It is going to be a beautiful week. I am staying indoors to continue animating moody windows and rain.

Alternative Press Fair

I sold some Everyday goods with Georgie yesterday at the Alternative Press Fair. We found ourselves in the pleasant and sometimes strange company of neighbours, Alfie Gallagher and Bear Guts, in the equally charming and bizarre venue of The Albert. It was a lively day. Met great folks, caught up with familiar faces and picked up some very decent publications and freebies.

Those handsome objects you see above are courtesy of Belly Kids, The Well Met Press and Sofia Niazi – and what a lovely bunch of coconuts they all are. Also super happy to have been given comics by Adam and Joe who dropped in for a good browse.

Thanks to Rebecca for getting us a space, and thanks to Hisham for sweet-talking punters when we left our table to gawk at zines and stuff. And thanks, of course, to Alternative Press for a swell Saturday.

Tottenham World Film Club Workshops

 

 

I’ve been facilitating animation workshops with Zuzanna at a local film club set up by documentary filmmaker Justin Lyle for the past few months. They’re open to people of all backgrounds and give a basic introduction to different techniques, aiming to show how accessible and versatile animation can be. It’s been great fun so far, and a real learning curve for us as well. Also happy to be working with stop motion again, and to enact those one day project ideas sitting around in the back of my sketchbooks (albeit vicariously).

Things have been quiet around here but things are happening. I’ll show you soon.

Excel / Fog

Fiddling about on excel as usual. Just an exercise in gradients and seeing what subtleties and transparencies you can achieve with shading options.

Kitchen

Those illustrations to go with Kitchen did happen. Here are some of them. I may have to return to the one of Eriko as well as the plants on the terrace sometime.  Although they are quiet scenes, both subjects are celebrations of life. Eriko is dazzling! And the plants are friendly and buoyant. At the moment, I feel they’re a bit timid, but they should make you want to do a little jig to a song you like. I’ll try to cheer them up.

Been working on another Short Cuts episode. Here’s a screenshot of an early line test and some character designs. That left hand page is something my scanner did as it let out some sort of war cry.

This one’s somewhat more lighthearted than the last one I’d animated with Zuzanna, so any tears shed will be from uncontrollable, unstoppable hilarity, perhaps. Listen to more Short Cuts goodness here.

Kitchen Tests

A few preps and tests for the Kitchen illustrations. Going through a periwinkle love thang lately.

iDEATH

Here’s a surviving scrap of work I created back when I was at Kingston. It’s a somewhat crude depiction of the landscape of iDEATH in Richard Brautigan’s novel, In Watermelon Sugar, which I animated a teaser for and, unfortunately, never fully realised. This snippet didn’t make it into the wee thing, but having been reminded of it by Eimhin McNamara earlier this week, I thought I’d post it up.

If you’re unfamiliar with Brautigan, his work is very easy to get acquainted with, so get friendly with them books. You might just figure out what the heck you’re looking at (hopefully). Then dig these fine folks over at the Brautigan Book Club.

Excel / Hob

I’m currently working my way through a series of illustrations for a novel I am very fond of, called Kitchen, which is about death, grieving and kitchens, sort of. So here’s a hob, which isn’t actually one of the illustrations, but there to show you that I fugging love Excel (I keep a sketchbook, you’ll see it around), and that I am cooking up some artworks in my kitchen of *creativity*. More arts soon, less BS metaphors tho.