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.

Threadless: Accepted.... and then rejected.

I submitted this entry to Threadless about a week ago. At the time I thought I was onto a genuine winner, covering as I was the requisite bases of indie nerd, saccharine smiles and fresh fruit referencing. The design is a subtle allusion to the mnemonic used by guitar teachers across the apple eating world, instantly recognisable to those familiar with a six-string, beguiling and entrancing to anyone else (drummers, say).

But then once it went up, lenoircouture said:

"i thought they were the sticks for caramel apples waiting for the apple"

Which hurt a bit. But then imbrilliant said:

"i thought it was pasta."

and shakethesheets said:

"i thought they were chopsticks."

and then, after all that, MadMike twisted the knife by saying:

"I had no friggen idea what this was about."

What a tragedy.
My performance was so ridiculously low I got taken out of the running but two days in. Later I think I saw someone pointing and laughing at me in Costcutter.
If you want to see the whole sorry story, you can click on this below. It's what they give you to put on your blogs and myspaces to get you friends to vote for you, but for me, having lost, it's just a sad reminder of defeat. An advertisement for my failures.

But despite all that, this does represent a milestone: it's the first thing I've ever really made in Illustrator. See that pattern round the sound hole? (The bigger circle, behind the pasta) I made that pattern, all by myself. It's all quite neat and satisfying, but most excitingly it's quick: I sketched this idea on the bus and within an hour of my getting home, it was done and submitted. (Trust me, that's quick.)

All my posts are coming up in facebook now. Isn't that weird?

No sex please.

A sketch of Britt Ekland, from an old Vogue cover.


Symmetry means beauty, I hear, so here we go. Strangely transfixing, isn't she? A bit like a piggy Billie Piper, which is nice.

Give a shit

Some sketches I uploaded whilst I was at work last week. Temping in a really lax office killed my bloggery because when you can theoretically get paid for doing something, you never want to do it for free. As I was essentially free to piss around on the internet all day at work I didn't want to come back to piss around on the internet at home. But then when I was at work I was eternally scared of getting fired for constantly revising BBC news stories, and the comments, in case they came up in some wacky bonus round in the Tuesday pub quiz and not sending the important letters I was asked to send. A fear of confounding my case by appearing to be in the midst of some elaborate other internet-based project and being sent to sort out the stationery cupboard for the next two weeks meant I never really did any blogging. It's a similar logic that led me to saving any toilet action for when I was getting paid to sit still, and going to bed farting and uncomfortable. I guess that's the price of getting paid for doing something you love.

I'm ready for my Spanish holiday this Summer.


This is the reception where I was working. Sometimes I hung out here because the receptionist was nice and sometimes brought in treats like snowballs (those old-fashioned chocolate and marshmallow things, not rounded lumps of crystalline water ice) or lemon drizzle cake (which seems to be rather fashionable recently. Or at least, Charlotte and I made one last week, and then there was a feature on Woman's Hour about them. Does that count as fashionable? I haven't read Vogue or The Face recently, but LDC is probably on both covers).


We got Glastonbury tickets in the end. Sophie here is probably reading about LDC.


The office.


Camberwell Church Gardens, where I ate my LDC and packed lunch.

mailmeart.com

First, I'd like to strart this blog-post with the usual blog-post opening apologies for the recent lack of blog-posts. I have no excuse (clearly I haven't spent the interlude drafting and re-drafting this blog-post opening).

Nor have I any nice annecdotes to fill the gaps. Oxymoronically I'm basically permanently temping, which despite being utterly thrilling and absolutely brimming with hilarious blog-worthy story-stuff, hasn't left me with any annecdotes I want to detail here. This is partly due to a vestigial guilt from my merciless, um, let's say "satire" of my last office placement (which remained up on screen after my departure), and also partly to do with the fact that I 've told everyone in my new office the details of that exact folly. Now they're positively looking forward to me leaving just so that they can see what I write about them all on here (but only for that reason, mind). So if you want to hear my tales of hour long shits on company time or how my office neighbour hums as he types, then ask me in a pub sometime.

One productive thing I have done whilst working here (yes, I'm at work now) other than earning £8 and then spending £10 an hour online is to cover a whole envelope in a doodle. Now this is standard desk jockey stuff I know, but being arrogant I've deemed mine worthy of entrance into the mail art project at mailmeart.com. It's fairly self explanatory: all the entrants get put in an exhibition online, and eventually offline, and there are some prizes too.

Here is my envelope:



And here is the letter I put inside it (I couldn't quite bring myself to put it on the headed paper):