Art & Design – Page 2 – A Note On a Rainy Night

Save Waterloo Library

I made these posters to help a friend campaign to stop Waterloo Library being closed down and sold off (there is definitely no resemblance intended to a certain range of paperback books . . ). Lambeth council is making devastating cuts to their libraries after having their budget cut. This government have been slowly and deliberately destroying every public service they can, if it doesn’t make their rich business friends richer, they don’t care. Libraries are incredibly important, and the poorer the area the more vital they are. Even with my family, who did have books at home, there is no way I would have the education I have now if I hadn’t have been constantly reading books from the public library growing up.

Andre Thomkins

When I was in Liechtenstein, I went to the Modern Art museum there. I was really impressed with the quality of the museum, especially in such a small country. They had a special exhibition about Swiss artist André Thomkins (whose estate had donated his works to the museum). I hadn’t come across him before, but I really enjoyed what I saw (and his large array of German puns), especially the short film where he was talking and demonstrating how he made marbled paintings by floating lacquer on top of water, something he started experimenting with after washing a brush he’d been painting furniture with.

Professor Knatschke

My university library had a massive stack of printing industry annuals from the 1890s through to the 20s. I always enjoyed looking through them because the illustrations and articles they chose to showcase new printing technologies were often really odd, and were good to photocopy for collages and zines. Next to them on the shelf was a strange little book called Professor Knatschke. It’s a comedy book written and illustrated in 1912 by Alsatian satirist Jean-Jacques Waltz, aka Hansi, about a clueless German professor and his daughter’s trip to Paris, mocking both the French and the Germans (but mostly the Germans) in a more innocent pre-WW1 pre-Nazi era. I always really liked the illustrations (and Elsa K’s obsession with making gifts embroidered with “inspiring” mottoes) , and now it’s available free online as a copyright-free ebook.

Slugs. Ugh.

I forgot to post this before. My friend Tukru does a freebie Halloween themed zine every year for her zine distro. She needed some extra pages and asked me to draw a monster, so I cobbled this together and scanned it in about 45 minutes. I hate slugs. Horrible things. In my final year of uni, I lived in a house which had seemed fine when viewed in the summer, but come winter turned out to have a real damp problem, and a slug problem in the kitchen

Malevich

Recently I went to the Malevich exhibition at the Tate Modern. I was vaguely aware of him as an avant-garde Russian artist (turns out more Polish-Ukrainian) and his black square paintings which caused such a fuss, but I didn’t know much else about him. I’m glad I went to the exhibition.

Kerguelen Islands Prints

I’ve done some prints of this picture I drew of the Kerguëlen Islands off the coast of Antarctica. Nothing there but penguins, cabbages and the odd french scientist. What could be more delightful? They are available in two sizes- A4 for £7 + postage and A3 for £20 + postage (the small ones will be sent flat, the large rolled into a tube), and are printed on 250 gsm semi-gloss paper with a white border. Available now from the shop.

Space Scrapbook

I have kept scrapbooks like this since about 2002, sticking in things like ticket stubs, catalogues from art exhibitions, food packaging, passport photos etc. Future historians will probably not be that grateful to me. Once a year or so I also make a general list of things I like, to compare with previous years. The lists have been pretty consistent though, my tastes don’t change a lot. This scrapbook spans late 2011 to the end of 2013. I photographed all the pages and made this gif. I took photos of some other old ones too, but I haven’t finished editing the pages yet.

Bacchae prints for sale

I still have a couple of these 22×25 cm / 8.5×9.5″ risograph prints based on the Bacchae by Euripedes left.

The text says “ἔμαρψα τόνδ᾽ ἄνευ βρόχων λέοντος ἀγροτέρου νέον ἶνιν ὡς ὁρᾶν πάρα.” which means “I caught this young lion by myself, without a trap”. Pentheus’ mother, having run off into the woods with Dionysus to be a maenad, kills her son in a frenzy because she thinks he’s a lion, and then parades his head around the stage boasting about the lion she’s killed. That old plot cliché.

