Category: Art & Design

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)

School anim­a­tion project

For the past few months, I’ve been work­ing with a group of students and an English teach­er at a school in North London to create a small anim­ated film. The students were set the chal­lenge of coming up with a story that reflec­ted some­thing about the school and the students with­in it. The school is very diverse, and they created a story about a girl who comes to London as a refugee, and is miser­able at school because she doesn’t know any English yet, and can’t under­stand anything or anybody. However, she soon starts to learn the language, and becomes far happi­er once she can under­stand and make friends. The anim­a­tion delib­er­ately has no music or sound effects other than the voice-over, because the music teach­ers are plan­ning to use it as a compos­i­tion project in class.

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?

The wonder of card­board: making anim­a­tion with school chil­dren

Since just before Christ­mas, I have been doing a weekly anim­a­tion work­shop with kids at a school in North London, work­ing with one of the English teach­ers. The brief was to create a short film which told a story that repres­en­ted the school and the exper­i­ences of the students in some way. The students range from 12-18, with the young­er ones being the art assist­ants, and the sixth-formers being the produ­cers. They came up with a story them­selves about a refugee girl from an unnamed coun­try who flees from a war to London, but is then unhappy at the school because she doesn’t speak English (quite a common real story at this partic­u­lar school). Gradu­ally however she starts to learn and under­stand, and feel happi­er and make friends. In the initial sessions, some of the inspir­a­tion clips I showed them included Persepol­is, The Science of Sleep, and my own Erika Pal’s the House.

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.

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.

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.

Visu­al Diary

As part of my MA, we were required to keep a creat­ive diary keep­ing track of the profes­sion­al prac­tice lectures, research, read­ing, exhib­i­tion visits and gener­al inspir­a­tion. I finally got around to scan­ning some of the one from my second year. In the first year I used blog posts for the same purpose, but I felt the need later on for a phys­ic­al record.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Influ­ence map

Scott made one of these, so I thought I would as well. His was far more coher­ent than mine. Mine turned out to be a strange jumble of art nouveau, kid’s tv, the romans, russi­an stuff and a spot of liter­at­ure.

Note­book

When I was 17 or so I used to carry this note­book around in my bag to jot stuff down in. In boring moments in the pub, friends used to draw in it too. I managed to lose the insides (I’ve still got a few pages some­where, but I haven’t seen then in a while, I’m sure I’ll uncov­er them when I return to Brighton and unpack my stuff). You can see where other people have scribbled stuff on the cover too, and polar­oid stick­ers got stuck on, and then fell off where the mater­i­al was so flimsy. Those polar­oid izone stick­ers were a bit rubbish really. I scanned the covers a while ago, and forgot about it, and just noticed them on my flickr.

Done

The last few even­ings I’ve been work­ing away making about 20 or so pages like this for my art port­fo­lio show­ing some projects I’ve done over the last few years. I’ve got an inter­view for an art MA on Thursday, and I want to get in.

Mr Benn Barns­ley Style

An epis­ode of Mr Benn entirely made by small chil­dren from York­shire. You under­stand I would’ve killed when I was 8 to do this. (I was never on Rolf’s cartoon club, *sob*)