|
|
Journal Page.
June 27th. Mystic Me
Watching England... Blimey, we're so bad we could well go on and win the thing. I've actually successfully predicted the score of the previous two games, so I clearly have some sort of previously undiscovered psychic gift - as soon as we meet a decent side [eg Portugal] managed by someone with a modicum of nous [eg Big Phil] we're doomed. Portugal to win 2-0. You heard it here first. If you want next week's lottery results, drop me an email and we'll split the rewards 50/50...
As predicted, I've not been posting much. That's been as much due to work as football, though. I've not watched as many games as I'd have liked. And then at the weekend the iMac collapsed, or at least the operating system did, leaving me with a frustrated day spent trying to muddle my way through sorting it all out again. With the help of Lloydy and Stratto [cheers fellas!] I just about got everything back and working. However, little things are buugging me. The settings on the Wacom tablet aren't quite right for a start. And the way the dialogue boxes open is different, and not in a good way. And all the title box thi=ngies have little shadowy horizontal stripes which are very annoying. Grr. Meantime, on the desk today... 
June 13th. Fahrenheit 451
For my birthday [did I mention it was my birthday the other week?] Sue bought me a copy of 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury. If you've never read it, it's a great dystopian sci-fi novel, right up there with '1984' and 'Brave New World', with some spookily prescient imaginings about where we're headed [it was written in 1953]
Here's a great quote...
"Christ is one of the "family" now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs..."
Meantime, on the desk today... 
June 9th. Go Buy Some Stuff...
It all begins today. Can't wait. To help me enjoy the event I bought one of these with some birthday money, and it's awesome. Go check it out.
Also out and available for your purchasing pleasure is this which I illustrated. True to form, when I opened it up I immediately spotted two or three glaring errors in the artwork. Funny how you never see 'em until they're in print... it's the Illustrator's curse. Even so, I think i did quite a good job on it...
My bro Steve bought me a Charles Atlas album for my birthday, and it's great. If you nip over to their website you can download the whole of their last album for free. Loads of ambient tuneage for you to chill out to there.
And lastly squidfire have new t-shirt designs and a sale on at the mo. Lovely stuff, all hand-printed onto sweat-free tees... very desirable. Go treat yourself to one.
June 8th. Back again...
We went away for half term, down to Dorset with Minty and Claire, Jim and Beth and Stumps and Sarah, plus assorted offspring. Claire's folks have a big old house down there, recently done up and it's rather splendid. We had a ball, and Minty didn't bring any of his 5 [yes, five!] Wang Chung albums with him, which is always a bonus...
Tim and Bex house-sat for us while we were gone, and James came round and whacked a huge fire-place-sized hole in the front-room chimney breast... (cheers, chaps!)
The only drawback with going away was that I ended up taking work with me. There's nothing more miserable than working while you're on holiday. You never get as much done as you would if you where at home, or do it as well as you should... frustrating, but unavoidable...
And it's been a bit full-on since we got back with a couple of deadlines to meet and the World Cup looming... (I'd always hoped that this journal wouldn't degenerate into a long whinge about work, so from here on in, if it all goes a bit quiet, just assume that i'm fed up and working hard...!) Meantime here's an image from one of the things that I've been working on...
I got some great birthday gifts btw. Three Stanley Spencer prints, A Banksy book (and so Eddie now has ambitions to be a graffiti artist), Sufjan Stevens' 'Illinoise' album (is 'Casimir Pulaski Day' the finest song ever written? Discuss...), a pipe and slippers and an old Cilla Black 7", a battenburg cake (a proper one from the farmer's market, too), beer, a Futurama dvd collection (series 3), a banana (?!) from Richard and Suzi, plus loads of other cool stuff... I did have this cunning plan to do a little drawing of each gift and post them up here by way of individual 'thank you's, but I've not had the time as yet...
ps ...come on Costa Rica!!!
May22nd. It's Been a Long Time...
...since my last post [as predicted]. Lots of 16 hour days. Lots of stress and frustration about just how awry my work:life balance has gone of late. Lots of drawing. Lots of hours sat in front of the computer wishing that I could work faster... you get the picture. Anyway, here are some of the things that've been on the desk in the meantime...
