more from the t-shirt/print venture!



…

i may just be using this as an opportunity to indulge my thoroughly shameless love of all things puny.

ON A DIFFERENT NOTE, i have some friends who do the music thing. they're in a band called kaiho. you can follow their antics OVER HERE.

this week they dropped a shiny new ep on their soundcloud and oh my stars and garters is it good. you should give it a listen.

i know i have.

quite possibly way, way, way too many times since downloading it today.


Everything Seems Worse At Night-time (Idiot Brain EP)

If Jesus Was My Swimming Instructor (Idiot Brain EP)

Charango Song (Idiot Brain EP)

Idiot Braine (Idiot Brain EP)

the crazy part is the you can snap this up for the low, low, low price of OH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL.

i also had the total honour of playing graphic designer for the ep's cover:




actually, this has been a pretty awesome couple of weeks for my, er… 'photography'. asides from this, a couple of snaps i took of the band gigging cropped up in 'miss robin'- a digital fashion magazine thing. they're part of an interview with sas and and freya and you can give that a butchers OVER THERE.






lastly, a photo i took at amanda palmer's recent koko gig (jesus christ. that was an amazing, intense roller-coaster of an evening) ended up making the rounds on a few blogs. someone even asked if they could buy a print of it which was pretty groovy indeed!





ugh. the stench of self satisfaction coming off this thing is unbearable. oh well. at least you actually have a legitimate excuse for cramming your blog full of photos for once!

sketchbook scraps!

not too long ago amanda palmer set up a kickstarter to fund her spanking new album. being a total sucker for both these things i prescribed to the philosophy of oh well, what the hell and threw a chunk of change at it.

asides from getting a ticket to the tour date in london, this also bagged you entry to a much smaller acoustic set a few days before. for some reason i thought this would be the PERFECT thing to bring my sketchbook to.

holy moly. despite having to run home and back halfway through to deal with the house alarm freaking out, this evening was SPEC-FUCKING-TACULAR.

here's jherek bischoff and his spontaneous string quartet for the night. they were performing instrumental versions of songs off his new record:





it was powerful.

check it out HERE






did have a go at doing some sketching during the main set but it was far too dark. it was also a gloriously theatrical affair involving fruit, megaphones and mass human drum machines that was pretty much impossible to tare your eyes from.

all in all, if one of your favourite musicians ever offers the chance to go to something like this, you really, really really, really, really, really must take them up on it.

here's something from the new album. stop motion kinetic typography? ohmyfuckyes.



aaaaaaaaaaand photos from the not so acoustic night:

last week was not a good week for art.

so you know how the last month or so has been spent working on comics? well, turns out someone made a little faux pas when it came to converting inches to cms.

whoops.

so much for those finals you, did huh?fortunately i'd mostly been working on roughs and thumbnails, but it was still a kick in the teeth. OH WELL. YOU CAN DO IT BETTER THIS TIME ROUND.


but you didn't come here to listen to me bitch and moan! here's some stuff from the BIG project.



super vague head sketches. just to get a feel of who's who.





not so vague character sketches. note- sadly there are no echidna's in this book.



a page that can no longer be used due to the aforementioned case of ruler retardation. it's probably for the best. there are some really whack straight lines in there.


_ _ _

in other news, have you ever wondered what the bastard love child of philip glass and a bass sax would sound like? i wager a pretty penny it would go a little something like this:



WOW. note to self. buy the fuck out of this album. i was listening to an interveiw with this guy on Q (canadian radio is pretty rad, guys). stetson (who's played with a ton of bands, including arcade fire) was saying how he has the whole room mice so _all_ the sounds the saxophone makes are picked up. what blows my mind id that he does what he does without a loop machine. or his lungs exploding.

because all i've been doing for the past week or so is thumbnailing comic pages and my brain was going to go all expload-y thinking about badly-drawn stick figures in wobbly boxes.





WOOOOO! SUMMER! YEAH!

that's a thing that happens sometimes.

...

right?

but that's enough of that. by the end of today you ARE going to have the first quarter of the graphic novel sorted. and then maybe we can do some actual drawing, yeah?

and in the mean time-



whoar.

so now you've joined the horde of recently graduated and woefully unemployed ex-students, you're going to be updating the shit out of this blog, right?

...

aaaaaaapparently not.

wait wait wait! i haven't been being totally crap! actually, been keeping myself pretty busy- there are things in the works that i should be able to show you soon. like little people about to go toe to you with big, fuck off japanese monsters:



a little snippet from something that will hopefully be going in the back of a book http://richwriting.blogspot.co.uk/ doing with markosia. fingers crossed.

in the meantime, i bring you the head of our former life-drawing teacher!



part of a series of drawings (resulting in some rather nifty tea towels) we put together as a thank you gift for our tutor folk. we're rather sentimental like that.





*****
so a while back there was an episode of the nerdist where one of those most hostfull of hosts mentioned that they couldn't get enough of a group called 'pale young gentlemen'. i followed up this hot tip. my ears have been thanking me ever since.

oh man. i know i'm normally a little on the tardy side when it comes to putting things up on here, but this might be taking the cake a little bit….






so these are some pages from the sketch book i was carting around _last_ summer. at one point i took a couple days out to visit one of our exchange students in their home trier, germany.

what a time. trier is an_incredibly_ nice place. managed to get quite a bit of sketching in too, so brace yourself for some more chicken-scratch doodles!