Tate Britain

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I went to the Tate Britain the other day. I went there planning to go to the Folk Art exhibition, but realised I didn’t have the time or money to do it justice that day, and what I was actually in the mood for was post-war modern art. So that’s what I looked at.

DIY Space for London needs a home

DIY Space for London has now raised £13,000 but doesn’t have a building. I made these posters to help recruit people to find something suitable.

Fire & Hemlock risograph prints

Someone requested one of these risograph prints based on Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones (one of my all time favourite books) recently, but I thought I had run out. When I was re-organising some things thought recently it turned out I had 10 left after all. £10 + postage from the shop.

Fabric designs

I finally got the printing samples back of the fabrics I designed. They are all available on Spoonflower, a print on demand fabric site. I was very pleased with the end results. I was a little nervous about how they would come out, because I didn’t stick to the recommended colour palette from the site, but the colours came out exactly as I wanted. You can order them as fat quarters or by the meter/yard. I recommend getting them printed on the kona cotton. If you do order any fabric, make sure to wash it on a delicate cycle with a less harsh detergent like ecover.

Pinup Payback- Anti sexual harassment campaign

I recently made this poster for Pinup Payback, a feminist/anti-sexism organisation in Medway run by a friend. I was given the theme of “girls just want to have fun” without creeps, so here are some gooey, sticky creeps. My hometown has a really disproportionate rate of sexual assault for the population, and a lot of people whose attitudes are stuck far, far in the past. Growing up there, and also going back to visit, I have had men say the most appalling and disgusting things to me and my friends, far more than any other place I know. This poster (along with training for staff) will be going up in the pubs and bars in town that sign up to the campaign to show customers that if someone if harassing you, the venue promises to take it seriously, a campaign also being run in London by Hollaback.

To find out more about the campaigns, phone app and to donate, visit the website.

(and yes, girls in this instance does include anyone who feels they fall into that category)

Kerguelen Islands

Recently I was looking up something on a map, and my eyes were drawn to the Kerguelen Islands at the bottom. They seemed quite substantial, yet I’d never heard of them. It turns out they belong to France, are uninhabited except for a few scientists, and are full of penguins and cabbages. Sailors used to stop off there to have a grim cabbage feast to fend off scurvy. Here is a lonely penguin in the cabbage fields. I will never have another reason to draw that. The picture is available as a print and various other items on Society 6.

Tea Party

This is something I had to make in a short period of time at work recently. Invitation cards for an after school event for kids who volunteered for a specific thing earlier in the term. It was nice to have something I could actually draw. Last week I was sorting out endless posters of geometry equations. There’s not a great deal you can do with those in terms of illustration . .

Lassay les Châteaux

Last month I went to visit my mum in France. She lives just outside a small town called Lassay les Châteaux. It does indeed have several ruined castles. It’s on the Pays de la Loire / Normandy border, and most of the houses in town are old stone cottages. She considered buying one, but it was too damp. When people are thinking of France being cosmopolitan and chic, they are not thinking of rural Normandy. It’s a lot like Derbyshire, but without the mountains. The local cuisine is heavy on tripe, bacon and sour cream, served with teacups full of cider (there are two rival triperies in another nearby town). While I was there, I mostly ate my own weight in brioche and sour cream, and sat in the sun reading a book about the post-war political history of Europe. I took quite a lot of photos on film, so I’ll wait until I have those developed before writing more.

New website

So recently I’ve been spending a lot of frustrating time re-doing my website. I wanted it to work/look the same on computers, phones and tablets and be simple and unobtrusive and just work. It turns out making simple things that work properly is quite difficult. I was going for “so unobtrusive you barely notice it’s there” not “made on Geocities in 1998”. Anyway, I got people with various different pieces of equipment to test it and it all seems to work fine now. The artwork galleries are a little empty at the moment, but hopefully that will be remedied in the next few weeks with lots of new work.

