When I'm sat at the computer and taking a break from things I often take a wander over to Too Busy Thinking About My Comics for some fairly thought provoking writing about the world of superhero comics.  Colin Smith is a fine writer, academic but with heart and humour, and takes the time to reply to pretty much every comment he receives.  During a recent exchange we hit upon a phrase that Colin thought would be great on a business card.  Had to agree so I mocked up a card and here it is.



I we...
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Apparently, much to my surprise, I am a "people" person.  I like the company of others, I communicate well and empathise well.  In short I am not the man I thought myself to be.  However I am prone to what my wife calls "cave time", when I want to retreat into my cave, paint on the wall with my hands and club anyone who invades my personal space.  Cave time has been less intense over the last couple of years but because of some emotionally draining events at moment it's come back with a venge...
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I don't remember the original thundercats, too old to have been watching unfortunately, but this new version looks very classy. Molly is going to love it I think.
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Wordle is very interesting.  It takes text and reworks it into a cloud, like the text clouds you get on some websites.  I don't understand why but I like it.  Here's one from my review of Moebius' Red Cross comic.


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I fancy trying something new and I'm considering a quilt.  I have a design based on the story of Red Riding Hood

This is a quickly coloured version of my initial sketch.  Now I'm considering the amount of hand sewing involved and trying to decide if I really want to do it.

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Been very focussed recently on Urban Sketching (it's so cool to have a decent name for drawing out and about) and my bird paintings which I'm selling on my newly instituted Etsy Store.  The bird paintings particularly have been a process of rapid memory jogging as I tackled watercolour again for the first time in a few years.  The results have been very pleasing and this is now one of my favourite pieces of my own work.


The paintings are all miniatures, a mere 3 inches square and are getting ...
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I have, at times, been a very lazy artist.  Not in terms of production, though that has been true too, but in terms of relaxing the drawing muscle and doing what's easy.  I've reached the conclusion that it's very easy to do drawing after drawing of things that come naturally to me, organic forms that adapt to my shakey linework as opposed to buildings and machines.  Further, to accept that is to stagnate and step back from artist to craftman, turning out well crafted items time after time.  ...
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My nephew Mitchell has had an impressive return to the world of karting after a long break due to a variety of injuries.  He's scarily focussed on his Karting career for a 13 year old and has ambitions for entering the Nascar circuit one day.  Although biased I really think he'll do it too.


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Recently I've become fascinated with the Urban Sketchers movement.  I'm aware that I found a comfortable niche drawing people and foliage, organic things, and need to step out of it and urban sketchers are my inspiration.

First attempts are a little shakey, this was the end of a row of rundown garages near my daughter's school.  This is how it looks in Google streetview.

The sketch was drawn with a black Rotring over 6 minutes while sat in the car.


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My participation in the 30th World Sketchcrawl was limited to little more than an hour due to family commitments but I made the very best of that time.

The first sketch was a short one in my mother's garden.  She still lives in the house where I grew up and I have a lot of history with this particular Rowan tree.  Apparently, when I was aged four or five, I decided to see how many of the berrys from the tree I could fit in my nose.  My mother delights in reminding me about the fun of removing ...
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I've heard about Golden Books for more years than I care to count, mostly in connection with Disney films as they come out.  The've almost been a compulsory piece of merchandising. You couldn't make a film without releasing a book.  I'd never seen one or had an oppotunity to buy one however until yesterday.  I walked into a charity shop to look through the kids book section and found three, Bolt, Ratatouille and Wall-e.

The one that first caught my eye was Bolt.  The film was, I believe, Disne...
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I'm not a fan of modern remakes of classic movies, mostly because they rarely match the quality of the original but also because I'd rather see someone make something new and original rather than retread something old.  When I heard that there was a remake of True Grit I had a feeling of horror and disbelief I hadn't felt since Burton's reimagining of Planet of The Apes.  I Just thought WHY?