----

meanwhile, caught some snippets of regina spektor's 'what we saw from the cheap seats' over the speakers while waiting for a gig to kick off the other day. while those weren't exactly the most stellar conditions to listen to it in, what made it over the general hubba-baba sounded pretty funky and resulted in a next-day (near) blind buy. i'm quite glad i did that, mostly because it meant i got to hear this:



THIS SONG. OH MY GOD THIS SONG. also, mouth trumpet solo? A-MMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZING.

---

ah, haven't done too stella a job of updating this thing recently. mostly just been trying to get back into the swing of things following the whirlwind couple of days that was our degree show…

speaking of, hope you've got a strong gag reflex because it's time for the obligatory holyshitit'sallover post. things might get a little… sentimental.

but yes. The Degree Show. that was a thing that happened.




asides from managing to trash the one thing that was going up on my wall at the eleventh hour (i will now be forever grateful for spare print outs. and our tutors who are FREAKING MAGICIANS when it comes to things like mounting, hanging and generally making things look neat and tidy), the show went up without a hitch.




guys. it looked pretty dope. despite the apoplectic stress fest it caused both tutor and students alike, it seems that levelling the fmp up from a 6 to 12 week project really paid off. i would paste in a million and one photos of all the shit hot work but for some reason, can't seem to be able to post more than five pictures per post. boo and hiss and boo. BUT! you can see more of folk's work (along with a really crappy intro by yours truly) HERE.







not going to lie, i am going to miss this course and everyone on it more than you will ever know. had an absolute blast there and couldn't have asked for a more top notch bunch of people to do it with. hell, even our exchange student's were the jam! here's hoping this won't be the last time we work together. lastly, our tutor's are due for a massive thank you. asides from working their socks off, those guys were mad enthusing. i learnt so freaking much from them and everyone else on the course.

so thankyou.

now.

let's got out and destroy the world.




p.s i recently learnt that michael nyman and damon alburn worked together on the score for a little movie called ravenous. it's about cannibals in early america. i watched this film when i was like seven or something.

i remember it being very, very good.

always wanted to go back and revisiting it- and after learning that tit-bit of information (aaaaaalong with the fact it's going for like £2 on amazon), that's a thing that's happening. give this track a listen. it is WONDERFUL.

more do overs in the key of flat colours and cheeky filters:

(closer look. because for some reason blogger's being lame and not allowing for full image view size. boooo on you blogger. boo on you.)

man. that psycho poster was pretty weak sauce in the first place but i'm not too sure if this is any better. a bit too much all over the place perhaps? (and not an ounce of good composition to be found!)

oh well. TOO LATE NOW SON.

pretty much ripped wholesale by this scene:


ggggooooodddd. this film is so good.


aaaaaaaaaand speaking of redos, someone decided to translate radiohead's ok computer into 8-bit. the results are totally jammy. give it a twirl!

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING TOTALLY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING!


so last summer, a few of us and our sketchbooks got together and went to the huntarian. let me tell you, there really is no better way to spend a fine summer's day than held up in a dark room with a crazy victorian's collection of pickled things. no, really. can we round up a posse and go once school's out?

aaaaaand speaking of school being out, it's practically two weeks to the hour till our final assessment. what?

but it's okay (LIESYOUTELLYOUSELF). also, here's a song i've been listening to a whole lot. it's quite fun.

old stuff! because this blog is more behind the times than a caveman in power shoulders:





these are from the four-project-pre-mid-year-assesment-cluster-fuck days. this project was all about coming up with some pretty pictures for a few lucy mangan columns. yeeeeaaaaah.


reggie watts came up in conversation the other day. hot dog, that man is genius. if you like beat boxing, loop machines and mad, rambling improvised streams of consciousness, give him a go!:


in other other news, we went to antwerp last week. good gravy did we draw the shit out of that place. god knows how we managed that between all the beer and general good times. expect a barrage of sketchbook nonsense and photos from that in the not too distant future. in the mean time, here's a picture of resident art man extrodiner aldous to hold you over:



guys. man can draw.

just some quick character sketches for the Final Major Project project. fuck me. that sounds a little scary. hopefully by the 14th of may, i'll have made a totally sweet digital comic based on the first part of toby barlow's sharp teeth. fingers crossed. more on that as it happens!

i have been listening to a wonderful amount of bloc party while working on this.


in the mean time, former middlesexer nadine is taking part in talenthouse's masterdon competition. you can check out that good stuff right RIGHT HERE. bon chance and all that jazz

SIDE QUEST! so our department's teamed up with an author who's putting together a collection of poems about imaginary saints. she provides the words. we provide the pictures. the selection process is all a little battle royal, but we got to have a look at all the submissions last week and there were no end of totally fly entries. hot dog, this book's going to be mighty minty.

the patron saint of remaindered books:

meh.

and

the patron sait of enthusiasts:

maybe not so meh?

was going to spam this thing up with links to other folks' submissions, but there's not too many of those floating about the internests yet. boo. HOWEVER, here's LEFKI'S PRETTY PIMP ILLUSTRATION FOR THE PATRON SAINT OF INFIDEL GIRLS. man alive. i'm digging her brush work.

anyway. here's a super fun song about saints.


and here's a photo of neil gaiman singing said song.


WHORRRRRR! SYNERGY!