rather lemony

Made you guys a card.

2012-02-14T15:41:00.001Z

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, BITCHEZ!!!1!

But, seriously. Fuck Valentine's Day. Not to be crude for crude's sake, but sodomise it with a rusty piece of drainpipe and throw it off a cliff as a sacrificial offering to the gods of I Don't Give A Shit.

Okay, that probably seems a bit much. But it's the most namby-pamby, rubbish celebration we acknowledge in Western Society, and it really needs to be killed with fire.

For the record, I am not bitter and twisted about love and romance and relationships and all that jazz. That's all fine. It's just all this public schmaltz sort of makes me want to throw up. I mean, look:

I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with anything I have ever felt for anyone in my life ... ever. In fact, I think, personally, giving someone a bear blurting out Bieber lyrics is the height of insulting. Is that really it? Is your special someone really so generic that you can sum up your love for them with a mass-produced stuffed toy and some cheap chocolate?

Agh.

Delve Dark

2012-01-24T19:48:00.000Z

When is a drawing of Myrtle Morrison not a drawing of Myrtle Morrison?

2012-01-21T18:48:00.000Z

When it's the basis for a lot of angsting about archetypes.

Playing about with character concepts last night. Should have been drawing invisible friends (bit ironic, that) ... but ended up reading over the future scripts for The Peckham Invalids again and started thinking about this gal, Myrtle. I'm just her colourist ... but I thought I'd give my tablet a spin and see what my take on her would be. Preemptive fan art if you will.

So she's a middle-aged lady of a certain social standing by the time we get to her in TPI ... but she would have been young once. I've been trying to decide if she was ever nice or just a bitch from the get-go. I suspect she's always been a bitch. Girlfriend knows that to succeed in this world you've got to crush a few fingers underfoot. Yikes.

This was brought about in part by an impromptu evening at Queen Elizabeth Hall watching the NoFit State Circus performing as part of the International Mime Festival that's been going on over the last couple of weeks.

I'd sort of gone along to go draw people doing stuff I don't normally get a chance to see (despite what you may have heard, my life doesn't usually involve people swinging on trapezes and dancing on tightropes). I sort of forgot about that and spent the whole time gawping at how beautiful the whole thing was. How the artists managed to convey so much without saying anything, so much character, subtle emotion and humour. Ritualised, abstracted symbols of the everyday comings and goings of the relationships we have with other people. Lovely.

Anyway. As I was sitting there, scribbling the odd note down, it sort of struck me, as it always does, how much of this use of body language, and costume to convey character traits can be echoed in illustration/written work (even amplified - you're not constrained by the laws of physics on a page). A lot of that is old knowledge ... using character archetypes is nothing new (Commedia dell'arte, anyone? What about the pantheon of Greek gods?) but if you accept that and use it knowingly I'd guess you can put it to shockingly affective use. I mean, no one expects you to invent a new alphabet every time you sit down to write a short story ... so keeping this in mind when you're using representative imagery is probably a good thing.

Of course it also means that whatever it is you're trying to say with the thing you're making runs deeper than the drawing itself and/or the words ... so I think that leads me onto the next little thing I've been thinking about recently ... which is how to go about feeding your (or, well, 'my' - this is turning into a bit of an introspective ramble after all) imagination.

You see ... from a 'craft' point of view I think it's great - if you're a wannabe story-maker like me- to go watch films, read pop-fiction, devour comics ... whatever. It's nice seeing how other people have looked at life and said stuff about it. It's going to help improve the eloquence of what you say, move it towards an established benchmark of what is acceptable or, arguably, what is more legible.

Problem with that is that it doesn't necessarily generate any new fodder for you to actually talk about or reveal any particularly unique or personal ways of talking about what you want to talk about. It's kind of learning about grammar, syntax, punctuation, or about music theory, and putting it into use is more akin to practising scales or set pieces than actual composition itself. If you're only looking at art forms for inspiration, would it be wrong of me to surmise that the best thing you can come up with would be a medley rather than your own melody?

It's troubling. Sometimes I wonder how much is left unsaid because the shared alphabets and symbols we use to make ourselves understood don't quite cover the area that you're trying to babble about. I wonder if this is why artists go round and round in circles for years over the same subject.

I don't know exactly where this ramble is going ... quick. Let's find a point. Oh, I know: I am currently wondering if the job of an artist (writer, painter, sculptor, sousaphonist, whatever) is to try and strike a balance between giving people something they already feel like they understand/read using a pre-understood medium (let's call that entertainment) and dredging that instinctive, unintelligible wordless pit of weird that makes people want to make things instead of just working in a call centre or as a cop. Or is all this navel-gazing counter-productive and should we focus our artistic shenanigans on more tangible research, like a scientist? Okay, that's not much of a point, but it's all I've got right now.