           Wonderful poster design for the Coen Brothers movie True Grit

Then I found out it was the Co...
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As I get older my interests are changing.  One of the interests that seems to be developing is British birds of the feathered variety.  I'm not a committed spotter but I'm finding I need to know more to be able to answer Molly's questions.  Drawing things helps me to know them better so I began drawing birds on small, 3in x 3in cards and rather than add another page to put them on the website they're on a blogsite instead, bangs twitches.  I like them so much so far, that I'm considering an E...
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Browsing the web looking for something, I no longer remember what, I was swpet up into a moment of sheer nostalgia.  I don't have an awful lot of strong memories from my childhood, I'm always amazed by people who seem to recollect perfectly everything from the age of 3, but one thing I do remember is Pippin weekly.  This was probably my first comic (sorry, picture weekly.  The word "comic" seems to have been kept mainly to stand up comedians when dealing with the very young pre-school market)...
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Finally here's the first set of illustrations by John Costanza from Joy Berry's "Let's talk about throwing tantrums".


The cover, printed on a retina burning pink, is clipped from the first illustration.  Kinda catches the theme of the book perfectly.








I love the artwork.  Costanza's line is loose and fluid, like looking at an old Dennis the Menace panel (US variety).  There's always just enough to tell you what's happening and give a sense of place without bombarding you with information.  Nex t...
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This year's Christmas card ended up being digital.  I underestimated the work involved so I'm a little disappointed.  Each card was printed, stapled, with a hand embellished and stamped cover.  The digital version doesn't do it justice.

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I'm a regular follower of Leif Peng's superb "Today's inspiration" blog which introduced me to more fine illustrators then I can count.  When I came across the John Costanza illustrations and wanted to verify they were by the well known comicbook letterer, he was the first person I turned to for help.  Leif took a look at the illustrations and contacted some people he knew.  Within less than an hour I had confirmation, from no less than Jerry Ordway, that these pictures were by that John Cost...
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Browsing charity and secondhand shops can lead to some interesting finds in the way of books.  Today I picked up two eighties editions of Joy Berry's "Let's talk about" series illustrated by John Costanza.  Now I'm guessing this is the John Costanza, reknowned comics letterer and masterful cartoonist on The Simpsons, Looney Toons and many another cartoon comicbook franchise.

The style is much looser than his comicbook work, done in pen and slightly reminiscient of Hank Ketcham's Dennis work, a...
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I'm a long time fan, having read many of his books over the years and there was definitely a time when Vonneguts view of the world matched my own.  I've mellowed with age, a great suprise to the few people who still know me from my older days but fortunately Mr Vonnegut never did.  In fact I think his outrage grew greater as did his despair at being unable to affect anything.  November 11 was Vonnegut's birthday and this quote from him captures him perfectly.


reblogged from Drawn but having bo...
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One of my favourite things from Google is the Google Reader.  Instead of spending hours trawling through countless websites the updates on my favourite blogs and sites come to me.  It's a masterful idea for many reasons but one i just realised is it allows me to chart my interests.  There are 187 subscriptions on my Google Reader, mostly split between animators and illustrators and a bunch of old comic sites like Stanley Stories .  Up until a few months ago there were a large number of comics...
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My daughter Molly's birthday falls on All Saints Day, or as it's known these days, the day when you get sick from eating all the candy you got on Halloween.  Her birthday party wasn't a real highlight for her as she got sick 20 minutes in and spent most of it crying and feeling sick with a nosebleed to top things off.  She did perk up enough later to go trick or treating with her little brother though.

Here's Molly in her bat costume and Harry as a skeleton.


This was also the first year I've ca...
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After much head scratching I finally managed to add comments to the blog.  They're on September Roads, reviews and 52 trees.  Now to wait with baited breath to find out if anyone other then me is actually looking at any of this.

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I don't know how many people will read this, probably tens at most, but World Blog Action Day is about making people think about stuff that makes them uncomfortable and so it has an instant appeal for me.

The topic this year is water.  Lack of decent drinking water and sanitation kills more people than war and every other act of violence every week, it just doesn't make the headlines or the evening news programme. News isn't news anymore.  It's entertainment, it's numbers.  If Premier L...
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Kevin Huizenga has revealed on his wonderful "Under Construction" blog that he plans out his comics in mini books made from stapled scrap paper.  I came up with something similar myself a year or two back and have been using them to work out a number of story ideas.  a couple of them are shown below.


As you can see I get a little more anal and obsessive than Kevin H.

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The other project is making the book of The Daily Viking.  This has been a longer job as book construction fascinates me and I want to get this right.


