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Happy Christmas, if you celebrate it. I was brought up unreligious, by unbelieving parents, in a not very religious country, and there are no young children in my immediate family,…
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Ruth had a dream that you could buy tins of something called “Greencheeks” that seemed to be tinned Kermit meat. I had to make this a reality in Photoshop using…
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I’ve finished my 2021 calendars, and they are available to order.
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I love using Photoshop product mockups – there’s something satisfying about creating a total lie of an object that doesn’t exist. I wanted an 8 track tape mockup, but I…
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I’m finishing off my 2021 calendar artwork – I’ve put pre-orders up. Calendars are £8.50 inc UK postage and you can also get prints of the artwork
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Margate Film Festival is coming up at the end of the month- obviously in person screenings aren’t possible, so the festival has switched to online. Tickets and film programme at…
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Second volume. This time with Tove Jansson, leylines, derelict canals and a strange comic about insects.
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I don’t normally do seasonal stuff, but on a whim today I decided to do a halloween themed thing, make the A4 prints cheaper than usual at £8.50 (uk postage…
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Another charity shop book- this time from the 70s. It’s a slightly strange mix of technicolour things made from recycling bin objects or fabric scraps, and then a section about…
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Here’s a playlist I made while I was in Melbourne of (mostly current) Australian stuff I heard played in various shops and cafes. Daytime Australian radio is where cock rock…
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On my last day in Australia, I had a few hours to waste in between checking out of the hotel and getting the train to the airport. I was staying…
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While I was in Sydney, I went for the day to visit my friend Zoe in the inland mountain town of Katoomba.
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This edition has a behind the scenes of Captain Pugwash, extracts from Tove Jansson, Jill Patton-Walsh, an article about CS Lewis, and interviews with various different authors.
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When I was in Sydney I met up with my friend Vanessa Berry, who writes Mirror Sydney (in both blog and book form), covering interesting and weird stuff she finds…
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While in Sydney I met up with my friend Emma Davidson who runs Take Care zine distro, and we had a wander round Newtown (not far from where she grew…
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To be honest I wasn’t fussed about the centre of Sydney. I was staying close to the harbour, but it all felt very bland and glossy, like living in a…
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Two new prints in the shop, rejigged from old poster artwork. Prices are £6 for A5, £12 for A4 and £24 for A3. You can find them here.
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Another book from a charity shop in Austria. I love how incredibly cack-handed some of the cakes are. Most themed cake books are impossibly professional, these ones actually look like…
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MONA was one of my main reasons for visiting Tasmania. It’s basically in an underground bunker like a Bond villain’s lair, and requires a boat ride to get to. The…
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One of my main reasons to go to Tasmania was the MONA art museum. Because it’s pretty much a Bond villain’s lair, you have to get a ferry there. I…
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Hobart is the capital of Tasmania, and one of the oldest cities in Australia- lots of old buildings. Even by Australian standards it has a really grim history of genocide…
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Here’s Australia continued- my trip to Tasmania and the pretty seaside town of Sandy Bay, hometown of Errol Flyn. If you have any idea from the cartoon that Tasmania is…
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I got this craft book for kids from a charity shop in Austria earlier this year. Austria doesn’t have the same volume of charity shops as the UK, but when…
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This charity shop fancy dress book is certainly… something. Lots of 80s actors modelling the costumes.
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Fitzroy Gardens is a park in the centre of Melbourne with a model village, lovely botanical conservatory and some fairly strange sculptures and tree carvings.
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There are of course loads of great record shops in Melbourne. However the problem is that most of the stock is imports from the UK and US, and I can…
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Sticky Institute is a Melbourne institution- a zine shop in the basement of Flinders Street train station that’s been there since 2001
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In Australia, charity shops are called op shops, short for opportunity shops and Melbourne has really great ones
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Melbourne was a boom town in the 50s and 60s with people wanting to leave post-war Europe (and also places like Lebanon) and there are loads of great period shop…
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Here’s some photos from around Melbourne in Sept 2018 (yes, it has taken me that long to sort them out), they’re mostly phone photos taken as I wandered around. Melbourne…
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Here’s a few photos from St Kilda in Melbourne. It’s a fancy coastal suburb of Melbourne filled with interwar bungalows, with a pier and esplanade. In the 1960s it was…
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Last year I went on a trip to Australia, with a stop-off in Singapore along the way. I’ve finally started sorting out the photos and writing a zine about the…
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To keep myself occupied lately, I’ve been drawing comics of goats. They’re extremely silly. I originally drew the goats for this flyer for Norwegian band Moon Relay (who are very…
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I meant to do a lot today but ended up napping on the sofa, so I went for an early evening walk along the beach to see the sunset and…
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After finishing the Borges project, I realised that one of the book covers with a little alteration and the addition of a cow parsley silhouette I already had, also worked…
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I was tidying up some old photos and found some from my trip to Denmark in 2015 that I never posted. These are of the Louisiana Art Museum. It’s a…
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Jorge Luis Borges loved to create fictional books in his stories, using non-fiction formats like book reviews of non-existent books to tell a story. If you haven’t read any Borges…
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Everything has been grim- the world, politics, more personal matters. Here is a short playlist of a certain mood of corruscating bleakness.