Look, I'm not the only one that gets upset by this stuff either. Charlie Kaufman is clearly more bothered about it than I am. He's such a bloody badass.

Okay. I'm just going to trail off and go back to writing about non-invisible invisible friends, otherwise I'm going to be worrying about this particular thinkhole all evening. Best way to thwart a thinkhole is to do the thing it's trying to swallow. I think.

P.S. I hope you like the drawing.

P.P.S Here's a detail view so you can see her snobby little face:

Ghosts and ghouls.

2012-01-19T13:29:00.000Z

Hello. It's 19 days past 2011 and I've been busy. Mostly with adminnish things, but I've also nearly completed a little comic about satan pissing off his minions, and thought I'd pop some of the line art up here in case you lot happen to be interested:

It's short and not particularly sweet, but you should be able to pick it up from February onwards. Info on that once it's all sorted and junk.

Just for laughs I thought I'd play about with colours on it too. Here's a panel that - if I were feeling more pretentious - I would say was inspired by the artistic stylings of Hieronymus Bosch, but I don't do that sort of thing so I'll say it was influenced by Sally Cruikshank instead:

So that's likely to be the first thing in print from me this year. There's a couple of other things cooking in my brain which I'd like to start posting development work from in the near future alongside collaborative stuff like The Peckham Invalids or anthology work (more information about that sort of thing as it happens).

In general, I'd like 2012 to be a year where I stop hiding all my personal/story work in my head, notebooks and sketchbooks and get it out onto this blog/tumblr/twitter/deviantart/the internet . Being secretive and shy about this stuff is for the weak and feeble. I, on the other hand, am strong like ox.

So yes. More activity in general. You have been warned.

In which I talk about Thought Bubble

2011-12-07T19:07:00.001Z

Photo courtesy of the very lovely Forbidden Planet Int. blog. Thanks guys!

So. Thought Bubble happened since I last updated. I thought it was rather good! I haven't been since 2008, and some of the scuttlebutt I'd been hearing around and about was making me think I wasn't going to have as brilliant-a time as that first intrepid voyage into the world of comics.

To be fair, last time I pitched up in Leeds, having not slept for a couple of days, I had spent the party evening getting very drunk, attempting to high-five some bloke called Kieron and getting holes ripped in my tights by certain Mancunians who need not be named, but who know who they are (we also managed to sell ALL of our stock last time, so it had been a fairly decent day on the financial front too).

Anyway. Not really wanting, a repeat performance of 2008, but also aware that this con had a lot to live up to in my memory, it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I planted my butt behind the stall I was helping to man. I needn't have been anxious though; the con itself was perfectly pleasant, and the after party (play lists and all) was lovely too. In fact I have no sordid stories, no nothing. It was just really ... really ... nice. Not much more to report than that. Ho hum.

Best bits: Picking up Paper Science, the Nu Nooners (great fun and apparently features a cameo from new buddeh Beckitastic ... maybe there are more too but I've yet to spot them), Ink + Paper and eating currywurst at the German Christmas market in Leeds proper. Oh, and reading the preview of Peabody and D'Gorath. That shizzle looks pretty (and compelling) as hell.

Worst bits: Missing out on the last copy of Cat Rackham to friggn' Howard. Of all people. He doesn't even *do* cats. He's a dog person. That was rubbish, and so was the journey up. But that's mainly because I was being judged for knitting on the train by a couple of business blokes. It was a scarf for a friend, okay? Nothing weird about that.

Anyway. That was Leeds. All in all very, er, nice and looking forward to the next one. Who knows, maybe I'll even have my own table. First time for everything, right?

Thought Bubble Festival!

2011-11-17T16:09:00.000Z

So Thought Bubble is this weekend. This pleases me!

So this is how it's going to go down:

So, as I have mentioned before, I'll be there with Howard Hardiman (left) and Julia Scheele (centre), generally working as a booth bitch but also promoting/selling/waxing lyrical our new Comic The Peckham Invalids, which I have already mentioned about a million times over the last few weeks so I won't bore you with more blurb about that.

As you can see from the very accurate rendering above I am the one who brings a touch of classiness to this situation. You can also see that we will be on table 152, which is on the main drag in Saviles Hall, shacked-up next to Time Bomb Comics and Rembrand Le Compte, opposite the Self Made Hero stand.

