Nana

a portrait of my Nana

A Mother's Day card made back in March 

(my Mum has two guinea-pigs who she adores)

A little watercolour sketch of my brother, Lewis, drawn this morning in a coffee shop.

Were most of your stars out?

These are two new pieces which I made for Bloom at the Garden's Gallery in Montpellier Gardens, Cheltenham. The exhibition features work by fellow Falmouth graduates Sophia Bloxham, Lucy Boden and Liz Clayton, as well as our talented friend Katie Thomas, and runs until Tuesday 14th May.

I decided to get away from using the computer to colour my illustrations, and it made me realise how much happiness I get from painting and collaging. There is something about making things with your hands, and discovering through making, which a computer cannot replace. I have a box of collage materials dating back to my first year at Falmouth - different types of paper, sheets painted in acrylic, bits and pieces collected in terms of colour - and it was nice to let the materials shape the direction of the work. 

I have a few of the instruments pictured - the banjo, ukulele, melodica, glockenspiel and autoharp - although I would never consider myself a musician - I have a very talented brother who plays guitar beautifully - but I like to make music in a very amateur sense, for my own amusement.

The typewriter illustration is based on a quote by J.D. Salinger from one of my favourite books, Seymour, an Introduction. 

The quote comes from a letter that Seymour writes to his younger brother Buddy:

"When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished…I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart."

Bloom

I'm exhibiting my work in "Bloom" - an exhibition at the Montpellier Gardens in Cheltenham next month, along with some good friends of mine and fellow Falmouth graduates.

[Drawing typewriters in preparation for the exhibition]

Walk Cheerfully

Fellow Falmouth-grad illustrator Beth Hague and I are putting together a zine with the theme of "Walk Cheerfully" - the brief is to illustrate a quote/motto/lyric/saying that gets you through the difficult times or cheers you up / makes you laugh.

It can be philosophical and profound or very silly and cheeky or rather dark.

We will be collecting the images online, with the hope of creating a printed zine of the best work at the end of the project.

It is open-submission and any artists / illustrators are welcome to take part.

Specifications:

Dimensions: 210mm x 297mm, 300dpi,
Can work portrait or landscape,
Colour,
Somewhere in the image you must include your quote/motto/saying in hand-rendered or typed text

E-mail entries as a jpeg to: walkcheerfullyzine@gmail.com

(To submit by post, please contact me for address)

When submitting your illustration, please also include details of any web-links to your portfolio.

Deadline: 30th June

Louis CK

Bright Eyes...

Last week, Dan, Beth, Helen and I went to see Conor Oberst play the Barbican. It was a wonderful gig, and totally reaffirmed what a uniquely talented musician, poet and performer he is.
Before the gig, Dan and I got talking about meeting our heroes and decided it is best never to meet them. But later on, we really regretted being too shy to say hello when we spied him in the pub under a hoard of hares's heads.

The girl with the binoculars

I woke up this morning with a vision of the top left hand corner of this drawing in my mind. Little huts and trees in a sketchy pinkish-blue. This is an imaginary record sleeve for music that doesn't exist.

It reminds me of that line in Belle and Sebastian's "If She Wants Me":

"I took a book and went into the forest
I climbed the hill
I wanted to look down on you
But all I saw was twenty miles of wilderness
so I went home"

I drew this listening to Boy Omega (whose album Night Visions is my new obsession) and also this video of the late Ray Bradbury giving advice to young writers:

Rebekah Brooks

"LOL!", as David Cameron would say.

The artist descends into madness

A few pages scanned from my sketchbook and coloured in Photoshop.

"without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public"

Audio of Bradley Manning's speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking government documents to Wikileaks:(via https://pressfreedomfoundation.org)



“In no case shall information be classified… in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency… or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.”

— Executive Order 13526, Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” - Nuremberg Principle IV

(taken from www.bradleymanning.org)