Top Five Vibes

Top Five Vibes is a daily update on the top five things within some specific category, run by my lifelong friend Dexter. The lists are totally random. I tell you, it's like Shortlist magazine ON ACID. The top five words that every new band needs in its name, for example, or the top five things that sound a lot nicer than they actually are.

I donated the header image. I'm not sure why I plagiarised the 20th Century Fox logo, possibly because I was listening to a cinema programme at the time or perhaps just because I have no original ideas of my own. It looks a bit like this, but in different colours.


And in case you don't own an old macbook, this is what the website looks like when viewed on one.

Daily Draw some more

weekend. It was so quiet I can't even capitalise the word. There's nothing like a 30 page form and then a ginormous tax bill at the end of it to suck the fun out of what is already the world's most depressing month.


Like true adults, we went to see a play on Monday. About something to do with the economy. In London's fashionable West End. Sadly unlike adults we both secretly think that the theatre pales in comparison to films, tv or even adverts. I even caught Charlotte putting her head back and closing her eyes to sleep at one point.


Bronson is like a two hour advert for moustaches. They criticise it for glamourising violence but what it does for face rugs is far worse, I'd say.


And I've just realised I haven't posted these two sketch book spreads from last week. Looking at them though, it's obvious why.

Even I can't tell what's going on in this one.

Daily Draw indoors

I gather, from the internet, that it's cold outside and so have barely left the house for days. This is good news for the Come Dine With Me ratings but bad for my daily sketchbook - there's only so many angles of the TV one can draw.

To try to break the monotony we did make one excursion: we went on a date to see The Road. Though Charlotte cried for the half an hour leading up to the end of the film and then for about two hours afterwards, which kind of ruined the cheery atmosphere we were hoping for. And to think I was banned from taking my sketchbook to the cinema because it's unromantic.


And here's several bottles of gin on a shelf, which may go some way to explaining those tears.

Ryan Giggs

He has scored some good goals, Ryan Giggs. Like that one against Arsenal in 1999. I'll never forget the first time I saw it on youtube about ten minutes ago, with the Killers on backing vocals.

This is a result of me experimenting with pencil meets photoshop techniques, quite unsuccessfully.

Daily Draw with the Simpsons

In 2009 in our house we would always watch The Simpsons on channel 4 at 6pm. But channel 4 always show the same old episodes so now, in 2010, every day at 6 we prop a laptop in front of the television and watch a newer episode on the internet instead. So we still get the reassuring comfort of our old 6 o'clock routine but don't have to sit through Treehouse of Horror XIV for the 68th time.



We're working our way through season 21 now. It's pretty substandard, of course, but at least it has references to things from the naughties like Bart gets a Z which mentions facebook, Twitter and all of that stuff that hasn't really been new for quite a long time now.

Daily Draw 2009: all together

All my sketchbook pages from 2009 in one flashy thing.

Now let us never mention it again.

Daily Draw 2010

So... 2010. The big 2-K-X. I'm going to carry on drawing daily as much as I can, but as this year is officially the future I'm allowing computer tweaking and colouring (last year everything had to be done "in book"). So the pages should be slightly less mundane to look at on here, that's the idea anyway.

Here's new years day. We had to put Glastonbury '09 on coverage as anything with a narrative was too overwhelming.


And then Char made an orzotto. Orzo is Italian for barley, so an orzotto is a risotto made with barley.

Daily Draw: 07.08 - 31.12

Back from finding myself in Colombia, I had a lot of Strictly Come Dancing to catch up with.


I didn't actually draw much in December, but I feel compelled to post these pages for the sake of completion.


Actually on this day I lost my sketchbook - I left it, along with the rest of my backpack, on the floor of a Wetherspoons and thought it long gone.


I even began to despair a little bit.


Though in fact some kind soul had already handed it in to the staff.


They eventually contacted me, and I arranged to collect it at my earliest convenience.


But as each day passed, pages and pages were left blank. I kind of hoped it would eventually come back to me filled with exciting sketches of Wetherspoons life, but alas.


Perhaps I needn't have posted all of these...


I got a new watch and some garish new pens for Christmas.


Then went back down to Brighton for the festive period. Going home really means leafing through old copies of the Evening Argus (POSTMAN BEATEN BY LAVENDER BUSH etc.) at the kitchen table whilst mother stands over the hob frying things for me. Christmas is no different.