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I watched a documentary about typography the other day, and it made me want to make a few adjustments to the fonts on my blog template. Which then lead to…
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Here’s some photos from a while back in Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei a beauty spot near where my mum lives in Northern France. It’s a strange little place, located on top of a…
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In 2016 I left London to house sit in the small town where my grandparents had lived. After a sequence of unfortunate events involving electricians and train strikes I ended…
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It’s very unlikely I or anyone else will be travelling much this summer (I’ve not been more than a mile away from home for months now), so I thought I’d…
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I was a teenager in the dark ages when you had to have lightning reflexes to tape songs you liked when they came on. I didn’t have cable or satellite…
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I got this 1980s guide to using lens filters from a charity shop. Of course a lot of these effects can be created in Photoshop these days, but actually for…
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Here’s a playlist. There’s a certain early 80s synth pop mood, even if all the songs aren’t actually from that era. There’s some Russian stuff, there’s the Deftones covering Duran…
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I’ve really been in a creative slump under lockdown. All that time, no motivation. I forced myself to do some drawing today- just some simple sketches of some ceramic sculptures…
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I cleaned and reorganised one shelf that I’d never been happy with, and before I knew it, I’d spent pretty much most of the day cleaning and rearranging stuff. When…
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I was tidying up and found some bits from art school ten years ago. Here’s some preliminary sketches I did for a project based on Mycenaean artefacts. Rather than draw…
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If you are playing an electric guitar or bass, you will need an amp. Here’s a guide to how they work, and how to find the one that will suit…
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Not many people are getting to the beach these days, but I live right next to it (in fact I can see the sea from my living room window). It’s…
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In the fuzzy zone between Christmas and New Year I scanned a lot of old negatives. I’ve recently started going through them and editing the photos. It’s not like travel…
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Tim and the Hidden People is a series of children’s school reading books from the late 70s/early 80s that a lot of schools had. They have a strange, bleak folk-horror…
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I realised I still had a few photos from February in Austria left unposted, so here they are. Strange to think that six weeks ago I was travelling around Central…
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I haven’t posted much this month because I was ill- not ill enough to need medical attention or be bedridden, but not ill enough to do anything much either. Was…
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A couple of years ago I won some plane tickets to Japan, and went inter-railing around Western Japan with my friend Vicky. The whole trip was short notice and on…
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My living room has a very handy built-in bookshelf (although the amount of different compartments meant it took a long time when I moved in to paint over the old…
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This was my April 2014 piece for Storyboard , a writing site with monthly prompts run by a friend. I couldn’t think of a story idea, so I wrote a…
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I had a whole folder full of artwork masters, so I decided to stick them into sketchbooks this afternoon (these kraft paper folio-sized books are around £6 from Muji). I…
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I thought while stuck at home I’d do regular posts showing things I like which other people may not have heard of. Ivan Bilibin was a Russian artist most famous…
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A few years back I made a zine with articles about writer Diana Wynne Jones (probably best known for writing Howl’s Moving Castle), and an interview I conducted with her…
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Amstetten is the most extremely average place in Austria. It’s a largish commuter town in between Linz and Vienna. You have no reason to visit it. Its main claim to…
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I was supposed to be back in Austria right now, running more school workshops. Obviously that’s not happening now, due to the Coronavirus lockdown. Here’s some photos from Salzburg a…
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I was supposed to be in Austria right now running school workshops, but obviously that’s not happening. Like many other people right now I’m unemployed as my whole industry has…
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Austria Post does an excellent fixed price box within Europe which is extremely handy when you’re travelling around for weeks on end with a 20kg luggage restriction and needing to…
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Here’s some assorted photos from Deutschlandsberg. It’s a very ordinary small Austrian town near Graz. Although it’s a pretty and nice place, it’s probably not where you’d pick for a…
