L I F E

A new cover for New Scientist on a subject close to my heart. A chance to draw as many insects, animals, birds and flora as I fancied! The article's an absorbing read too. However I have excellent books on all those things except the animals: I need a REALLY good, 90% visual guide to 'all the animals in the world'...can anyone suggest one? Google's great but I prefer books for getting legs and ears correct!

Read the article

Spring Shopping!

Just to let you know there are some fresh gubbins added to the Factoryroad Shop, which stocks not only Inkymole's goodies but items by co-conspirator Solo One and our record label Blunt Force Trauma as well. Records, stickers, prints, t shirts, jewellery, stationery and some lovely spring tote bags (featured in a new book by Jitesh Patel about...erm...tote bags!)

Whether you want to spend 50p or £25, there's a small something-or-other in stock. More to come later in the year. Yeah. We have plans.

www.factoryroad.bigcartel.com/

My First Ever Jobs. No. 1 In A Series: Cliff.

This is a series I hoped to start ages ago. But I was so busy doing my 'Most Recent Ever Jobs' that I've not, till now.

This is the first job I did for a commercial client. I was not even a full term into my second year at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design and was on a self-directed work placement at a design company in the Midlands. I had to design Cliff Richard's tour shirts, and even then, my 'skill' for typography and its commercial application was recognised, as I was asked to do Cliff's signature. Since I had no idea how Cliff signs his cheques - and I told them so - they just said 'oh that doesn't matter, just fudge it.' So I did. The red insignia is meant to be a C and an R...more like a G, or the bottom half of a treble clef I think, but they loved it, and it sold in thousands on his tour.

This one's up for grabs as the ongoing space-clearing continues. It's a Large. Surprisingly, never worn. Anyone a closet Cliff fan, or know someone who is? Hey woah come on now, easy! Not all of you at once!

Never mind that, we're all about to be turned into one giant pixel.

Remember I said I love looking at things that make me feel dim? Sort of the 'must-try-harder' syndrome?
Well this one's a 100% organic-prime-beef example.

Made by French director Patrick Jean, this scales up all those bleepy munch-munch sounds of 80s video games and shoves them in the direction of New York, where they proceed to invade the city. There can, of course, be only one conclusion.

Soundtrack here by our man in Berlin, Bazooka, of Aural Carnage Records and Sub-Carnage Records, whose second 12" 'Knowledge and Wisdom' we re-released because we loved it so much.

It's great to see such a perfect hook-up of sound and vision.

EX-E- CUTE:

In a fight between Timmy Burton and these lads...

...I know who'd win. Now, I do love Timmy and his bonkers creations, and I get asked a lot whether I am 'inspired by Tim Burton' and there were the never-ending type comparisons a few years ago. Well, yes, of course I am inspired, but the word 'dark' is so often used to describe his work it makes me feel a bit tired sometimes. It's not 'dark'. Dark became a word as over-used and high-streetified as 'eclectic' did ten years ago (everyone's latest release was bloody 'eclectic') along with words like 'awesome' ('it inspires awe in me') and 'underground'.

So, although there's a fair amount of reduced light levels in there, Tim Burton and his friendly-scary creations are many subterranean levels up from the murk and dinge of these two quiet fellas, the Brothers Quay.

You can Google them of course but there's no website. They don't want one. So thank God for YouTube then and their plentiful supply of films.

Marvel at how one rotating cube and a pile of iron filings become the most unsettling thing you've ever seen. Be sobered for a moment at the way a change in speed makes things less comprehendible, and a simple movement of an inanimate head is so unnatural you can actually feel your own follicles trying to get away. Tiny motions, mute details, claustrophobic viewpoints, lots of chiaroscuro, and beautifully curated sound.

No point me banging on any more, I know what they do for me, but have a look and see for yourself. Sometimes you just have to share.

This is a rejected 1991 ident piece for BBC2, which makes me want to turn back time and go to animation school:

Brothers Quay -1985- The Epic of Gilgamesh
Uploaded by petitlolotechre. - Independent web videos.

and my favourite, 'Stille Nacht I Dramolet':

The shape of things that hum.

