Category: Art & Design
2023 Calendars
Goat Comic 2
Goat comics for fans of Borges and Le Guin. Volume two is finally here.
That’s my motto, here’s my banner
Primaeval Lumps of Flesh
You were a landscape in my dream
Moondial, sundial, wormdial?
I recently did some more illustrations/cryptic symbolism for my friend’s band Dawnwalker. All to be revealed later.
Nine Times Nine Pictures to Dispel the Cold
I was reading about a Chinese tradition similar to an advent calendar that starts on this day. It’s 81 days until the Spring, and that makes a neat grid of 9×9, leading to the tradition of Nine Times Nine Pictures to Dispel the Cold- draw or colour a picture every day to get you through the winter.
2022 calendar
My 2022 calendar is now ready – you can order calendars and prints of the artwork here.
Vinyl stickers redux
I got some vinyl stickers of my artwork printed up (after some long twists and turns with printing companies and the current goods/delivery shortages in the UK). £1.75 each (inc uk postage), or bundles available.
Margate Activity Books
I’ve made a children’s activity book about various locations in Margate, with open-ended drawing and writing activities that encourage observation, exploration and creativity, with very clear layouts and instructions. Suitable for age 7+.
Fanzine Ynfytyn 2002-2020 collection
The Deer Man I
Secrets! Mysteries! Forbidden powers of the forest!
Goat Comic Volume One
Interview with Sajan Rai
A short interview with my friend, illustrator Sajan Rai. I first met Sajan when we were assigned adjoining tables at a zine fair, and he was offering to draw people as sloths for £5. This clearly being a sign that he was the right kind of person, we became friends.
Goat Comic #1 pre-orders
Axolotls
After multiple people asked me, I did a print design of everyone’s favourite neotenous, cute but somewhat cannibalistic Mexican salamander.
Parmesan Water
I had dream that there was a craze for parmesan-infused mineral water, and everyone was obsessed with the stuff. I didn’t like it, and was considered extremely uncool.
ITV idents
Night and Fog Are My Days
Greencheeks
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 a stock can mockup template.
2021 calendars
I’ve finished my 2021 calendars, and they are available to order.
8 Track Tape photoshop mockup
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 couldn’t find one. So I made one and you can download it.
2021 Calendar pre-orders
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
Margate Film Festival poster
Halloween print
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 included) and only do 25 of them.
Vortex and Primordial Soup prints
Goat comic: A visit to the Oracle
Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania
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 owner David Walsh, is the richest man in Tasmania and a very strange character in his own right- he grew up in a rough area of Hobart, and made his fortune by using maths to outsmart the gambling industry, and then spent it on this museum. He’s simultaneously “mathematical genius” and “13 year old edgelord”.
Das Große Bastelbuch für Kinder (1996)
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 you do find one they’re usually really good, especially in small towns, where vintage isn’t really a big thing.
Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress (1983)
This charity shop fancy dress book is certainly… something. Lots of 80s actors modelling the costumes.
Goat Comic
Times Out of Mind
Louisiana Art Museum, Denmark
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 modern art museum and sculpture park just up the coast from Copenhagen.
The Fictional Books of Jorge Luis Borges
Some design changes
Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei
Sophie Woodrow sketchbook page
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 by Sophie Woodrow that I’d admired. I think it did me some good.
Mycenaean Grave Goods
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 direct, I drew various motifs on some acetate with marker, and then held it on the cyanotype paper with glass to expose the pictures. These prints were not the final project, I don’t know where that has gone. They were more preliminary exploration work.
Tim and the Hidden People
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 atmosphere, and the illustrations in the first three collections are a little uncanny valley. Tim is always walking along lonely canal paths with strict instructions to not look over his shoulder and tie the silver string around a particular tree or else.
Ink Master Copies
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 tend to draw the line artwork by hand with a non-photo blue pencil and posca marker, and correct mistakes/add the colour digitally.
Ivan Bilibin
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 for his lavishly illustrated books of fairy tales taking inspiration from Japanese wood prints, Russian icon painting and Ye Olde Slavonic script.
Graz Art Museum
Street Signs of Győr
There’s also lots of vintage street signs in Győr. This one says “fabric dyeing and dry cleaning”.
Street Signs of Vienna
Vienna has strong rent controls for shops, meaning that many of them are in the same location for decades, leading to lots of vintage shop signs around town (along with stylish new ones like the brewery one above). Here’s a selection of different ones I spotted on this trip.