The book is printed on A5 sheets of various pale shades from The Paper Mill.  I then drilled the pages with a tiny little hobby drill 5 times about 3 centimetres from the left edge and used a Japanese binding technique, substituting a fine wire for the usual cord.  The covers' curently unfinished, are jointed and covered with a grey/blue scrapbo...
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Working on a couple of projects at the moment.  The first is a piece of 3D work, a cartoony figure of an old man.

Unfortunately I leapt into it with little planning beyond what it would look like and fell afoul of some very obvious problems.  Ideally it should have been built around a wire skeleton and that would have given it a degree of support. With that support parts would not have fallen off.  I'm now left trying to decide if I can rebuild itand secure the various limbs and more to the po...
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Each year there is a World Blog Action Day in October When bloggers of the world unite to write about a subject of global concern.  Each year the choice of subject is put to the vote and this year the winner is water.  There are lots of horrendous stories and statistics about the number of people who die each day from lack of clean drinking water or the damage done to the environment by water pollution to the unwanted addition of fluoride to our drinking water.

I'm not sure what I'll write abo...
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Here's a clip of my son, Harry, dancing to his current favourite musical artiste.  Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the musical stylings of..... (drum roll) THE IMAGINATION MOVERS!!!  The crowd of under 5's go wild.   Amazingly, The Imagination Movers are probably the least offensive toddlers and young kids targeted musical tv shopw I've seen to date. The guys involved are normal weird rather than creepy weird (The Wiggles still worry me). They're not stage school brats and their not ho...
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I gave this far more thought then intended and left out so much.  Dozens of newspaper strips from Trog to The Fosdyke Saga to the Heart of Juliet Jones, programmes from Magic Roundabout to the Pogles to Pertwee Doctor Who, books from Oliver Strange's "Sudden" westerns to Lord of the Rings to Asmov's short stories, comics from the Eagle, The Beezer and Topper to British Marvel Ditko reprints and films from My Life as a Dog to The Big Blue to Planet of The Apes.  Then there's the illustrators, ...
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So, here I am.  Three months in to working for Karen Bangs Training as an Emergency First Aid at Work trainer.  The boss is tough but I knew that going in.  Emergency First Aid at Work (EFAW) is a fun course to teach, bandaging, cpr, choking and swapping horror stories.   When I was training to be a first aider my trainer told us that most accidents to men over 30 that aren't car related are due to sport or stupidity and everything I've heard in these sessions definitely bears her out.  Very ...
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Here's one you need to be a driver to fully appreciate.  Beautifully animated and well observed.  Building to a fine climax over a mere 38 seconds

Parallel Parking from Yum Yum London on Vimeo.

Okay.  Storywise it's probably the equivalent of a mediocre O Henry story with a sudden twist at the end that comes right out of left field.  Having been in that situation myself, back and forth to try and escape a tiny space for over 20 minutes, the ham represented a lot of things, though mostly it was ...

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I'm always looking for ways to improve my website so this is me trying out Issuu

 
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I'm a fan of sketchbooks.  I like to be able keep things together easily, look back and review ideas.  As a naturally untidy person they just make better sense to me.  One of the things I've always appreciated is small pocket size sketchpads because I like to always have one on me, it's the urban sketcher in me.  I originally fell in love with the Moleskine a good few years ago when I first got into the habit of always havinga pad in my pocket.  They're gorgeous, hardwearing books and the pla...
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I spent World Sketchcrawl 28 at a Christian Conference in Newark with my lovely wiif and kids. Managed a handful of sketches, mainly of people at the various meetings, and here they are.


A newcastle lad playing footie outside the Impact meeting tent


This was an older guy waiting for the start of a seminar


and a woman doing the same in the front row.


and the young man running the seminar


Security on one of the gates


and the scene beyond the gate


A fellow caravanner, a hunchback filling his water bar...
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In the end there are very few measures for a life well lived.  How much joy did you have and how much did you spread?  Living to work isn't what it's about.  To that end Karen and I decided we'd form our own business, or, more accurately, I'd join her training business.  So now I'm a qualified Emergency First Aid at Work trainer, Karen is continuing as a Manual Handling Trainer and I get to spend the larget part of my time at home with my son enjoying him growing up.  If I work five days in a...
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My son Harry is 20 months old and as typical a boy as you can get.  Loves his mother, wrestles his father, annoys his sister, plays with cars and sticks and water and is into everything he shouldn't be.  And when he's quiet he looks like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

This sketch was done this morning while he was helping me fill the paddling pool.  He first turned the hose on the dog and then on me.