Life Drawing

Last night I went with some friends to a life drawing class in the basement of a pub in Stoke Newington. I went to life drawing most weeks when I was in 6th form, but have been very sporadically every since. I think the last time I went was 9 months ago. Usually they’re in some sort of neon-lit municipal hall. This one was in a purple room, with music playing and with the most flattering lighting I’ve ever seen at a life drawing class. It was nice, I’m going to go back. Usually returning to life drawing after a long break makes me want to cry in frustration, because my pen just won’t do what I need it to do, but it wasn’t so bad this time. I didn’t produce anything of any value, but it was a good start, and I’ve lost the knack of foreshortening and hands. Here are my sketches. I had to resort to taping them to the door and photographing them, because the paper was too big for the scanner. I always write comments all over my sketches. Is that the drawing equivalent of talking to yourself?

Prague Puppet Shop

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Puppetry is a big thing in the Czech Republic. As well as being the home of Jan Švankmajer and Jiří Trnka, there are a few puppet shops in the Old Town in Prague selling the work of local puppet artists. I’m afraid I didn’t get the names of the artists who made these ones I photographed. I really wanted to buy a small puppet, they weren’t hugely expensive, but I didn’t have much chance of getting it home in one piece, so I reluctantly gave it a miss.

Golden Hands Book of Crafts

While I was at my grandparent’s place, I scanned some books. Here’s the Golden Hands Book of Crafts from the 70s. I have some of the magazine of the same name, which I scanned before. You can see that here. Most of the tutorials in the book weren’t very exciting, but there were some nice 70s stock pictures.

Space is Ace II

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My friend Mel put on a space-themed night at Power Lunches with some other students from her MA course. I helped out by designing the flyer, helping with decorating, and djing in the bar. I had a really good time, but I really don’t have anything nice to say about the behaviour of the three other St Martin’s students.

The night was really popular though, the place was packed, and everyone seemed to have a good time, which was the important thing.

Space is Ace

Tomorrow at Power Lunches in Dalston, my friend Melanie is putting on an event with her compadres from the Art & Science MA at St Martins. There’s going to be bands, sound art, projections, edible sugar glass planets, and a very large amount of tinfoil. I did the artwork for the flyer. If you like it, and are coming to the event, you will be able to buy A3 posters of it (a few people asked already). I don’t know the exact prices yet, because I haven’t got them printed yet, but the b&w edition will be roughly £1.50 and the colour version more.

Procrastinating in my limited spare time . .

I should be doing more of this, but instead I’m working very long hours at the dayjob. I’m either being a hermit, or trying to squeeze in some sort of social life. I hate rigidly scheduling things in my personal life, let’s leave that to work.

Revert to Disarray

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The gallery has some kind of connection with a hotel, and they held another event there the following night, with Jim Sclavunos from the Bad Seeds djing ( a strange mix of Iggy Pop and novelty jazz records), and a repeat of the music. It was quite a surreal experience. I don’t really drink in fancy hotels anyway, it not being in the budget. Also, on the way there, we stopped off to get some food, and eat it in a little park, the sort where office workers go to eat sandwiches. There was a crown green bowls contest going on in the middle of the financial district. We felt very civilised, watching bowls before going to socialise in a hotel.

Making Tracks- live cinema

A little while ago my friend Erika Pál had the animation she made for our MA show in Whirligig Cinema’s Making Tracks festival. She made recordings of the students describing dreams they’d had, and painstakingly created the animation with oil paints on glass and time-lapse photography. Here she describes how she made it. She doesn’t have it available to view online at the moment, so here are some stills from her website.

Souzou (missing images from Wellcome Collection)

At the moment at the Wellcome Collection they have a free exhibition of outsider art from Japan. All of the artists live in assisted living facilities, and most of them create their artwork as part of art therapy classes.

The Embarkation at Dover (1520s)

Here’s some photos of a painting I like. It shows Henry VIII setting sail for the Field of the Cloth of Gold for his swank-off with Francis I. The pictures aren’t the greatest, a tripod and polariser would improve them greatly, but you can still see all the details.

Laine, Wolle

On Sunday I went to an exhibition about wool at Somerset House with Natalie. As well as the expected demonstrations of things like Fair Isle and weaving, they had interiors and artworks made out of wool.

