasy nest of synthetic hair that probably smells of stale vomit, she's a poster child for keeping clean. Having said all that, I do think she's hot.

In Vogue

A Pretty girl I copied out of a glossy magazine. I think she was in a shampoo advert. Everyone likes pictures of pretty girls, boys and girls. I like pictures combining pen and pencil, though I haven't found a good way of colouring them in yet.



Meh.


I like pocket cartoons. I have my google page set up so that I can see the days Matt one every day without having to expose myself to any of the Telegraph site. Here's a quick one I did while at work last week to go with this Pitchfork article about a choir that sings their complaints.



I had my first Vindaloo last night. It made me feel pretty big and clever at the time, but today I've regretted it. By midday I'd gone for a poo in four different toilets: at home, on the bus to Oxford (there's a toilet on the bus to Oxford), in the bus station and at work.