The hat he is wearing is his tribute to Henry Fonda in "On Golden Pond".

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 A story by my daughter Molly, aged 8

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Marigold who always spread happiness in the land.  One day she saw a little girl weeping on the side of the pavement. 

Marigold went over to the little girl and said "What's the matter little girl?  Can I help with anything?"

"No" said the little girl, "my parents are just being annoying."

I wonder if this is her way of telling us we're being a little to pushy in trying to help her improve her handwriting.
...
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Frank Frazetta is dead.  Possibly the greatest fantasy artist of all time and certainly one of the most influential, Frazetta's been spared the sight of his family squabbling over his artwork and gone to paint in a better place.

My first encounter with Frazetta was when I was eleven, the Conan covers.  This was swiftly followed by volumes 1, 2 and 3 of The Art of Frank Frazetta and the realization that none of his contemporaries came close in terms of ability.  I know less than nothing about F...
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It's been a hectic couple of months.  I've just about got through the first anniversary of my dad's passing, two very busy months at work looking after old folks, a three day First Aid at Work course, a two day instructors course for teaching emergency first aid, trying to start up a business with my wife to support us both, supporting Karen through finishing her latest ergonomics module and a bundle of stuff around the house mean that continued semi regular sketching, writing and drawing, ha...
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It's been so long since I did any drawing with intentions that extend beyond simply drawing that I was stunned and suprised by a recent opening of the floodgates.  In the past three weeks I've written and sketched out/laid out 28 pages of a children's picture book, begun work on a script of some kind, rewritten and continued the first 6 pages of a western comic, reworked Aldenburgh, a comics magnum opus, and started on thumbnailing after struggling for 2 years with a lack of ending for the st...
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I've been doing care work for an un-named agency and it's been a real eye opener.  The work itself is less emotionally distressing then most people think.  I expected bathing and changing continence pads to be very awkward but it's all so matter of fact that I don't think either party are uncomfortable.  The most interesting thing about ti is that it's given me a story idea that's got me more excited than any story in the last five years.  Biggest problem is it requires a degree of comedic wr...
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Having real problems with canon printeer scanner since upgrading to Windows Vista which is why there's been no new artwork lately.  Upgrading your os seems to be a major pain in the backside in fact.  More to follow.

Typically I post about this after a number of days fighting with it and then immediately figure it out.

Still can't scan into Photoshop but I can scan now as shown by this,

The first attempt at sketching or drawing a car in more years than I can count using the digits on all my lim...
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When I have five minutes to spare I want to do a proper review of this but in the meantime go watch the funniest animation on the NFB site, The Cat Came Back by Cordell Barker.  This is a very different approach to adapting an old folk song, irreverant would be an understatement, but absolutely hilarious.

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I was telling a friend last night, the hugely talented Paul Harrison Davies, that I seem to have the opposite of writer's block at the moment, I've got so many ideas in my head that I'm finding it near impossible to focus on just one.  As each bubbles to the forefront the idea behind it is shouting "Hey, how about me?" and demanding attention ad infinitum.  trying very hard to focus on drawing a flood coming to get one thing finished and juggling ideas about a western I tried to start 2 years...
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Looked out the window this morning and the world looked like a Christmas card cliche again.  Cane back from the school run and couldn't drive back up the hill to the house as the snow had formed ice over the top of the gravel previously laid down.  I've had enough of this now.  I'd like it gone.

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Cute piece of software that imitates a polaroid camera.  Found out about it on Size Matters, the mini comic blog; You drag and drop your own photo into the software and these are the results you get.


The classic family shot, a day out on a British Beach.  Notice the fingerprint.


Molly ready for her new school



Harry's first haircut.  Again note the fingerprint and scratchs


and the Christmas label image of the two of them.

I love the way it reproduces the slightly fuzzy, mildly sepia look of old pol...
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Snow never really picks it's tie all that well.  Tuesday I went to the dentist with a mild tooth ache which, by the time I got home and the injection wore off, turned into a raging exposed nerve pain and ended up requiring a root canal.  However to get there I had to go through this.