Obviously there's lots more to see at TB than just us. Particular highlights include Marc Ellerby's stall, where he will be dishing out the latest (colour special!) instalment of Chloe Noonan, and Tom Humberstone's pitch where he will have many many copies of Solipsistic Pop 4 for sale (it's very good. There was a lot of furious dancing at its launch party. This is always a sign of a superior publication in my humble opinion). Lizz Lunney will also have her brand new book about Depressed Cat there, which I am really looking forward to getting hold of. All in all it's going to be pretty damn great comics-buying territory.

So, uh. Yes. Hopefully see you there over the next few days.

Invalids has Arrived!

2011-11-15T16:00:00.001Z

Look what rocked-up to my front door this afternoon! Bad news: I burnt my lunch whilst I was helping to lug it out of the van. Good news: COMIC LOOKS AMAZING! It's pretty damn lush even if I do say so myself (which I do on this occasion).

So, we're going to be at Thought Bubble in Leeds with this thing this weekend*. You ought to come and say hello if you are free/in the country.

And now a really quick clowncasian sketch. A result of rediscovering dAmuro on, er. Deviantart.

Did I mention I have an account over there? I do. Not a very active one ... but if you're there you should give me a shout!

*I am there purely in a Peckham Invalids/assisting Howard Hardiman capacity this time ... next year I'll have some of my own stuff up for grabs. I promise.

The Peckham Invalids Available to Pre-Order and Stuff

2011-11-08T16:04:00.000Z

So! So. The first Issue of The Peckham Invalids went off to the printers this morning, just a little bit before elevenses. Obviously I am rather excited about this because apart from some stuff I've done for We Are Words and Pictures, this is more or less the first thing I've got in print. Or at least it's the first thing I haven't photocopied together in the college library when I should have been writing essays or animating stuff. Anyway.

For my part, it's also been a great opportunity to actually try colouring something fully. Going beyond just spot-colour or blocking which is more akin to printmaking than painting. A lot of the larger panels in this comic I've been treating a little like oil paintings (a medium I bloody love but rarely get to muck about with these days). I hope that if you get your mitts on a copy you'll be able to see how much fun I've had with those larger layouts.

Evidently my involvement in The Peckham Invalids is going to be long-term colour-wise. It also looks like I'll be taking on board writing one or two of the origin stories we have planned for the characters. I daresay I'll be doing my fair share of doodling for it too, which (as you know) I quite like doing.

For more information about the project, please head over to The Peckham Invalids website, where (as I think I mentioned before) you can take a look at some preview pages, read about the characters and even pre-order a copy should you feel so inclined.

Ophelia. WIP

2011-10-29T16:02:00.000+01:00

More on this soon ... but for now here's a peek at a print project I am working on slowly but surely. I think this is the first of a possible five, and it's not done yet ... but there isn't enough Shakespeare referencing going on on this blog. No, sir.

So, there's a new comic in the works.

2011-10-26T21:30:00.000+01:00

Evening, dear things.

Despite this radio silence, I have been up to stuff! Specifically, there's this terribly badly kept secret that Howard Hardiman, Julia Scheele and myself have been working on a comic about disabled Edwardian superheroes.

It's nearing completion now, and there's a website with a bit of background on the characters and a few preview pages for you to take a look at. We are at MCM Expo this weekend to talk about it (and give you a pretty postcard with the front cover on so you'll recognise the thing when you see it in the wild), and we'll be releasing the first issue at Thought Bubble Festival On November the 18th. Hooray!

C-Sharp - Rendezvous video

2011-08-06T23:38:00.003+01:00

It's late and I am trawling the murky estuaries and oxbow lakes of the internet (the region surrounding the Swamp of YouTube, specifically). As I was fishing for interesting visual tidbits I stumbled across another video I worked on whilst at MIE.

This one was actually dead good fun to work on. I got to flex my character animation muscles a little bit, and there were robots (I do love robots, especially arguing ones).

Sad News Weekend

2011-07-26T20:35:00.000+01:00

With shootings and deaths and disasters all over, there isn't really much to say. I only hope this week doesn't end like the last.

New Cross Turn Left

2011-07-23T18:55:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note to say that New Cross Turn Left is tomorrow. Basically, The Old Police Station is having an arts garden party, with lots of comicy, illustratory, musicy types showing up. Should be good fun, so if you're in the area (or even if you're not and you're looking for something a little different to do) you should drop in and take a look.

On the way to Grandma's House.

