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).

Loud Story

Open publication

Loud Story was a book idea I was developing a while ago which pretty quickly ran out of steam. It plays with the neat kind of accidents that can occur when predictive text goes wrong: when pint accidentally becomes riot, kiss becomes lips, baker becomes cakes and all that stuff. Textonyms, these words are apparently called.

Nowadays of course anyone with any self-respect has an iPhone - or at the very least a Blackberry- and so uses a miniature QWERTY keyboard, making the whole idea redundant. Which is a shame.

Daily Draw: 22.07 - 18.08

A load of Daily Drawings, and a couple of blank pages too- because it is the holiday season after all. I'm allowed to relax for five minutes, right?



I barely drew "for fun" all of this week in fact, because I was swamped, flooded and festooned with work. Mainly with completing 60+ colour illustrations for a pair of books coming out on Mothers Day and Fathers Day next year, which is quite exciting. Probably worth getting pregnant for now, if you're not a parent already, just so you can legitimately enjoy them (or one of them, at least).






I had to get a number of jobs completed before I left for a fortnights jaunt - split between Croatia and Italy - and as my departure date loomed I was working very long days indeed. I was at the desk still at 1am on the Monday morning, and we had to leave at 3am. That is what they call "the joy of freelance".



We stayed in Razanj, a little village about an hours drive up the Croatian coast from Split. In Croatia beaches as you and I know them are yet to be invented: instead they have concrete shelves built into and over the rocky shores. They are almost better though because you can jump off the shelves and impress girls and you don't get sand kicked in your face by bigger boys.


It was just me and Charlotte. We've never really done a couples holiday before. We went to Morocco last year, but then we were too busy fearing for our lives to allow for any romance.


It was pretty boring until we bought a pack of playing cards.


At the end of the week we went back down to Split and took an overnight ferry to Ancona (that's in Italy). I was led to believe this would be the glamour-high-point of the trip, but once we'd finished our warm pre-made bottle gin and tonic on the top deck it was a case of trying to sleep curled up on the floor of the engine room on a bed of towels, which wasn't all that fun.


The Italy chapter, in which we joined Charlotte's whole family and our friends Jess and Sophie, was all based around food: specifically those tomato, mozzarella and basil salads covered with balsamic. BBMTs, the Italians probably call them.


The two weeks were quite different. Croatia was so relaxed we were almost completely still for the whole time. In Italy there were ten of us, almost all teenage girls, and so was lots and lots of fast-talking and high-screaming and sobbing and general drama. There were probably more words machine-gunned out in any given minute of week two than the total that were uttered by me and Char combined in week one.