Wednesday

Morning
Nobody is going anywhere.  Thick snow is lying like a pale eiderdown across the city and visibility is only about 40 feet. Molly's school is open but side roads are murder and police are recommendi...
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I've always had a great appreciation for what gets classed as commercial art, book illustration and covers, poster art, album covers, and am always amazed at the sheer quality of the artwork created.  This is probably because I've bought into the myth of the starving artist in the garrett.  Van Gogh aside, the majority of the old masters and the great painters that followed all produced their work commercially.  Pictures were commissioned to fill a space somewhere and the artist was paid.  On...
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Drawn by hand, scanned into photoshop and cleaned up then painted using ArtRage 2.15.  Bloody superb painting software.  And damn cheap.

It's been a lousy bloody year, lost a parent, laid off from work, lots of money worries and a whole host of family illnesses.  It will get better.

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Not sure and can't be bothered to check, but I think it was Blanche DuBois in a Streetcar naed Desire who said it first.  The kindness of strangers always, inevitably takes you by suprise, be it the two foriegn girl students who stopped to help me push my car out of a busy road while my fellow countrymen drove by, leaning on their horns and swearing at me, or the departing Editor of the sadly defunct Nickolodeon Magazine, Dave Roman, who sent out care packages of half a dozen magazines to any...
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Okay I know this happened a while back but I think we're starting to see results from it now.  Disney XD, the rebranded Jetix aimed at boys, now has an all Marvel Superhero segment on Saturday Mornings and Iron Man, Armoured Adventures as a key series on the channel.  Admitedly the segment is made up of new Iron Man alongside old X-Men and Hulk cartoons, but it's a step towards Disney making some use of it's new aquisition.

Disney XD's UK launch saw viewing figures in the region of half a mill...
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My son Harry turned 1 a couple of weeks ago.  Here's pictures of him with one of his favourite toys.





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It's 1974, autumn, a rainy Sunday afternoon.  I'm sat on the carpet and have just watched John Wayne in one of John Ford's Cavalry trilogy on BBC 2, one of only three tv channels available.  Then next there's a couple of animated shorts, not your Disney or Warner Bros cartoons, they're reserved for BBC 1, but a film by Norman McLaren that involves animating live people around a strange outdoor garden set.  This is followed by an almost liquid swirling abstraction that interprets a bouncy piec...
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This is soooo funny!!!  The comics world is once more ablaze with bad feelings towards Alan Moore.  This time it's because he's said in an interview that DC is still living off the ideas he produced for them 30 odd years ago.  This time Geoff John's Darkest Night story is the target for his ire.  As ever Moore is railing against the storytelling bankruptcy currently prevalent in Marvel and DC comics and how far to many stories at DC are based on throwaway ideas in stories he produced at the c...

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I've always been a big fan of animation in it's many forms, largely thanks to afternoons watching National Film Board of Canada  shorts on BBC2 on a sunday afternoon when I was a kid.  Many of their films had a Punk, DIY, approach long before te idea of Punk became attached to it.  The French probably view it more as an auteur thing.  The NFB website has hundreds of films, including some superb documentaries, available to view for free and is highly recommended.

What brought this to mind thoug...
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Just added a second gallery of older sketches, some with a splash of colour. Also been busy working on the tale of Tibrogargan and Beerwah and a variety of other things as well, including "The daily Viking".
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Having figured out the how to's of adding a flicker gallery I've now posted a bunch of sketches on "pictures by me".  They're from over a year's span in my current Moleskine with the sheep being from this time in 2008 and the pictures of my son Harry being from this Saturday just gone.
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   Up until now 45 has just been part of the name of one of my favourite book shops.(Page 45, Nottingham)  In 11 days it will be my age.  Now I'll be the first to admit I don't do birthdays well but I have improved over the last 5 years.  My 40th was fun, camping in Somerset, and each subsequent year my lovely wife has managed to make memorable.  45 has caught me out though and I'm freaking a little.  I have a 10 month old son and I realised I'm going to be pushing 50 when he starts school, m...
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Two comics in the works, one, based on an aboriginal dreaming that's elsewhere on this site, is a tale of parental demands and familial failings.  The other is my first story set in Aldenburgh, my Ruritania if you will, and is a tale of lost childhood, memory, guns and love.  One short form, one long form, both to appear on the website once they're underway.  Unemployment hasn't really given me anymore time to draw but it's given me greater incentive.

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Test time.  This is a free website which offers the opportunity to upgrade to a "professional" web address.  So I'm gonna take some time to play.
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