I'm in the mood for talking about some things by other people that I like. Talking about your own work gets really boring sometimes!

My friend Kev sent me his new record recently, 'The Shape Of Things That Hum' on Ninja Tune records. Kev is better known as Strictly Kev (I never have found out why), of the DJ Food outfit and I do need to point out we were buying his records long before we started getting free ones! *winking emoticon*.

This one's a bloody corker though. Not that the others haven't been, I play A Recipe for Disaster (listen to it here and/or buy it here) a lot, even though it must be cocking on for 14 years old (my partner prefers Kaleidoscope), it's just that this one comes with exquisite art (Kev is also the Charlie Big Potato designer for Ninja) and we can't stop listening to it. The artwork is jewel-like and very pretty; it looks a bit like a mad man with a healthy dose of OCD has gone into a jeweller's, smashed up all the gems, and calmly re-arranged them all on the big shop windows with glue then shone a light through them.

The line work for the art is by Henry Flint, whose detailed writhing comic book art work you'll have to seek out in a non-web format as he does not have a site of his own. (Strangely refreshing, that). Kev has painstakingly coloured these images retrospectively and 'against all the odds'...


And it's a killer package too - big juicy poster and download and there's a DVD to go with it. But the main thing is that it really sounds like someone who's taken time to ruminate and masticate and all those other things you have to do to stir up a really fresh brew. It takes time. It still sounds like DJ Food, but DJ Food gone away for a bit and had time to fondle some new sounds and play for days on end with robots. Because this does have a robot theme, you see; Kev is a big fan of the mechanical man, and this suits me just fine because if I only ever had to watch Iron Man and Robocop and Terminator and all their sequels for the rest of my cinema-going days, I'd be a happy geek, though not quite as happy a robo-geek as Kev himself:

It hangs together really well and the sound seems, if I may so bold, more fulsome. More reverb and bass. Still very Kev though - narrative vocals, jazzy bits, groovy percussion (groovy in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and ... an element of minor threat lurking beneath. Or at least a warning.

The other thing is the cover / re-invention of one of my favourite artist's tracks, 'Giant' by The The. I put the record on without reading any liner notes (always do, listen first read later) and kept thinking, bloody hell! This is cheeky! But Matt Johnson and Kev have been friends for a long time, so it only made sense that they'd collaborate on something like this eventually. There's a fresh vocal being recorded for it too, which I can't wait to hear. The The was the inspiration behind my 'O' level art exam project (don't laugh) and to this day I go all tingly when I hear the opening notes of 'This Is The Day'.
Cheers Kev for sending it and making it in the first place, and may there be lots more. Kev's studio by the way is one we should all aspire to - tidy, clean and decorated with all things visually delicious and design-tastic - have a look. (Then go and tidy up in an embarrassed frenzy!)

Li(f)e in pictures.

My friend and long-time inspiration, Sage Francis, releases his latest album in May called Li[f]e, named after a line from one of his earlier tunes on what is one of my most-played albums, Personal Journals.

Anyone who's kept an eye on what I've been doing for the last ten years will have an understanding of how important Sage's work has been in developing my own, and Sage's words will need no introduction. But for anyone who isn't aware, it was Sage's music which prompted me to undertake one of the biggest and scariest projects I've ever done, my show 'If A Girl Writes Off The World', in 2006.

Here's a quote take from the website for the show, which you can still visit today:
'I played connect-the-dots with your beauty marks, and ended up with picture-perfect sheet music...you can still hear me humming your nudity under my breath' (Hopeless)

Sage's songs are strewn with tiny linguistic gems and white-hot pin-pricks of personal expression, leaving the hip-poppers littering their charts with fake diamonds and teeth.

And if being reduced to tears or smarting from a sharp political smack round the chops isn't enough to remind you you're alive, his beats'll do it for you.

I wish I had written the words, but I didn't; I can only pick up the crayons and scribble hard at what they conjure...it's going to take more pictures and more day trips out of the comfort zone before I can say I've done this man's work justice.

