Talkies

An update: Matt Craig sent me a low-res copy of the completed strip, now he's added the dialogue bubbles, and done a fine job of it, too. As I said: Bristol Comic Expo if you want a live copy handed to you by the creator. (I won't be there because I'm an eccentric recluse.) If you happen to be the comissioning editor for a major publishing house looking for a thirty-eight year old beginner, all the better.

Nicely done, Matt.

East - West

Work in progress. Oil on board.

I'm very reluctant to post work in progress, because it invariably looks a bit rubbish. I returned to this yesterday, when it was a rough draft with promise, and slowly ruined it throughout the day. Today I've started the upwards path again and I can see how and where it should be going. I was doubly put off because I read a disparaging remark in a John Cheever short story about people's taste in art not stretching "beyond baskets of flowers and marine sunsets." So that was me in my place, but then Laura discovered Scottish landscape artist Ken Bushe, whose work is very fine, and restored my faith in what I was doing, although his seem rather better than mine.

I began it in the Midlands, when it was a painting of sunset at Tywyn, Wales, but with an eye to the local market it could equally be an east coast sunrise. The choice is yours.

The Joy of Shed

A shed, yesterday.

I have a shed.

It's the first shed I've ever had. I installed a workbench (I say workbench, it's two planks of wood at the moment) and cleared out the stuff that had ended up there as the overflow from the house move.

I began to turn my mind to the renovation of my Dawes, now that Judge Dredd is done and dusted, and the prospect of tinkering with it in a bona fide shed is an appealing one. As it happens, we went to Kelso this morning to pick up a mountain bike and a lightweight aluminium frame that we bagged through Freecycle. They were from a man called John (thanks, John), who was being slightly forced to get rid of them by his wife, who seemed to think he had come up to some sort of bicycle plimsoll line. I had the chance to see what she meant, because John showed us his shed. "Do you restore bikes?" he asked, and I said I was working on one - hesitantly, because I could tell from the way he asked this was a man who'd spent the greater part of his life tinkering in sheds, knew vastly more than me and could probably identify fourteen brands of British Lightweight by feel alone. And then he took us to see his "projects" he was working on.

Man, what wasn't he working on. He had a couple of hand built Flying Scots, a 1960s Dawes frame waiting for stripping and powder coating, a couple of Brompton-type things (he said he had a bit of a thing for small-wheeled bicycles), and was on the lookout for a Raleigh Twenty folder, and he'd just completed a fixed-wheel project with a frame he'd got from Vancouver. And there were others, stacked and dangling in said shed; road frames, mountain bikes, BMXs he was doing up for neighbours and so on. He delicately removed a lightweight alloy mountain bike frame from a cardboard box; it was worth about four thousand pounds and, I couldn't help but notice, splendidly finished in Tartan. "If I'd not been here," John said, "my wife would probably have just given you this."

As we were leaving, he was still offering tools, odd bits and pieces, handlebar stems, nuts and so on. And this was all Freecycle, mind, he didn't want anything for it. I take my hat off to you, John; thanks a lot. I've put them in the garage and will be compiling a good bike for Laura out of the one frame and two bikes she's got. Which brings me back to the shed.

I can't wait to start hanging tools from nails and finding an old chest of drawers to put stuff in. I dream of one day having a drawer entirely full of anonymous and inscrutable offcuts of metal such as I found in my dad's workshop this afternoon when I was looking for something else. In the meantime, I'll be happy to aim for a chilly autumn evening, a mug of tea, a small portable radio, the Sports Report theme tune and the voice of James Alexander Gordon. Magic.

The Blue Lump

I have this week completed another piece of work for the estimable Matthew Craig, perpetual motion creative comic dynamo, in which foppish new Dr. Who unwisely materialises on Judge Dredd's beat. Evenin' all. BLAMM. (Plus a very surprising new regeneration.)

Matthew will, I think, at the Bristol Comic Expo on 22nd-23rd May, promoting his own fine work, and this will be available as a handout from him.


There's a Tardis in it. I made sure that the details were correct, as I didn't want to send him alone into a comic book crowd to disseminate printed material showing an inaccurate Tardis. There's probably by-laws about it, let alone the anger of the mob.

Over The Hills and Far Away From the Midlands.

Finally, finally, we have moved house, wrestled with the interweb and become connected to the world again. Life is very slowly settling down and the process of living among boxes is gradually going in reverse and getting back to normal, only a new normal. With, ahem, more frequent and regular blogging.

We have an open fire (romantic, messy and inconvenient), a splendid garden to look at, and regular views of the Cheviots and open farmland for miles around. I saw at least two vistas I wanted to paint on the first day we were here. The oil seed rape and the gorse bushes are in bloom, competing shades of yellow, the beech trees are coming out in young, acid green leaf. However fond of the last house I was, this is better than life beside the A5190.

Bostin'

Well, bless my soul. We have suddenly sold and bought a house after 5 months and 129 emails-worth of fannying around.

Yes. YES.

And I finished - finally finished, two-in-the morning insomniac retouching and redrawing finished - my comic strip. I'm at the stage where I'm partly pleased and partly can see only mistakes. Still, tomorrow I look for an A3 scanner and so I can tune the images, make them really black and white, and then I can send them off to their creator Matthew in the nerve centre of his empire. Thanks for the opportunity, Matthew, I had a hoot.

I hope he won't mind a brief, non-spoiler taster:



Here we see Antonio Giallo, aka B-Have, and assorted Brummagem gawkers. It makes the change itch in your pocket to buy one, doesn't it, hm?

Moonlight, Snow and Mutant Cat Action.

One of the tremendous advantages of stress related insomnia is that it frees up so much useful work time that would otherwise be frittered away sleeping.

When I got up for a soothing hot chocolate this morning (I know, I know, you're not supposed to stimulate the brain by internet or television etc.) there was a thin, bitter-looking layer of snow on the cars and a fine, hard white moon, almost full. Moonlight and snow is such a powerful and bleakly evocative sight, it was rather beautiful. Bloody cold, mind.

I did this piece (not tonight) as a commission for my mother, who has a special affection for the cathedral close at Wells. And cats.



I think one day I'd like to do a more refined version. One day. In the meantime, I'm getting on with my first ever piece of published comic strip artwork, efficiently summarised by it's splendid creator Matthew Craig as "sixteen pages of mutant cat action."

Everyone likes cats.