2011-07-19T21:40:00.000+01:00

Had some time to myself today, so spent it drawing wolves, trees and girls (though not necessarily in that order). I always forget how much I just like a good, juicy pencil sketch. Such a simple tool, but often one of the best.

Red Riding Hood is a favourite fairytale of mine. I've been re-reading this brilliant essay on it by Jack Zipes. If you've never got your hands on a copy and like a bit of analysis then I seriously recommend it.

Paper Science 5.

2011-06-30T18:15:00.001+01:00

Well whadd'ya know. It's nearly Paper Science time again, and this time I'm in it!

You can pre-order your copy over here and find out more about Paper Science at the We are Words and Pictures website.

George Michael - True Faith

2011-06-30T17:31:00.001+01:00

So, a couple of months overdue - but better late than never - here's the George Michael Video I designed characters for whilst over at M-I-E.

For those of you who don't know the original video, that would be the 1980's classic by New Order (possibly the first music video I ever saw and remains beyond awesome in my opinion):

Now that (or at least the choreography and costume designs) is based on The Triadiches Ballet by Oskar Schlemmar, which is worth a look, particularly if you're into character design. It's just a bit mental really:

So taking that and the original video as inspiration, here are a few of the characters that sprang to mind. Their presence in the final video isn't as pronounced as we had originally imagined, but that's just how these things go.

Long-time-no-update

2011-01-13T12:47:00.001Z

Hello.

So I haven't updated in ... five months. Ooh.

Lots has happened in that time. Namely I got a temporary job as a junior animator/creative designer at a little animation company, and have been spending most of my time (and creative energy) there, which is nice. Learning lots, working hard, looking forward to sharing some interesting results in the future.

I did make a little comic for the 'We Are Words And Pictures' publication 'Paper Science', which was kindly mentioned by Forbidden Planet International a couple of months ago (thank you, guys!).

WaWaP Matt has kindly asked me to contribute something new to the summer edition or Paper Science, so if nothing else you'll hear from me when that is done, but hopefully before then.

Pun of the week?

2010-09-06T10:14:00.001+01:00

Found whilst walking about in Gravesend. Kind of brilliant.

Scib paint commercial the first

2010-09-04T18:41:00.002+01:00

The first of two commercials I worked on whilst recently at Not To Scale is up!

Input on this one was minimal (I think I painted the flowers that pop up in the background), but it's too cute for me not to post it.

Lush Illustrations

2010-09-04T18:30:00.001+01:00

Last month I completed some work for Gorilla Perfumes at Lush. Having to create images in reaction to descriptions of scents was really interesting, and I really enjoyed the process.

The final illustrations for 'Love' and 'Smell of Weather Turning' are up on the Lush website.

The perfumes they have put together for this collection are really gutsy, distinctive scents and it is a pleasure to be involved with such a great project. I think my personal favourite is The Smell of Freedom, but they're all pretty darn good and well worth a sniff.

Website

2010-09-04T18:17:00.001+01:00

ratherlemony.com is finally back. It is currently housing examples of my illustration work, sketchbook wanderings and a very short animation showreel. There is also room to talk about various projects that I have worked on and will be working on in the future. Nothing there yet, but watch that space and see what happens.

Style is kind of minimalist, so there wasn't so much room for my usual silly characters. Here are some lemonheads that have all but been dropped from the design. I think they're kind of cute.

Self Portrait

2010-08-16T17:15:00.003+01:00

A couple of self portraits. Well. Not actually self portraits ... more contour exercises than anything with the happy accident of them looking a bit like my face.

Limbo.

2010-07-11T00:15:00.001+01:00

Updating from the no-man's-land that sits between opening night of Save Our Souls (which went very well), and my graduation ceremony (which should also go well, seeing as I am graduating with a first).

Anyway. Spent the day today with the boys from Order (above: this be they, alongside musician Rich Watson), helping out on a video shoot. Looking forward to seeing the results in the near future.

Save Our Souls - Six Days to go.

2010-07-02T23:57:00.000+01:00

Save Our Souls Animation Showreel 2010 from Camberwell Illustration 2010 on Vimeo.

Six days until the degree show, people! All very exciting. In light of that, here's a preview of all the animationny goodness that's going to be going on there (edited by me. Obviously. Hence the really stupid music).

animation is up.

2010-06-14T12:12:00.001+01:00

Learn To Count from Sarah Gordon on Vimeo.

So. This is the animation I was rabbiting on about doing a month or so ago. 400 paper masks and a lot of love went into this. Also: first bit of 'music' I have ever made. Ever. I want to make more.