Hundertwasser

Every so often I like to write on here about things I like, and why I like them. I’ve (finally) been finishing my zine about Vienna, and there’s a section about Hundertwasser in there, but I didn’t really have enough space to say everything that I wanted to say, and in a b&w zine obviously you totally miss out on the colours, which are a major part of his work, so here is a longer thing about him and his work. I’ve visited the Kunsthaus/Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna quite a few times, and I wrote about one of my visits here. I first came across his work in 2001, when I was 16/17, and bought a £3 book from a discount shop because it looked interesting from a quick flick through. I’m glad I did! All the pictures in this entry are either taken by me, or come from hundertwasser.at. I don’t feel like I’ve really caught my exact favourites here, but collecting images from lots of different sources and making sure they were all credited properly would have taken a long, long time. Here’s an overview of some things.

Serious colouring in

For professional colouring in only. It says it on the label, see. Don’t worry, I’ve got a licence now.

Storming an onion

Something from my sketchbook- the text in the picture says it all really. (If you can’t read it/my handwriting, it says: “Recently I was reading an article which described getting through psychological defenses as storming a castle or like peeling an onion. Here is how you storm an onion”). I debated adding some kind of siege engine, but didn’t have space really.

Ugh. Disgusting.

Here’s a rough mock up of something I’ve been working on. It’s not quite how I want it yet. When I was younger I had a book called Nature All Around (I scanned it in this post) and it had a picture of a big orange slug that used to disgust and fascinate me. A few years ago I lived across the road from a fish and chip shop with a poster in the window advertising the “new masala cod”. The photo was a lurid orange, and looked a lot like a less frilly version of what I’ve drawn. If you bought a masala cod late at night and forgot to eat it, I always imagined it would creep along the carpet in the night and smother you like a terrible 70s horror film.

Surrealistic Pillows

I opened a Society6 shop today to sell my designs. You can get cushions, greetings cards and iphone/ipad/laptop covers. I have the same designs on Spoonflower, available as meters of fabric, but I’m still waiting to get my printing samples to check before they go live. I’ve got lots more patterns I’m working on, but here’s 6 to start with. Society6 have a special offer that ends at midnight Pacific Time (ie early in the morning GMT). If you order today, you get free postage. The link is here.

Sketching

I’ve had the bug that’s been going around over Christmas, albeit not badly, but I haven’t really done as much work/creative stuff as I’d like. Here’s some sketches I did this afternoon. I didn’t really plan what I was drawing, I just started making some lines and went from there. Mostly I just wanted to try out the white marker.

Death and the Penguin

I set myself a project recently of doing mock book covers. First up is Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov. I did both English and Russian versions of the cover. I’m not sure how successful it is, though. The map I used in the collage is of Kiev.

Coffee Pot Cafe

Loosely based on a picture I’d clipped out of this place. The photo I have is from a different angle though.

How I Make my Zines

This is how I personally make my zines. There’s no right or wrong way (aside from doing things like accidentally making it unreadable once photocopied or forgetting about your margins and cutting off half the text). If you want a more in-depth guide to all things zine-related, I can recommend Stolen Sharpie Revolution. You can see all the back issues of my zines on my website.

Et tu, pipio?

Last March, I drew these fat pigeons for Moogie Wonderland’s Ides of March event. I did a silhouette projection about Julius Caesar, and made some fortune telling games based on the Roman practices of divining by watching birds or inspecting livers. The birds read “turn me over for your fortune”, and were hung up with strings around the room (you can see that version here).

Airmail fabric

I designed some airmail/penpal themed fabric using some of the same artwork as the patches, and it’s available to buy on Spoonflower. They have various different fabric options, but I recommend the Kona cotton for this design, a smooth, medium-weight cotton. This is a scan of the actual fabric.

Printable Castle

I drew this castle that you can cut out and fold. There are two pdf versions for A4 paper and US Letter. By the way, it’s deliberately trapeze shaped rather than rectangular, so if you make it, don’t worry about one side being longer.