It's not all been work though. The weekend before last it was Tim and Becky's wedding in Seacroft. The weather was dour and drab, but the wedding was great - the highlights being a specially-prepared video with various friends of the bride and groom talking about them and relationships and marriage and stuff, and the music [loads of old motown soul]. I was sat next to Mike Love at the reception, which was great - he's a very inspirational bloke.
Then this weekend it was my 40th. Sue whisked me off for a night away in York at a hotel directly opposite the minster. Fantastic. We went to see 'Confetti' which is a marvellous film - very funny with a really warm heart - ate out at a great little indian restaurant, watched Micky Smith defeat the cybermen and cheered Finland on to Eurovision glory. Eddie and Joe also had a whale of a time, being babysat by Ed and Liz. Cheers chaps. Yesterday afternoon was open house round here with a great many guests coming round to celebrate with me/point at me and laugh at my aged-ness. Lovely. And now it's back to work...
May8th. Good Day/Bad Day
Saturday was Free Comic Book Day at OK Comics [Is there a finer shop anywhere?] Anyway, as a part of Oxfam and Amnesty's Million Faces campaign I went down to help Ben and Jill sign folk up for their visual petition outside the store. It was fantastic, and I think that it worked well for both parties - we picked up a lot of interest from comic-book buyers, and we also directed a lot of folk into the shop who may not otherwise have ventured in. A top way to start the day.
We went off for lunch with Esther and the Forshaws in the Corn Exchange, endured a minor football-shirt-buying strop from Joe in SportsWorld, and made it home in good time for Doctor Who. Which was fantastic [this week's episode hadn't had great write-ups in the previews, so I was bracing myself for disappointment. But it was the best of the series so far, I thought.]
Then, post-Who we had just enough time for bedtime stories and a change of clothes before dashing out to the Olive Tree in Chapel A for a rather splendid meal with Bronny and Simon and Andy and Heather. To be honest, I was worried that I'd doze off before the evening was out, but the company [and the food] was so good that I didn't even feel tired again till we got home. A thoroughly fantastic day.
Then came Sunday. Woke up feeling a bit rough, and with a bad feeling about the day ahead. Discovered that some joker/s had pulled some planks off of our fence at the back. Took Joe to Striker9... over the past few weeks I've come to really enjoy this part of my weekend. Watching him play with the other dads and sharing in the collective amusement at our kids' attempts to master the basic skills of shooting, passing, heading and generally not falling over... it's a very blokey way of relating [I don't even know any of the other dads' names...] But this term the dynamics seem to have changed and yesterday I just didn't have the energy or the patience to try and make conversation. Came home and mended the fence in the rain. Then Sue went off early to set up for the Revive business meeting, and I realised that this was the reason for my sense of foreboding. Yesterday we were voting to continue as a Church or to end Revive as a legal entity. To me, Revive is great at being the church [ie the body of Christ] and frankly a bit crap at being a Church [ie a religious institution], and i love it for that. So I was up for closing the institution and concentrating all our energies on what we're good at.
I drove over to Burley for the meeting with the kids a bit later, and got sort of lost en route. Actually it was worse than being lost, as I actually knew where I was relative to the venue, but just couldn't navigate my way there through the maze of dead ends and bollarded-off roads that proliferate the area. So i arrived thoroughly pissed-off, with a bad feeling about what lay ahead and in no mood for anything spiritual. I put myself off in a side room to look after the kids for the duration of the meeting, during which Sue and I were accepted into official membership of Revive Baptist Church. [It's weird to be joining something in order vote for it's closure...] Sure enough, the meeting didn't seem to go too well. And I was pretty glad not to have been in there, if I'm honest. There's something about the institution of a Church that brings out the Pharisee in folk [me included] - I can't believe that when he was preaching and teaching and doing his stuff back in the day, Jesus was envisaging the Church structures that we have created for ourselves...
And the result of the vote was to continue Revive, which left me [and maybe the six others who voted for closure?] in an awkward place. And so about seven hours after being accepted into membership of the Church, I resigned. [I am secretly hoping that this may be some kind of record - Shortest-Ever Membership of a Baptist Church?!]
And so I'm left pondering where that leaves me, church-wise. I'm hoping that my relationships with Revive people can be maintained and deepened - after all, that's why we joined in the first place, for the people. Sue [and the kids] have not left though, so we'll have an interesting time trying to work out how this all works out for us as a family now.
