Wednesday 2 December 2009

Rarrrrr!!!

I made a tiger outfit for a party last weekend. Here's my highly technical sketch planning the hat:


...and the finished hat in action:

I had planned to make a whole tiger suit but that fun fur is well expensive. I ended up buying half a metre of it for £3.50, plus 2m of satin bias binding and a square of pink felt. It worked out about a fiver, but I think I'm going to get considerable mileage from this outfit... I also made furry short shorts with a tail but don't have any photos. Sure some will turn up eventually, I danced in them for about 12 consecutive hours so there must be pictures somewhere.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

creepy drawing

Here's a little picture I drew for a comic recently. I left it on my bed when I went out and managed to make myself start when I came back in and caught sight of it! Bit grim, having the reference photos for this one on my camera made me worry about leaving my camera on the train! The end comic was rushed but alright, it's in a new anthology which I'll write about soon.

Another Nazdrove flyer

Not much to say about this one. The person is actually me - I worked off a reference photo, thinking I'd have to change the face so it wasn't obvious. But I was a bit optimistic about my drawing skills, because it looks like nothing like me. Score! It's a 2 colour risograph print, done at Footprint the day before they got raided by the cops! Good timing. I drew the black layer, then drew the red layer on tracing paper with it all taped to a window to line it up. I drew one trumpet, taped it to the window and then rotated the paper so each one was identical. Unfortunately I started at twilight so it ended up being a bit of a race against time to get them pencilled in before dark...

A bit more detail from the original. The tshirt design is the Roma wheel, the arm tattoo is the matryoshka from here.

Thursday 8 October 2009

flyers, 2006

Just found another old flyer, this one's from 2006. (click on all to view bigger)


And here's some cut and paste



These are all from gigs at Matilda, a squat venue I was involved with from 2005-6. It's a whole 'nother blog really, but you can see the bands we put on here.

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Nazdrove 2nd anniversary flyer



Here's a low-quality image of another Nazdrove poster I made. I've actually done another since then which I can't find a picture of anywhere. Pretty into the continuing theme of red and black printing on cream paper, with that font (Red October off dafont.com). Although I think this is on bright white paper because Footprint were out of cream and I was doing it last minute, again.

Details you can't see on this tiddle pic - Black Flag badge, 'Play Fast, Dance Dirty' on the accordion, prison hand tattoos and Romany flag belt buckle. I try and get the Romany flag into most of my Nazdrove stuff because I think that gypsy culture gets ripped off pretty much wholesale and boiled down to gold teeth-trilby hats-fast music-Gogol Bordello with no regard to the fact that Roma people across Europe are still stereotyped, persecuted and oppressed. The flag's my nod to the culture behind the music - it's not a big thing but I think it matters.

Monday 6 July 2009

how-to article

And here's the last in a series of How-Tos I did for Last Hours magazine when it was a print zine. Unlike the others, this is more of an article than a comic - it was a bit of a struggle to fit so much information into 2 pages so it's more text heavy than I prefer for zine layouts. The other how-tos I did were 'How to pee standing up', 'How to make DIY tattoos' and I did a 'How to build a pizza oven' for another zine. Then I ran out of shareable skills. I think the DIY tattoos one is getting put in a book but not through any effort of my own - I'm pretty bad at self-publicity.

Anyway, here's the article, click on it to read the text. I put this together when I was living on a narrowboat which was easily one of the most challenging places to draw/make stuff because of the lack of space and storage for clippings and materials. I'm about to move back there, yay!


quick collage

A birthday collage for a vegan friend. Two woodcuts out of a library book pasted together and then photocopied to make it slicker - who needs Photoshop, eh?



Scuse 6 months between last post and this one - balancing working in A&E, a precarious housing situation and as many climbing trips as I can get in while its sunny hasn't left much time for trooping around getting my camera, a lead and a computer in the same place.

Monday 12 January 2009

Xmas presents

Here are some Christmas presents I made:


This was just an excuse to put a book in the industrial guillotine in my basement in the dead of night. My mum liked it though.



Photo frame for my brother. The papercut is made with an old map, I knocked up the frame in the last 45 minutes of my woodworking night class, then painted it black to hide the mistakes. The photo's just one I had lying around of some owl thing in my room that I got from Muji.



Just a tiddler, about 2" square, that I made for my mum... The image is based on an old woodcut - it's not exactly as I'd like, but it's all learning, innit. Went a bit squinty after this one.

I also made my dad a silhouette picture like in the previous post, but of the Lake District and a little papercut for my sister. My haul included some sexy typography and art books, mushroom pate and a bird box. Score!

Thursday 8 January 2009

Xmas present 1

Hooray! Christmas and all that crap is finally over, so I can post up all the stuff I made for people. Except that those photos are on another computer. So for now, there's just this, which I made for a friend. It's the view from Idwal Slabs in North Wales where we went climbing a couple of months ago, made from layered black paper and tracing paper. The more tracing paper you put in front of the black paper, the fainter it gets - I saw the idea in a kids craft book a few weeks ago. I made one of the Lake District for my dad too - its an idea that lends itself well to landscapes I think.


Oh yeh, Happy New Year. I saw 2008 with a glass of Buckfast and hundreds of drunk punks at the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford... sweet.