Architekturzentrum Wien
I also visited Vienna Architecture Centre- I’d never been inside this small museum before, but the entry was thrown in free with the bundle ticket I bought for the other exhibitions.
Vienna Academy of Fine Art
On a rare day off in Vienna I went to the Open Studio day at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. This is the top art school in Austria, and also the same institution that famously rejected Hitler twice for his lack of creativity. The studios are in this impressive building, the Semperdepot, which was originally built to store theatre scenery and props.
Kunstautomat
Kunsthalle Wien – Nina Vobruba/Malte Zander + Time is Thirsty
The Kunsthalle Wien holds temporary exhibitions- I caught the last day of this show. It definitely isn’t the best thing I’ve seen there- I’ve previously been to blockbuster Basquiat, Haring and Švankmajer shows there, but it was included in the Combi-ticket I bought for the other museums, so I made sure to see it.
Post Club
Get a nice surprise in the post every month- sent out on the 22nd of each month. Zines, mini-prints, postcards, stickers. It’s a surprise.
Slovak National Gallery
The Slovak National Gallery was also open late- it was free that day too because they were changing the exhibitions and only two rooms were open. From the website it seems like there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the museum, and it’s a pity I didn’t get to see it, but I enjoyed the small section I did get to see.
2020 Calendar
I’ve made an A5 calendar of my illustrations – the calendar itself is £7, and the artwork is also available as prints of various sizes. UK postage is free, and international postage is automatically calculated by weight.
Photoshop Digital Colour tutorial
Multiple people have asked me for a tutorial of how I do colour in Photoshop. A lot of people think my prints are analogue screen-prints, but they’re actually mostly digital. I draw the ink lines by hand, but all the colour and texture is created in Photoshop.
Magic Stories From Around the World (1986)
Here is another scan of a vintage book I have had since I was a child. This is a collection of myths and legends from around the world. It was originally Czech and translated to English, and has a large selection of central European stories less known in the UK, along with stories from places like the high Arctic and Polynesia. There are also lovely illustrations by three prominent Czech illustrators.
Psychic Rat print
New print over in the shop- Psychic Rat. £6 for A6, £12 for A4, £24 for A3.
Extinction Dome print
Here’s another print- price in the shop varies from £6-£24 depending on size. You can order one here. Features a plesiosaur, a nautilus and a coelacanth for your pleasure.
Nervy Betters poster
I designed this poster for my friend Henry, based on Ware landmark Scott’s Grotto, but forgot to post it here. It’s tomorrow if you are in the area.
Space Dachshund print
I’ve got a new print in the shop. A5 at £6, A4 at £12, A3 at £24.
70s Soft Toy Book
Here are some scans from a 1970s craft book I got from my grandparents’ house.
2012 sketchbook
While clearing up, I found an old sketchbook from 2012. Here’s some photos of some pages.
Mushroom King prints
I now have prints of this Mushroom King artwork up for sale. A5 is £6, A4 £12 and A3 £24. Find them in the shop.
Planetary Urbanisation
Yesterday I went to a talk at Well Projects from anthropologist/sound artist Dimitrios Bormpoudakis from the University of Kent as part of A Cut From Sharp Grass, “a visual art exhibition & series of public events developed in response to the increasingly urbanised, networked & technologically integrated landscape of Kent”. Here’s my sketchbook notes from the talk.
Cake Exploding
I had a dream that Cake Exploding was a popular hobby, with world championships and dedicated YouTube channels. Here’s the comic version. Available from the shop for £1.75
Feral Practice
Earlier this week I went to a free art workshop hosted by Open School East. Open School East is a combination art course/residency and students are required to organise public art workshops. This time environmental artist Fiona MacDonald aka Feral Practice was the visiting artist. There was a talk about ants and fungi and the aim of “meeting with animal/plant/place through the processes and reflexivity of art”, and then we went out into a local park with a woodland area to do some classic sensory/location art activities. Here are my sketchbook pages and some snaps from the day.
Diana Wynne Jones conference notes
A couple of weeks ago I went to an academic conference in Bristol focused on the works of Diana Wynne Jones. She is probably best known for writing the book that the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle was based on, but she has around thirty other books aimed at a variety of ages. Even the ones aimed at children have a surprising amount of psychological and literary depth, and a willingness to explore very dark issues not usually found in books for that age group, giving her work a huge appeal to adults and academics.