Endless card

This was something I made as development work on my MA, and never finished. It’s an endless card. Basically you cut four rectangles of card, and fold and glue them in such a way that you create a card that opens to reveal another opening, which then opens to another, and so on. You get four different pictures that open up. There’s a tutorial to make one here. I went to a workshop where they showed you how to make them, and the woman running it had made a very nice card of the story of Dorian Grey.

Write more letters

Today I screen-printed some patches. When I’ve done screen-printing before it’s been with proper facilities, not on my dad’s newspaper-covered kitchen table, with a cheap kit I got in the clearance sale, so I was a bit nervous. Preparing the screen and printing is a lot more fiddly when you don’t have a light table, spray washer or anything to rest the print on except a piece of cardboard. I thought that I’d messed up my screen when I was rinsing the emulsion after exposing it, and the water suddenly turned hot.

Costumes for Plays and Playing

When I was a kid I used to borrow this book again and again from the local library. The first thing I ever sewed myself was from it. A friend of mine at junior school’s older sister was in a school play of Toad of Toad Hall, and we went to watch. When you’re 7, 13 year olds seem incredibly impressive. What impressed me even more were the weasel costumes. I wanted one for myself. Armed with an offcut of brown fabric and a toy sewing machine I’d got at a bootfair, I made a hood with ears like the ones in the book. It was wonky, and I was a bit ashamed of it though, and wished I knew how to sew straight (looking back, I’m not sure the toy sewing machine was actually capable of a straight seam). My opinion of my sewing projects has improved slightly since.

Amoebas

For the last two weeks, I’ve been doing work experience at an animation studio. I know I don’t want to be an animator (too much minute adjusting of other people’s artwork!), but it’s been good to do anyway. I’d much prefer to design things, and then hand them over to some animating wonder, who would do a much better job than me. I made some minor contributions to an advert for Canadian tv (I’ll probably link it when it’s been on later in the year) and did costing for getting some promotional gifts made, but the most valuable thing has actually been just talking to people. Everyone is very friendly and helpful, and has insightful things to say.

I could be happy (missing images)

I was in London to go to a private view for my friend Mark Pembrey. He does fantastic things with typography and printmaking, and he had an exhibition at Woolfson and Tay, a bookshop in Bermondsey. For some reason, I was expecting it to be in an old quaint building on a market square, but Bermondsey Square turns out to be super modern. In fact they were filming a reality show there, where various famous people had to run a restaurant/hotel. There were quite a few bored looking locals standing around outside the restaurant window to see if they could get a peek of anyone famous. The bookshop’s great anyway (although wonderful bookshops are always painful when I’m broke) and I had a better time at the private view, chatting to Erika, Mark, Zoe and our teacher Graham than I ever would have had standing around outside a tv set.

Radio silence over

Here’s the embroidery I’ve been working on for my MA installation. The whole thing (islands and sea) took me about 70 hours. I am thoroughly sick of embroidery at this point. In a week’s time I’ll be finished with university.

Long time no see

I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, because I’ve been working all hours to finish my MA project and dissertation (I handed in my dissertation last week). This is the kind of thing I’ve been doing. Yesterday I stuck on the Beatles Anthology, the longest documentary I could think of, and sat and just sewed and sewed until about 70% was done. I was in Spain for two weeks before that. I’ve got lots of photos, but I haven’t had time to develop the film ones and organise and post-process them. It will have to wait until later. The first week was fine, but the second was far more stressful than a holiday should be. There was a 40C heatwave, and the air conditioning broke down, and there were ants, and we both had insomnia and short tempers and it was too difficult to concentrate on the work we’d both been forced to bring with us. Stress. In two and a half weeks I should hopefully be all finished with my MA, and free to find a full-time job, and actually earn steady money again (I hope). I’m really broke right now, and I’m tired of being broke for so long.

Lucky dip

On Wednesday we had a bakesale fundraiser for our graduating exhibition. For some reason university regulations only allowed us to sell home-made food in the foyer if it was packaged up, so we made goodie bags and boxes. Some of the focus in these photos is a little odd, because my lens got jammed onto f.17 without me realising until later that afternoon (the aperture clutch thing is a little unreliable). That’s also why there aren’t any people in the pictures, because everyone ended up with things like an out of focus nose.