Whatever happens for us, it's sad and actually quite depressing to see your mates hurt and divided and generally wandering about stunned and upset like folk were after that meeting. And then when Sue arrived home [she stayed in Burley to count the votes] I had a frustrated rant at her about a whole load of other stuff. Sorry for that, Sue, I was out of order. So all-in-all, a really crappy day.
And now I'm facing a very very busy few weeks, with several late night-ers ahead of me if I'm to get everything that I need to get done finished and all my work deadlines met. Which is my way of saying that postings on here may be a bit light for a while. Normal service wil be resumed er... probably after the world cup! [See you in July!]
May4th. My New Favourite Band
The other day I cracked the cafetiere, leaving me with just one of those geometric metal expresso coffee-maker thingies to provide me with my daily caffeine intake. The last time I drank expresso I came to half an hour later wandering around Oxford and pointing at clouds...Then today I tipped a full mug of the stuff (watered down, of course) over the computer desk. The keyboard and Wacom tablet took the brunt of it, and after a good wipe-down everything appears to be functioning ok, though for some reason iTunes has gone very temperamental. Maybe it's the mac equivalent of whacked-out cloud-gazing....
Meantime this dvd arrived yesterday, and it's great. It's got a Jeffrey Brown animation on it, which was the main reason for getting it in the first place, plus of course death cab for cutie are brilliant. Well worth owning.
I also just finished re-reading 'Blankets'. I googled my way to some interesting interviews with Craig Thompson (the author) about the book, plus a couple of reviews, which confirmed my conviction that reviews tell you more about the critic than they do about the thing that they're actually reviewing... (feel free to remind me of that next time I'm treating you to my informed opinion about anything)
On the desk today = some roughs and another one of these... 
May3rd. Knock-Backs
I got knocked back over a couple of work-type things today. Firstly, those flat-pak Dr Who models - turns out that the bbc are working on something similar in their 'Doctor Who Adventures' comic (in issue three - out today! - there's a cut-out and make K-9) so I can't post the nets for my models on the site here - copyright issues etc. Serves me right for asking 'em i s'pose. Still, it's nice to be nice.
Then I heard that my pitch for a fold-up Advent/Christmas resource thing (based on the walk-through Advent calendar that we did back in December) wasn't going to come to anything either. The book packagers that I was talking to felt that they couldn't realise the idea in a cost-effective way, and also, my style's not quite right for their market... I guess that I'd expected as much, and it leaves me free to do something with the idea on here and/or with revive folk later in the year. Watch this space...!
In the meantime I'm suddenly facing a busy month with deadlines popping up every few days from now till the start of the World Cup (when my schedules obviously go right out the window...) Today I also got a couple of sets of comments back on sketches that I sent to clients last month, and I have some roughs to get done and emailed by the end of this week (see below). I've been struggling to get up the enthusiasm for work recently if I'm honest, but I can feel my zest returning, and I think that shows in some of the stuff I did earlier this afternoon...
April 28th. Instead of working...
...I've been fiddling around with these.
For those not in the know, that's a dalek, a sea devil and the Moxx of Balhoun, all created in Photoshop and printed out onto A4 card. The sea devil needs some work, to be honest, though this version is much better than my first attempt...
Having said that these were made instead of work, that's not exactly true, as I may have a got meself a job creating something similar for a Christmas/Advent resource, so this counts as research. Sort of.
ps ...apologies for the general crapness of the previous posting. too much to say and not enought time to edit...!
April 25th. Like A Glittering Prize...
A busy weekend. On Friday night I was out on the town with Ed and G and Lloydy and Dan for part one of Tim's stag do. I nearly didn't make it as I missed the bus and ended up sat at the stop for half an hour wondering whether i should just give up on it and come back home, but I'm glad that I didn't... I've never been in the HI-Fi before, it was comedy night and I thoroughly enjoyed it - will definitely make the effort to go again. When the hen party showed up there, we moved on to a little indie club called Wire, where they were playing a rather fine selection of stuff, including several tunes that I knew and loved including the Postal Service and the Fall... point of order for Lloydy - Simple Minds are in NO WAY comparable to the mighty Echo and the Bunnymen and henceforth must never be mentioned in the same breath. [Not even in jest...] Got in at 1.20am with ringing ears and blistered feet [I'm breaking in a new and rather fine pair of doc marten shoes] and woke up on saturday with a remarkably clear head.
saturday was all work and football-and-Doctor-Who-watching [I'm the only one in the house who had a werewolf nightmare as a result, much to everyone else's amusement]
Sunday was a football day too, as we took two Revive teams down to Goals soccer centre in Leeds for a tournament organised by our mate Cap. I made the trophy - it being St George's day the competion was named the 'DragonSlayer" tournament - and it came out quite well.
