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aaaaaaaaaaand that's all the pages from the 'drawn from memory' project. fortunately, the last day was the only day when scotland decided to live up to its reputation of being a rainy son-of-a-bitch. good thing too. rain was so damn heavy it's a miracle we didn't drown trying to get to inverness and our water proofing proved to be A MASSIVE LIE. lo, see what a bunch of drowned rats we were by the time we reached the end point.



still though, it was waaay fun. i was in inverness last month for the con. seeing the castle that photo was taken from was so very surreal.

roughs for our current (and LAST!!!!! HOLY FUCKING SHIT. WHERE DID THE TIME GO!?!?!?) project. we've all been given one of the memory books from last term and have to turn it into a two page comic. i ended up with hector's, which is all about a super fun run in he had with airport security this one time. the final version's going to be a lot darker than this one. our special guest tutor (woodrow phoenix. i would strongly recommend checking out his book, rumble strip) told me to stream line it so now it's all about the build up to the rather... ahem... interment search.

(just so you know, i don't think there was any cavity search in real life but we were encouraged to employ a little artistic licensing to the stories we got to spice 'em up).

i cannot WAIT to see what everyone's coming up with.

moleskin antics featuring tube people, mrs o chords for the uke (ugh, i have been neglecting my ukulele duties something awful. uni year one pretty much wraps NEXTS THURSDAY, so after that, i'll be able to spend some quality time with that dwarfish guitar) and the drummer from frightened rabbits. they were opening at a modest mouse gig we went to waaaaaaaaaaay back before christmas. mmm, colour me impressed. they do that thing where there's this underlying ambient roar that builds through a lot of their songs which i go all weak at the knees for.

they also wrote this lovely little ditty:



(i think it's about his penis)

more backgrounds for animation. gah, these things are (in theory) meant to be in for next wednesday. outlooks looks... mildly improbable? hmm, backgrounds have always been one of those things i've always thought i've kinda fobbed off so to have to focus on them like this has been a super fun exercise and oh my god this post is dull dull dull. let's talk about something else.

went to the last of the london evelyn evelyn gigs on sunday and oh my, was it a good stuff. for those not in the know, evelyn evelyn is the current pet project of jason webley and amanda palmer that involves the pair pretending to be conjoined twins and singing show tunes. you can check some of their stuff out here: http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn

it was a hoot. hats off to those two as well for managing to play pianos, guitars, accordians, drums and ukuleles while wearing the same dress

hoy hoy!

batting around some cover ideas for issue o2 of turning tiger. initially, i was kinda hoping we could go with the initial one (um, i think someone got that idea by staring a little too long at the invincible hard cover collections) but the powers that be wanted to go with something a bit more 70s film-postery. i think it's all in the process of being lettered so fingers crossed it'll be in previews soon...

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i'd like to thank a combination of ball bust levels of work and shit internet for the lack of updates round the parts. shit internet has been sorted! wish the same could be said of the criminally long to-do list...

more from the book! yes kids, drinking brown smelly water is never, ever a stella idea no matter how much the locals tell you it'll do you a world of good.

LIES!

still, despite the onset of massive gut rot, that bit of scotland was. so. pretty.



PLUGGERY TIME! oh man, there is sooooooo much good music out there. recently got my mitts on the soundtrack for where the wild things are. so. so. so. SO. GOOD. there is no way in hell you can feel blue after listening to that thing; it's crazy levels of energetic, but then i guess that's what you'd expect from karen o (front lady of the 'yeah yeah yeahs').

character designs for the anthology piece. god, i love playing casting director. trying to find the right look for fictitious folk has got to be my favourite part of the whole thing. also, LAMBCHOPS! god, the victorians knew how to handle their facial hair.

right, enough of this prattling about on the internet. there is work to do!

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ah yes. turns out that flora is not an acceptable replacement for butter when it comes to cooking. seriously, it's a miracle we didn't come down with botchalism after chowing down on that. hail to the chief!

shame on me. i wasted a good chunk of this afternoon tarting things up in my sketchbook instead of tackling the mountain of uni/work work i absolutely had to get done five minuets ago. a-booooooooooooooooooooooo.

more new york stuff. god, watching that man do 5,000 pull ups while i sat there eating my body weight in orgasmically lush french toast was depressing.

huzzah for crime fighting golf carts!

backgrounds for the much bitched about animation project. holy moly, do i need to pick up the pace on this thing. GAH, LEGALISE CLONING ALREADY SO AT LEAST ONE VERSION OF ME CAN GO OUT AND PLAY IN THE GLORIOUS SUNSHINE WE ARE CURRENTLY ENJOYING.

oh perspective. i love you and all, but some times you make my brain want to crawl out of my ear, hop in the microwave and put an end to it all.

character designs for the anthology piece. god, i am having too much fun playing around with ridiculous victorian hair.