The exhibition was a collection of 2- and 3D pieces made as a raw and energetic response to a selection of his words. In contrast to client and professional work, these pieces were imperfect and impulsive, some being sold, some becoming permanent installations with fans around the world, and some making their way to the walls of Sage's home, where I'm proud to say they remain to this day.

A video of the show coming together.

Voxpops of the show with Sage making a cheeky entrance/exit.

When he asked me to produce artwork for his previous album, 'Human The Death Dance' (above), I was awestruck and bloody excited - what's better than being asked to do cover art for your favourite artist? But I was equally excited for to discover Sage's next cover artist is fellow Rhode Islander Shepard Fairey, who's created this beautiful illustration based on an old snapshot of a very caucasian Sage from a time when it wasn't at all cool to be a white rapper. Not one to give in to tired and silly rap preconceptions, Sage stuck his face in all its pasty beardy glory on his album cover, and it became one of his most iconic images.
Having watched Sage's cover art move from hand-drawn covers, photocopied for free at Kinko's, to collaborating with one of our most renowned artists (and fellow Bernstein & Andriulli creative) has been a journey I almost feel a maternal pride in; this is a man who's worked harder than I can describe to get his label to where it is today. Constantly in awe of his vision and commitment, I'm proud to have played just the tiniest part in that!

Congratulations Sage on the beautiful artwork and I cannot WAIT to hear the album.

Sage Francis starts touring in May 2010.


Read about and order the new album here.

Planned Obsolescence

*This is a long one. You might want to get a cup of tea before you start.

I was thinking about this phrase, brought to my attention by B. Dolan and invented in the 1930s as a way of boosting the economy and I realised that from the moment we started planning the new studio, currently being built messily downstairs, there has been a constant flow of objects outward, as things are agreed upon as surplus to requirements, better suited elsewhere or become superceded.

We always knew there would be some serious 'cleansing' to do; for years we've kept a charity bag on the go, regularly taking it stuffed-full over to the Mind shop where I am a Gift Aider and from whence I receive regular letters telling me how much money my unwanted things have raised. We were aware there would be an escalation of things leaving the house as we cull the studio, kitchen and living room contents, and look objectively at what we have. Although we live fairly minimally, not having a loft to use as a convenient 'disappearing space' for things we can' decide on, or a parents' garage, there are still too many things to potentially litter our new space.

No; everything we have has to earn its keep. Do we need it? Can someone else re-use it? Can it become something else? If not, where do we take it so that it's responsibly disposed of? Questions like this have, over the last few weeks, thrown into sharp focus the difficulties of 'getting rid' in a responsible and ethical way.

We've had a skip outside for weeks now, and I can see why humans see these as convenient yellow and black holes which make nasty or dirty things magically go away. Just bung it in. The temptation to hurl things in and close the front door is strong - but passers-by have done that for us, adding the obligatory pizza boxes, chip papers, plastic bottles and and fag packets. The thing is, they don't 'disappear'; although some materials such as wood, hardcore and metals will be separated and recycled, much of what is thrown in can end up in landfill where they may or more likely may not break down, lurking ruefully for decades under the earth. It wears me out just thinking about it.

We now know just how much work it is to enable an object to leave us responsibly. But boy, it can be hard work. Here's a list of what's gone, and how we 'got rid' of it:

-The piano was sold to an eBayer who bought it for his little girl, learning piano aged 11. Her Dad's a singer in his spare time, and I couldn't have wished it a better home, though it took huge amounts of perseverance to get it sold (and a tear or two when it finally left).

- Our gas boiler, no longer needed but in full working order, was given to friends whose recently-purchased house is still without central heating. Mmm, warmth! We had to pay a plumber to remove it, and it was our dinner guest in the living room for some time, sitting disconnected on the floor, but it was worth the wait.

- The cooker has followed it, replacing theirs which had a silly non-closing door. It took chums to helps us lug it out it, and take the two items to the next town - but they've got a new home.