Sadly, we didn't do so well, with Revive B scoring only one goal and registering only one point [a 0-0 draw with a team who also lost all their other games] And I scored an og with my very first touch. The other Revive team did a little better, wopping us 5-0 [though it was much closer than that, honest!] on their way to being knocked out in the quarter finals... However, Joe got his hands on the trophy by ingratiating himself with the winning side and joining them as they went up to receive the honours. [He even came away with a spare winners medal which one of 'em kindly let him have...!]
Rounded off the day by watching Solaris in the evening - a really great and thought-provoking movie about love and loss and guilt and redemption and stuff. [I love films like that - movies leave you thinking and puzzling about them for hours afterwards. A very rewarding watch that I'm still pondering a couple of days later...]
April 21st. Looking Up...
This pic probably gives away where I'm headed with these Greenbelt pics. Don't know if I mentioned it before, but the sequence [if I ever finish it] is inspired by 'So Here We Are' by Bloc Party, and it's about looking up - something that I'm trying to do more of, both metaphorically and literally. Maybe it's something that all tall people inevitably end up doing, but I spend a lot of my time with my head down. And that's a shame, 'cos Leeds has some amazing architecture when you start gazing up at it.
Meantime I spent a lot of yesterday listening to 'Script of the Bridge' by the Chameleons. It's my favourite ever record for wallowing in when I'm feeling a bit pissed off with things [as I was yesterday - don't ask...] - it starts with a track about standing on a window ledge contemplating suicide, and follows on with songs about John Lennon's murder, old ladies being beaten up by burglars, existential angst, unemployment and the vacuosness of the music business. [It's not all doom and gloom though as the album ends with a tune about lying happily on a hill and thinking that maybe things aren't all bad after all] During my obligatory-miserable-teenager phase, the Chameleons were the band that nursed me through relationship trauma and disillusionment and A-level panic and I'll always love them for that - 'Intrigues in Tangiers' [the session version recorded off John Peel on a crappy tape recorder] - that's the greatest song ever for moping about to... Funny how I'll retreat there when I need some comfort music, rather than opting for something more recent... Anyway, back to looking up... April 19th. Back...
We're back after our short easter break.
On the journey home from Norfolk earlier today Joe announced that he'd just seen a "squarecrow" standing in a field. Other highlights included Easter Sunday egg-rolling [I'm glad Emma won, as we sensed that it could've got ugly if she'd lost...] and of course, Doctor Who, which we watched with good friends and pizza. In preparation for the new series, we looked back at a few of the episodes from last year, and I'm hoping that I'm not the only one who blubs uncontrollably* at the end of the one where Billie Piper/Rose goes back in time to meet her Dad. [Or when the lone Dalek commits suicide... how sad am I?!]
Annoyingly we forgot to set the video for the BBC's other Easter extavaganza, the 'Manchester Passion', which sounds like it was pretty fantastic. So if anyone out there did record it, and fancies lending it to us, we'd be dead grateful...
Meanwhile, Eddie took part in a Leeds Young person's Film Festival animation workshop, and going down to the Vue to see his efforts projected up huge on a big screen was pretty exciting. We were hugely impressed, with his film and also with the festival and it's organisation. [And all for free, too. Brilliant.]
And Joe distinguished himself in the Leeds Striker9 tournament with some crunching tackles, the odd searching pass, and by picking a fight with a rather bemused kid twice his size...
Work begins again tomorrow, but in the meantime here's another of those pics which I did a week or so ago but never got around to posting...
*that's "uncontrollably at the end", and intermittently throughout...
April 6th. Today's pic...
April 5th. All Apologies...
Sorry for not posting much of late. Partly it's general busy-ness, and partly it's because I've not really felt that inspired, to be honest. Life ticks over and there's not a huge amount to write about going on at the mo. Which is ok, I think...
Until something exciting does happen, here's more of those pics for Greenbelt. I need to pull my finger out and get more of these done I think, otherwise I may just run out of time...
|