Infrared print
I liked one of the images I got from the Lomochrome film so much I decided to offer it as a print in the shop.
It Came From the Merch Table
People loved the poster, so I got some merch printed up to sell at the festival, and some local friends to model it in an impromptu photo shoot…
Beige Palace & Dead Kaczynski
Here’s another gig poster I did (this time for a gig that’s already passed, because I’ve been so slack about updating this blog)…
Jazz snails
Another poster I did for a local gig I helped promote…
Enter the Vortex
So here’s the posters I designed for two gigs I’m helping to put on- one in London, the other in Margate. As per the press release “Girl Sweat is the ever-changing garage-noise project fronted by the 6ft 5” beast that is ‘Sweat’” along with the fine collection of psych and drone weirdos assembled in support. My brief for the poster was “illuminati/masons cult shit”. I hope I delivered.
Behemoth Lives!
Margate is currently hosting a variety of art events related to T.S.Eliot (who wrote the Wasteland here almost a century ago), including a weekend dedicated to cats over Easter. I created this print based on Bulgakov’s the Master and Margarita, and a giant painted banner version of it to hang up at the show. It was a bit last minute, but I got it all done on time. The show is on at the Viking Gallery off Northdown Rd over the long Easter weekend and until the 7th of April.
Whitstable print
Here’s an illustration I recently did of Whitstable seafront. A3, A4 and A5 giclée prints are available here.
Primordial Soup
Here’s a gig poster I drew recently. I was given free reign to do whatever I wanted, and it turns out what I wanted was to do a fake cyanotype of pondscum. Facebook event for the show here.
Dawnwalker
So I recently did some artwork for an album cover- Human Ruins by Dawnwalker (featuring Dane Cross from Sacred Son, who caused an incredible fuss last with the Black Metal fanboys with his choice of album artwork). I did the moons and runes, and someone else did the photograph and logo. Photos courtesy of Mark from the band.
New print- Sheep Skull
So here’s a new illustration I did. It’s actually based on a drawing I did when I was 17 that I found while sorting out some paperwork recently. You can buy monochrome and colour prints for £3-£30 over on the shop.
Die grade Linie ist die unschöpferische Linie
Just before Christmas I ran a Hundertwasser-themed workshop as a fundraiser for 101 Social Club. (If you are not familiar with Austrian artist, architect, environmentalist and cranky old hippy Friedensreich Hundertwasser, I have written about him quite a few times- you can find the entries here) People had food and drink, learnt about Hundertwasser’s work and philosophies, and did three different casual art activities- collaborative line making, resist painting, and creating architectural models of Hundertwasser-style buildings out of recycled materials. All while listening to the fine selection of Can, Neu, Fennesz, Cluster, Faust and other artists from the playlist below (I had it on shuffle on the night)
British Museum Sketches
Here’s some more old sketchbook pages I scanned, this time from the British Museum.
Wooden hands
I got a short notice illustration job this week for images for Christmas greetings from Buildopia, an Italian eco-building company. They specialise in wood and their slogan translates as “the building game”.
“I cried for madder music and for stronger wine”
I have Bacchae prints available again. The text says “I caught this young lion myself without a trap”. Based on the scene from Euripides’ Bacchae where Pentheus’ mother tears her own son’s head off with her bare hands while under Dionysus’ spell and parades it round the stage. Available from me as a print here for £6 or £12 depending on size. Ideal festive gift for all, look how red it is.
Hobotnica
And to round off my stuff from Croatia, here’s some sketchbook notes from Zadar museum and Trogir. Hobotnica (pronounced hobotnitsa) is Croatian for octopus. It’s a good word.
Topiary
I used to work at Hampton Court. This is a marker drawing of some of the trees in the gardens there. I earnt a pittance, worked every single weekend for six months, and wore a terrible polyester uniform. I got very used to being surrounded by incredible splendour though, and spent quite a lot of happy hours minding the maze, sitting in a shed reading long Russian books, listening to whatever mellow music wouldn’t annoy tourists (lots of Elliot Smith, Fleetwood Mac, Tortoise and Grandaddy), and making up lies about the maze to tourists. (I wrote about being in charge of the maze in issue 22 of my zine). I also used to get a good amount of free glasses of Pimms too from jugs that were left over from the outside bar.
A magician calls
Another old sketchbook page I scanned in. This one is from a couple of years ago. I was teaching on a residential course for teenagers. It was in an old nunnery in the middle of nowhere, so the staff organised a lot of evening activities and film showings to keep them amused. One night a magician came to do a show, and I made these notes.
