"Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper." - David Lynch

I've been experimenting with collage, watercolour and creating textures with a printing brayer.

Hebe (my cat) has been very ill lately, and became very thin and bony, so we've been nursing him back to (rather rotund) good health with sardines and mackerel.

The Idiot

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody

I love the immersive feeling of connecting with an artist and their world - when it happens it is the most special thing. I exist coated in their ideas, my eyes see the world alighting on details I wouldn't have found special before. I agree with Alan Moore that writing is a kind of magic, though I think there are a lot of trick magicians out there and very few real sorcerers.

Salinger's stories have so much wit and warmth - he makes it appear so easy. You never feel like you fully get to know his characters - when Buddy Glass tries to describe his dead brother, you get more of an impression of how much his brother meant to him than what his brother was really like. The back-story always feels bigger than the story. Salinger only lets us glimpse parts of it.

Does every generation experience this ache for change?

It might be the biggest ink drawing I've done. I had to photograph it with my phone because my scanner is back in East Anglia and I'm in the (Wild) West Midlands. The next step is going to be to apply watercolours in a loose, very pale wash. Must be careful.

New Empress: The Stewardesses (1969)

An illustration for New Empress's B-Movie special, for an article on the 1969 film The Stewardesses

Sketchbook

I have a tiny A6 sketchbook. It tends to just be full of writing, but sometimes sketches creep in.

Just re-worked my Tomcat Murr book cover design...

Sidle Zine Blog

The Sidle Zine blog is now online - you can find it here: http://sidlezine.tumblr.com/

It was great to receive illustrations every few days as the deadline approached, and I was impressed with the standard of work - all of the illustrators who took part covered a wide range of issues, which they clearly cared about, and there was a lot of variety too.

Hopefully it has shown that illustrators are capable of creating work which is engaged with the world around them, and I hope to get more illustrators involved in the next issue.

New Empress: The Violence in Silence

We've just got the new issue of New Empress in the post - now A4 sized, printed in b&w, with a glossy cover for the Silent Film Special. My illustration for Helen Cox's article "Slap That Baby Make Him Freak: The Violence in Silence" (about violence directed towards babies in silent-era films) was of a train about to hit a pram. I wasn't sent the article to work from (the brief was just to have a pram in a precarious situation) but oddly enough one of the first examples of infant-directed violence mentioned in the article involves a pram hit by an oncoming train. 

(Please note that no babies were harmed in the creation of this illustration.)

I also made a colour version too:

Dan filmed me drawing today

I've been experimenting with more of a children's book style, albeit a rather bleak children's book involving a trapped mountain bongo...

It will be on display and available to buy from Mustard Café in Norwich from Monday