Pick Me Up 2012

Before I went to Bulgaria, I helped out at Pick Me Up, a yearly graphics art fair. My tutor was running a “Drawing Olympics” workshop, and some of us students went along to help.

Siren song

I made a test animation for one of the puppets from my uni project. The movement’s pretty rough, I’ll refine it later (I also need to clean up the masking). I just wanted to see if it worked. I’ve been rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses, and in the sirens section the barmaids are constantly described as “bronze gold”, so I made my sirens bronze coloured. Might as well.

Forkbeard Fantasy

I went to see this exhibition at the Festival Hall a little while ago. Forkbeard Fantasy are a group who create stage costumes and props, and make films and peepshow art installations. (I misspelled it as “Folkbeard Fantasy” when I was labelling the Flickr set, which kind of makes sense). There’s a strong theme of fantasy, humour and surrealism in all the work, and most of the things in the exhibition were for touching and using rather than being locked away in glass cabinets.

70s craft books ahoy

I like buying 70s craft books from charity shops. I’m not sure what it is about them, but maybe it’s the colours and the quite often bizarre project suggestions. Here’s 2 of them scanned in.

These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

At the end of the summer I went to an exhibition by stage set design students at the National Theatre. It’s strange, I’ve never had much interest in dollshouses, but I love toy theatres and set design models.

New zine time again

24-page b/w quarter sized zine on pink paper made of marshmellows and happiness

What’s in this one:

* Why Mr Frosty sets are disappointing as an adult
* Your Tears are Cheap: Special holiday centre section of vitriolic negativity
* Lists! Lots of lists.
* Extra J.Mascis and cats

As though of hemlock I had drunk

3 colour risograph print based on “Fire & Hemlock” by Diana Wynne Jones (one of my all-time favourite books)

Blood, oh the blood

I’ve done some risograph prints based on one of my university projects to try to raise some money. The life of a post-graduate student is not a rich one.

Often Inclined to Borrow Somebody’s Dream Til Tomorrow

I’m a big Syd Barrett fan, but I really can’t stand any of the stuff Pink Floyd did after he left (ironic, considering that my MA project supervisor is the guy who designed the cover for Dark Side of the Moon). Recently I went to an exhibition of his paintings, photos and letters. The gallery wasn’t the most welcoming place, but I enjoyed the exhibition. I particularly liked the way he would just give his paintings to anyone who liked them. There were some pictures I really liked, but they didn’t allow photographs, didn’t sell postcards (only prints costing several hundred pounds) and the pictures on the website are covered in ugly watermarks. It’s the same as when I went to the Hundertwasser museum in Vienna- an exhibition dedicated to an artist who when they were alive lived in an anti-commercial, diy way, is run after their death in the most snobby manner of the commercial art world available. (I’m not a fan of the atmosphere a lot of commercial galleries create, art is for everyone)

Idly Drawing

Seeing as I’m meant to be an art student, I thought it was time I did some drawing. I feel rusty at drawing. Here’s a drawing I made earlier sitting in the Castle Gardens after I signed on at the dole. Signing on always puts me in a foul mood, there’s just something about Chatham dole office, but drawing in the sunshine made me feel a little better. I think the drawing’s a little bland though. I think I should’ve made the left tree black shaded too, for better composition, but I was just drawing what I saw, one deciduous tree, and one evergreen.

You Got Me Coughing Up My Cookie Heart (ok, cake)

These are some silly collages I made 9-10 years ago for my friend Katie’s zine. She found them recently and scanned all the bits. It’s a real gourmet recipe.

Caesar ‘ad some jam for tea

I haven’t updated this for a little while, and I’ve built up a backlog of things to write about

Things I need to write about:
Brighton Zinefest (I’ve got a whole heap of photos to sort out)
Typical Grrls II
University Work
Oliver Postgate Book
I’ve also got a whole load of films I need to scan.

