Fighting with a pen and ink, and sometimes winning.

Fuck yeah!

2011-10-03T20:44:00.002+01:00

My friend just got acquitted of conspiring to fight Nazis.

So I made a cake:

That is all.

Stop motion

2011-10-03T11:23:00.002+01:00

I've been in America for two months - I got back last week and had one particularly jetlaggy night where I couldn't get off to sleep til 5am. I was awake enough in the mean time to finally get around to arranging an unfinished stop motion film to put online.

I made it in my flat with my cheap digital camera in Spring 2010. I took low-res photographs for each frame, then put them together using Windows Movie Maker. After years of thinking about making stop-motion films it was a revelation to realise that I already had the stuff I needed.

When I first started dreaming about stop-motion (age 11), you had to have a camcorder with a 'still' button. To be able to throw one together so easily is really exciting. I learned alot putting this one together and have lots of ideas. I just need more free time, it's so slow!

One for the coffee hardcore.

2011-05-26T18:05:00.004+01:00

Printed 30 of these today to sell at the Alternative Press Fair and on Etsy.

Etsy!

2011-05-18T22:48:00.005+01:00

I've finally made it onto Etsy, thanks to a recruitment freeze in the ambulance service ^_^

I'll be adding new things slowly, with plenty of opportunities for custom designs and requests - come and have a rummage.

Shape & Situate #2 contribution

2011-04-20T13:09:00.003+01:00

Click for decent quality image...

This is my contribution to 'Shape and Situate #2', a zine of inspirational European women out soon. I made it for photocopying not scanning - the pen marks won't show up on the finished thing. You can read more about the legendary Jayaben Desai here. If you want a copy of the zine, comment here or search for it online innit.

Rest in Peace Vic

2011-04-15T15:36:00.004+01:00

In memory of peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni, murdered yesterday in Gaza. A huge loss.

This image is copyleft, feel free to print out/ distribute. You can find a decent quality version by clicking on the picture, or get in touch. Love to all of Vic's friends and family.

2011-03-29T11:40:00.006+01:00

Finished my contribution to Ink For Aid last night - an auction of art and illustration to raise money for Japan. They're still after artwork to auction - search for them on Facebook or email inkforaid@gmail.com if you're interested. I'll post auction dates when they're announced.

Japanese Knotweed - carbon paper + origami paper

nowt to add

2011-03-29T11:40:00.001+01:00

sneaky peek

2011-03-29T11:34:00.001+01:00

Next Nazdrove flyer... Bad Brains go to Russia... should be done soon

Bits and pieces

2011-03-29T10:14:00.003+01:00

Chair recovered with shopping bag. Would have done it with all my chairs if it wasn't for the Morrison's logo.

A squid cake. Some tentacles lost on the walk to my friend's house. This contains so much sugar I felt sick for about 3 days after.

Playing at tattoos.
Ambulance supplies catalogue collage... let my friend count off the hours left of his student paramedic placement.

Woodcarving

2011-03-29T10:08:00.003+01:00

I've carved a few spoons over the years, but tend to be held back but having the wrong tools. These two are carved with a chisel and are unfinished until I can find a spoon gouge.

The smaller is carved out of birch I got from a woodpile in Finland. The larger one I can't remember...

This was the carnage left on my desk....

Virgin Maryness

2011-03-29T10:05:00.002+01:00

A birthday present I made for a friend. The image is cut from a postcard I found in a bin in Barcelona. Made a frame out of cardboard then went wild with glue, glitter and sequins. Glueing sequins down with tweezers is very soothing.

Stamped stamp

2010-03-03T16:07:00.000Z

Here's a teeny little fake postage stamp I made using a carved eraser and a little holepunch.

And in its natural environment...

New lino print

2010-02-20T15:35:00.000Z

Made a lino print last week to go into a new zine I'm working on. Cutting it was the easy part; lining up the two colours was a niiiightmare. Had to invent 3 contraptions to align them, involving cardboard, tracing paper and lots of tape. Only the 3rd worked. Generally happy with how it turned out, although getting enough pressure to get a decent print involved putting my 4" thick paramedic textbook on top of the lino and paper, then standing on top of it and stamping on each corner.

The text is a quote by Charles Rennie Mackintosh which I like.

I'm planning my new zine to involve quite a bit of printing and hand-assembling - I'll probably regret that as I put 300 copies together - but I hope it'll turn out well. Although it took me all evening to make 30 copies of this print! But now I've worked out how to do it....

Rarrrrr!!!

2009-12-02T16:41:00.000Z

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.

creepy drawing

2009-11-03T22:19:00.000Z

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

2009-11-03T21:56:00.000Z

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.

flyers, 2006

2009-10-08T10:14:00.000+01:00

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.