Ljubljana Biennial
This summer I had to chance to go to both Documenta in Kassel and the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. Here’s my photos from one of the Ljubljana Biennial exhibitions that allowed photos. The theme of this Biennial was this poem by Slovenian writer Jure Deleta.
My only love is the sea
Here’s an illustration of a fishing village in Cornwall.
Ghost Notes
Earlier in the summer I went on a ghost tour of Cambridge via work, and I took these notes.
Seahorse Lino cuts
Lino printing 101.
Sea Serpent Bookplates
I’ve made these printable bookplates, in both A4 and US Letter sizes. Four per page. They are for personal use only- you may not sell copies you have printed, host these files on another site, or use the artwork for any other commercial purpose.
The downloads are free, but if you like and use them, a pay-what-you-want tip is very much appreciated.
Valentina Tereshkova stickers & Write More Letters patches
While unpacking my art stuff, I found some long-lost screen-printed patches, and some packets of kraft paper sticker blanks I had no memory of buying. So I rejigged some old artwork to create some stickers.
Metelkova
Metelkova is an area in the centre of Ljubljana that was originally a military barracks, then was squatted in the early 90s when the Yugoslav army pulled out after Slovenia declared independence, and is now full of social centres, workshops and gig venues. (And a hostel where I stayed overnight before crossing the border to Klagenfurt for work).
Margate Zine Club
I moved house last week back to back with coming back from Germany, and am exhausted, but here I am organising events. A little zine meet up in a lovely local cafe/record shop/yoga studio- plenty of vegan and gluten-free options. Free entry, and step-free, but sadly no disabled toilet (the toilets are upstairs).
Three new zines
I’ve got three new zines out- one about France, one about Italy, and one about film photography
Sick Exhibition
I’m much more timely with writing about this than I usually am, because the exhibition is currently running. My friend Zara Carpenter has curated an exhibition of artworks In Chatham related to chronic illness. It runs from the 4th to 27th August at Sun Pier House, Chatham. You can find out more about the exhibitors and philosophy behind the exhibition on the website. There are just some hasty phone photos from the opening night.
Benesse Museum collection
Benesse House on Naoshima doesn’t allow photos of their modern art collection, so here is a selection of works I like by some artists I saw there. I though the space of the museum was wonderful, but the fact that there was no information about the artworks was a letdown. If you didn’t know much about modern art already, you might not have got much out of the visit, which is a bad thing for a museum, seeing as one of the main reasons to go is to learn new things.
Naoshima
Naoshima is tiny idyllic island in the Seto Inland sea devoted to modern art. The opening of the Benesse modern art museum (owned by the same organisation as Berlitz language schools) revived the island’s fortunes, although it’s still a small and quiet place with only a few villages and a lot of old people.
Brown paper packages tied up with string
I’ve also coloured a few of the colouring book pages in Photoshop, mostly for my own amusement.
To create this effect of being printed on brown paper:
Colour me in
Lately I’ve been drawing much more, and writing a lot less. I’ve been preparing artwork for a colouring book, which I need to get finished by the 12th of November, to have ready in print for the Rose Tinted Zine Spectacular in Brighton on the 19th of November. So there’s been a lot of 8 hour drawing sessions and high levels of caffeine consumption.
The risograph lives again (after a fashion)
About five years ago I did two risograph prints, one based on Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock, and the other on Euripides’ Bacchae. Each print was an edition of 50, and I sold all of them a long a time ago (except for a couple of copies I kept for myself). Now I have a giclée printer though, I have resurrected them as a new edition. This time they’re printed on Canson Infinity rag museum paper, which is an acid free and archival watercolour paper for fine art digital printing.
Blogs -vs- zines
People who don’t make or read them much themselves sometimes ask me why I still make zines, even though the internet exists, and the world is becoming more and more digitally-focused, and I have this blog. In short, the answer is for the same reason I still have hundreds of records and books, and develop black and white film at home, even though I have an ipod, spotify subscription, e-reader and two digital cameras, and I’m far from a luddite: I feel the physical medium offers me something that I don’t get from the digital version.
On Light Festival
A few weeks ago, University College London held a light-themed street festival, with stalls run by the different university departments with demonstrations and free activities. My friend Mel was there to win a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest cyanotype print (she’s already the holder of the record, which she did as part of an arts festival in India earlier this year, but she wanted to beat her previous record).