And we had a nice Christmas day, despite Christmas eve turning out to be a bigger night than New Years.


Something else being fried.




And we're done.


So there you go. A whole year of drawing almost every day. 12 months. 162 backs of heads. 112 tv sets. 7 countries. 3 funerals. 1 operation and not that much more.

I'm going to do the same for 2KX, as the kids probably say, but change the rules a bit ie. allowing myself to do a bit of computer colouring and such. It is the future now, after all.

Happy

Having spent a depressing chunk of December 25th checking Twitter and Facebook under the turkey table, I know the internet is already far too awash with greetings for Christmas and New Year and all that, so I won't bother.



It was also Emily's birthday, of course, and I made her a card (drawn quite quickly). The URL is for a Spotify playlist (compiled quite quickly), so if you didn't get a bottle of Sloe Gin from me this Christmas then have a listen and consider that your festive gift from me.

Sloe business

In the true spirit of Christmas, Char decided to exploit her friends and family by selling them things they didn't really want. This year: Sloe Gin. As indeed I was with picking the sloes, preparing the gin and pretty much every other stage of the process, I was asked/forced to help out with the packaging.

I started like this:


And polished one slightly to this:


And then stuck it on the bottles and threw in a tantalising lens flare like this:


If you want to some, well, you can't. It's all sold out. Sorry. Your only hope is that you are my Uncle Coco, in which case you're getting a bottle for Christmas.

Dibujando Diario: 07.09.09 - 06.12.09

I'm back now from my gap-month, four weeks of finding myself in Colombia.
I was with Charlotte for the first two weeks, and then all alone for the second two. It worked out a bit like this:


We flew there with Iberia, via Madrid. A pretty painless flight except for the films: 500 Days of Summer, He's Just Not That Into You and Moulin Rouge.


We started in Bogota. It's pretty high up - about 2500 metres - so you get tired walking ten yards. This is La Puerta Falsa, the best place (says the Lonely Planet) to catch your breath with a nice Chocolate Santafereño - hot chocolate with cheese melted into it. Which is pretty much as you'd imagine: like an ovaltine with a dairylea dropped in.


Then we went on to Medellin, Colombia's second city. It's loved by all but we didn't really give it that much of a chance because we wanted to rush up to the coast for the weekend. Plus someone pulled a knife on me in the famously safe Zona Rosa. Luckily I managed to stumble and stutter out unscathed, but still.


So we headed up to Cartagena. By all accounts the jewel in Colombia's crown - the whole of the old town and it's crumbling colonial splendour is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was the weekend of a big independence day festival (they must really love that film) which is somewhere in between Rio Carnival and Brighton Pride in terms of scale and glamour.


Next we went to Playa Blanca, whatever that means. It's a beach that looks like a postcard feels like an island and is actually a peninsula.


The only thing I made up is the friends.


We ended up staying there for four days - this is how long it takes for the idea of a shower to become more appealing than waking up in a hammock metres from clear blue sea.


To the west a few hours is Tayrona National Park: 150 km² of jungle hanging over the Caribbean sea, like the set of Where the Wild Things Are (the book).


It was really relaxing. And we were lucky to go in low-season: we saw more monkeys and lizards than people.


And then we had to go back to Cartagena, because Charlotte was flying home from there. Leaving me in Colombia all alone for two more weeks, with no idea what to do.


More out of a need for a fixed new gang who couldn't escape me for a couple of days than out of a passion for archaeology, I booked on to a five day jungle trek to find Ciudad Perdida: The Lost City. It's a city way up in the mountains dating back to 800AD that went completely undiscovered until the 1970s.


On the way some of us took a tour of a cocaine factory hidden in the jungle and were taken step by step through the production process. It's basically leaves+gasoline+acid=delicious drugs. So now you know.


Poker Face (jungle version)


And then finally back to civilisation in Santa Marta. If you call mullet haircuts civilised, that is.


All that time on the Caribbean coast eventually got to me. It was just too hot. So I went back to Medellin to give it a second chance. It really is pretty nice. This is one of the main squares in the middle of Medellin, full of about 15 sculptures by Botero: the only artist ever to come out of Colombia, it would seem.


Next I went to Salento, a pretty little place in the Coffee Region and back to Bogota. By this point I was sick of drawing.


...and then home.


Here are some actual photos, to prove it's all true. Trekking to Ciudad Perdida, drinking bag water and sunrise over our home on Playa Blanca.


So that was nice. And how have you been?