o4


from the book project. this page is a little bigger because the bit at the top was actually done as a flat. gimmicky, i know, but that hill just did not stop. literally, the mo-fo looked like it was levelling out and then the terrain remembered it hated you and wanted to crush out your life and there was still half a mountain to go. so traumatic was this experience that we had to make up a little ditty riffing on a popular tune of the time. it went a little something like,

*what's that coming over the hill? is it a- oh wait, it's just another hill.*

GOOD TIMES!

and with that all said and done, here be some funky stuff from the internet. it's a wee animated film that's just a little bit unsettling.

for the doodle caboodle. still on the theme of food stuffs. people are a legitimate source of food, right?

shit-tacular storyboards for animation.

uuuuuuUUUUUUUUUGGGGGH! i just spent the last four hours or so doing the line work on one of the backgrounds for this. haven't got onto the making things move bit and this thing is already killing me! there's lots and lots of cool stuff i want to link to in this post but my brain feels way too much like rancid granola for that right now....

character designs!

stuff's been going on y'all. despite being all like 'yah! i'm going to blog the shit out of this blog' this week i have been B-U-S-Y cranking out the last couple of pages of turning tiger and finally, after so so so soooooo long, IT'S DONE! *throws hands in the air like she just don't care*



despite that, it's still go go go. i was at hi-ex a couple of weeks ago (a totally sweet convention up in inverness run by richmond clements, writer of turning tiger. you really should all go). i got to hang with a bunch of really cool cats like Gary Erskine (http://garyerskine.blogspot.com/) , Charlie Adlard (http://www.charlieadlard.com/home.htm) Simon Fraser (http://simonfraser.posterous.com/ -someone remind me to buy the act-i-vate primer. i took a peek at it in the flesh while i was up there and bloody hell, it was prutty) and got to say hi to John Higgins (http://www.turmoilcolour.com/) which was particularly mind blowing. i was working on colouring stuff in and he came over to chat about wether or not he should get a wacom. he had a go on mine, drew this and was thoroughly wireded out by it:



aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, good things came of it. there's going to be more turning tiger and what i posted way back at the beginning of this post is some prep work for an anthology piece by GM Gordan. MAN, i can't wait to get started on this thing!

ancient history from the new york editorial project. oh my god, the paper in my sketch book doesn't know how to take watercolours.

one thing they really pushed in this project was thumbnailing. god, it's crazy just how far away you can sometimes find yourself from your original idea.

speaking of tangents, it's stuff that kicks ass on the internet time!


the phillips tv people recently released a bunch of short films they commissioned to show of their shiny backlight feature or whatever. i think the directors were given free reign over what they came up with, as long as the short featured the line 'it's a unicorn'. haven't checked out the others yet, but this is pretty badass. so much so that warner brothers and fox are in a bidding war to turn it into a full length feature. huzzarh!

panel from the issue of turning tiger i'm working on. i spy with my little eye flagrant abuse of photoshop effects?

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seriously, we came back looking like a particularly lumpy batch of porridge. seeeeeeeeeeeeee-xy.

this is the first time i've picked up acrylic paint in so long. DAMN, i forgot how much fun that stuff could be. it's so fun to be able to really work into something since with water colours it's totally a case of less being more.

in other news i was all like 'MAN I AM TOTALLY GOING TO FINISH TURNING TIGER TODAY' until i realised i'd LOST the second last page. slow clap. there was a moment of raising the fists to the heavens and yelling 'WHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYY' in a manner that was just a little melodramatic but then i started redrawing the page. MAN, i'd forgotten just how much i love doing this shit.

life drawing! gosh, he looks just a little bit like a big, scary, cloven foot clown.

more stuff from new york. for the love of god, don't litter if you find yourself there. some dude tossed a wrapper and ended up being chased down the street by this woman who sounded like she'd swallowed a fog-horn.

most intense man was most intense. we clocked him while in line for the ellis island ferry (oh, we were delightfully touristy). the dude was about three times taller than everyone else there and spent the whole time staring off into space not blinking. it was mildly terrifying.

also making a guest appearance are matt and helen (she likes cake).

PEACE!

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i'm going to warn you now, the production on this thing is absolute balls. also, the spelling gets increasingly funky as you get deeper and deeper into this thing. blame that devil may care attitude that tends to kick in and fuck everything up on the tail end of projects?

but yes. always make sure you take sensible walking shoes. by day two my blisters had blisters. in fact, i think i can rustle up some photographic evidence...

pageo1


hoy hoy!

people, be wary of all you can eat chinese. that stuff is a recipe for wicked food poisoning.

aaaaaaaaaaaanyhoo, going to be putting some stuff up from our latest project at uni. the name of the game was to make a story book based on an experience from your life. god, some people put together some really amazing things for this one.