Nothing to Do With Dionysus

The title’s a lie. Here’s Dionysus minus his arms and legs, and looking surprisingly cheerful.

I’ve been making the paper puppets for this today. I was originally going to use split pins for the joints, but I’ve been reading Oliver Postgate’s autobiography (highly recommended by the way) and he just used sewing thread stuck on with scotch magic tape for easy removal, which is a much better solution, as nothing sticks out then. The puppets have interchangeable heads for different expressions. Hopefully I’ll get the film finished by weds the 26th when I have one of the dreaded Review of Work days at uni.

Bacchanalia

Today Tukru helped me take some photos for my uni project (someone needed to stop the camera tripod falling down the hill and be able to touch things without covering them in blood. Today’s myth was Pentheus & the Bacchae. I was a Bacchant/Maenad. I got to sit around in a vest in the winter doused in fake blood, clutching a mostly empty bottle of booze and a fimo human heart and trying not to squint in the unexpected February sunshine. How I usually spend my Tuesday afternoons, really. Fake blood is surprisingly cold in the wind. Clearing up felt like we were covering up a murder.

Baking a Human Heart

I needed a brooch in the shape of a human heart for a photography project I’m doing this week, and decided to make it out of fimo. I used to make loads of fimo stuff when I was a kid, and taught some classes to kids a while back, but I haven’t made anything in about 5 years. It was a mix of fun and frustrating, but came out as raw meaty looking as hoped.

Drink-drawing & Reading Objects

My friend Adam from art college runs a pub drawing game night called Drinky Doodle in Brighton. I couldn’t make the first one, but I managed to get to the second. It’s at a nice scandinavian themed bar. There are assorted themed games where you have to either draw what’s on the card you drew out of a hat, or draw the things that are shouted out. Sadly I missed out on the That’s Life Drawing they did last time, where you drew stuff out of the magazine. I love those awful “REAL LIFE DRAMA” magazines.

Pentheus & the Bacchae film- proposal for my next uni project

I wrote this proposal for my next project at uni to send my tutor. I’m doing an MA in Sequential Design. Basically I can do anything I like, as long as it’s based on storytelling in art, and after the term I’ve just finished, you have to set yourself your own projects. So here’s what I’ll be working on after Christmas (subject to any changes suggested by my tutor)

Toy Theatres

Here are some pictures I scanned from a library book about toy theatres.

Haiku Ode to Papa Hemingway

I made some risographed postcards to bring with me to the Alt Press Fair. It worked out cheaper to get hundreds printed up, so I’ve still got bags of the things.

White Night 2010- all night arts festival

On Saturday I went to White Night rather than doing anything big for Halloween. It’s an all night art festival in Brighton on the night the clocks change. I knew some people who were doing stuff in it, and there was plenty of interesting stuff to come across anyway.

Mirror exhibit

This was from an exhibition I saw at the MUMOK in Vienna. It’s difficult to photograph well, but it was pretty impressive in real life. Bascially there was a huge room covered in mirrors and then there were various sculptures made of neon lights dotted around the room so they were reflected back and forth in different mirrors, creating different shapes and patterns based on where you stood in the room. Can’t remember the artist’s name.

More Vienna- Hundertwasser

Also on my to-do list was the Hundertwasser museum. If you’re not familiar with him he was an Austrian painter, architect, graphic designer, environmentalist and all round interesting eccentric

Postcards

Leopold Museum

I was working in Vienna a few weeks ago, and I haven’t got round to uploading photos and putting them here. There’s plenty to come. I went to as many art exhibits as I could in the week I was working in Vienna. I’ve never felt so spoilt by all the free entry in London. I think I spent about €40 overall just on museum entries. It was worth it to see some things in the flesh though.

Were Pigeon

I drew a werepigeon for Tukru . It was a silly private joke, and she insisted I drew it. So I did. I don’t draw much. It’s for a halloween zine she’s putting together, you should make something for it (details here). It’s probably good that I gave her the drawing before it frustrated me so much I threw it in the bin. This is what always happens when I draw stuff.