Nazdrove 2nd anniversary flyer

2009-10-06T17:17:00.001+01:00

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.

how-to article

2009-07-06T22:48:00.000+01:00

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

2009-07-06T19:51:00.000+01:00

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.

Xmas presents

2009-01-12T13:47:00.000Z

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!

Xmas present 1

2009-01-08T01:38:00.000Z

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.

and finally

2008-12-19T17:08:00.000Z

For my last post in this update binge, here's a papercut I made for my grandma two weeks ago. My mum called to say she'd had a fall and was in hospital, but not expected to last long. She booked us a train down for the next day and I got to packing, which left a long quiet evening wishing I was already with her. So I sat down and made her this. It's not perfect at all - I've worked out a 300% better way to stick down papercuts since then, and the artwork is pretty much straight copied from an illustration in a book - but I found the devotional aspect of relatively mindless activity focussed me and calmed me. My grandma taught me to knit and sewed countless quilts for her large family by hand, hence the image.

We drove 3 hours from the train station to get to the hospital at 2am - she actually held on until after I'd come back up north and died on the Sunday morning. I put the card next to her bed - I don't think she saw it, but it was good to be with her.

some papercuts

2008-12-19T16:58:00.001Z

Super into making papercuts at the moment. I'll have more to post after Xmas when the recipients have seen them.

First one I made, and the only thing I could think of to do with it.

First page of my new sketchbook, a quickie but like it.

detail of my favourite yet - unfortunately a rather private present for someone so this is all you're getting.

Just got a surgically sharp scalpel from Fred Aldous when I was in Manchester a few days ago, so everything is going to get more intricate from now on.

More flyers

2008-12-19T16:43:00.000Z

Some old posters I dug out. Sorry they're photographed, not scanned.

Summer 2005 - I had this bike in front of me to draw, first time I used any kind of reference in a drawing and it felt like cheating.

Summer 2005 - beginning of my thing for drawing hands.

Drawn with a biro in Barcelona, late 2006. Someone else did the lettering. Drawing with the wrong pens is so painful, and I blame this shonky effort on that.

oldest school

2008-12-19T16:39:00.001Z

Found some stuff I made when I was a nipper at my folks' a few weeks ago:

My grasp of perspective stalled around this time.

Sewn in my bedroom when bored I imagine. That tasteful fabric was used for my morris dancing skirt at the village fete when I was 7, fact fans.

Sketchbook secrets

2008-12-19T16:14:00.000Z

Here are some little bits from the sketchbook that I've just finished. I started it when I was living in Barcelona at the end of 2006, pleased to actually fill it. When I was in BCN I pretty much just drew what around me - squats, crust punks and skips. When I was in Israel/Palestine I drew the same because I missed it all. Now I'm attempting to branch out...

If your mind is blank, draw skulls.

From a comic idea I had, optimistically written in terrible Spanish.

A kind of anti-DIY guide.

This is much more recent, when I'd just bought an ink pen and all I could draw was MOUSTACHES.

Nazdrove again

2008-12-15T16:16:00.000Z

Saw this on the Nazdrove Facebook, I'm taking it as evidence of their success rather than one person's comment on my integrity. Went to the Xmas Nazdrove last Saturday that I drew the Russian doll poster for, all the posters put up around the venue got nicked which was rather nice. Awesome night too.

Old old old!

2008-12-15T16:08:00.000Z

Just dug this up, a poster I made for a film screening in 2006. Still like it, although the text is horribly done.

Drawn at Helene & Nick's kitchen table with felt tip and fountain pen, April 2006

Nazdrove poster #2

2008-12-02T20:11:00.000Z

Pen and ink and cut and pasted text, and a little bit of collage.

Drew this over the weekend, and printed it with alot of help from Footprint in my cellar on Monday. Pleased with how it turned out but a little bit intimidated by the quantum leap of using two colours rather than one, after years of drawing flyers for photocopying.

The internet is sometimes surprising

2008-12-02T20:07:00.000Z

Wasting time online took me to Flickr, where I was momentarily astonished to find photos of alot of the stencils I did around Sheffield a few years ago - most of them have been buffed off and I presumed that was it. But strangers have been uploading pictures and even more weirdly people have been commenting on them. All a bit odd. On the whole though, they weren't very good, so I'll just post a photo I found of a sticker I put up in Reyjavik, Iceland in the summer of 2006.

wedding tattoos

2008-12-02T19:57:00.001Z

I designed this for my friend Tom, who got it tattooed for when he married my other friend Kat. They met and lived together in Sheffield for years, hence the cutlery. I chickened out of their wedding, but I hope it went down well - he kept it hidden until the day...

Nazdrove poster #1

2008-12-02T19:49:00.001Z

Pen and ink and cut and pasted computer text (dafont.com I love you). 11/08

-These were the original ideas that Nick emailed me... I apologised for adding in an androgynous punk hottie, but I think he's used to it by now.