- Our two removed windows were sold on eBay to a man in Bristol, who's building his own house. We've lost a handsome amount of money on them, but Mr Builder will look out over the Avon through two beautiful sash double-glazers, and he'll send me a picture. That's good enough for me. The alternative - firewood? Giving them back to the carpenters for dismantling? Not for us.

- My first Mac, blogged about in a previous post has, for the princely sum of £17 and an hour spent on eBay, gone home with the wonderful Graham, Mac collector and Apple geek, whose boyish smile betrayed his excitement at the latest addition to his collection. Strangely I couldn't give this away, not even to charities pleading for old computers, but once on eBay, it was snapped up.

- The carpet was a different matter. Now at Worklink, the reaction I got from the carpet shops I called to ask about recycling had me double-checking I hadn't just asked them what to do with a sack of dismembered puppies. I could feel them recoiling. Recycling? Not our problem, they said, throwing me at arm's length - we don't need to recycle, we leave all the bits with the customer. Oh, for them to recycle? Yes, they said. And where do we do that then? Erm... they said. In fact, carpet retailers can join this association.

- The new washing machine in the flat we're having to stay in wasn't wanted by the previous tenant, and the landlord didn't want it either, so that's gone to a family somewhere in Leicestershire. The sofa, armchair, dining room table and chairs went to Worklink. Their fridge will follow, as our own inherited 1956 Frigidaire is still doing its job handsomely.

- Two old mattresses are the only thing the council has had to collect, but the sum of £20, and the amount of hassle saved by not taking it ourselves, is worth it.

- Our builder's had the antique radiator (we kept the big fat one in the bathroom), and the living room radiator's gone to a friend with a freezing cold house (another friend with a freezing cold house).

- ...she had the TV, too (Mark the builder's given us our first flat-screen. Yay!)

- Mind had about 30 DVDs. Some bloody good ones too. But you can't keep everything.

- The original lath ceiling is stacked and ready to be burned in the yet-to-arrive woodburner.

- The cast iron fireplace (we've opened up the original arch behind it, before you panic!) is going to the bloke who supplies our reclaimed bricks and iron columns. Nice.

- The same man's had our 50s kitchen cabinets by Daintymaid - someone's going to go bonkers with excitement when they see those.

- Even my old studio phone has found new employment at the builder's house.

There's more, but you get the idea. It looks like a huge amount of hassle that we could easily have chosen to avoid by going the 'skip' route, but despite the dust and muck we breathe easily that we didn't add to the piles of decaying crap in the process of giving the house its next lease of life. More money has left the house than has been generated by parting with these objects, and it's a cliche, but we feel we're really lived the 'reuse, reduce, recycle' mantra. We're so relieved about that it almost makes us want to lie down.

Despite the effort, it's completely possible not to fill the skip, and to send things onto gainful employment somewhere else instead. It's not difficult, but you have to be dogged in the face of challenges like terrified, cornered carpet retailers and the desire to just...'bung it in the yellow hole'.

There's an entirely separate blog on the raw materials we're building with, and how we've swapped and traded for some of the things we've needed. But that's for later. In the meantime, please marvel at the current state of the kitchen.


And the same corner before:

Dare. Dream. Do!

Over Christmas I was working on this campaign for Target, with Little & Co. and Digital Kitchen, through my agents Bernstein & Andriulli in NYC.

In honour of Black History Month, Target recently launched its “Dare, Dream, Do” campaign. The print, web, broadcast, and interactive campaign tells the inspiring stories of Malaak Compton-Rock, Marc Morial, Marcus Samuelsson, and Steve Stoute. The banner ads and video interviews are a blend of 2d and 3d, Digital Kitchen seamlessly mixing live video with my hand-drawn illustrations. You can see some of the videos here.
Malaak Compton-Rock

'Dare, Dream, Do’ is an integrated multicultural branding exercise by Target, celebrating the company’s diversity and aimed at sharing stories of success. Malaak Compton-Rock (married to Chris Rock) founded the Angel Rock Project, an organization that aids orphans and young children in South Africa. Steve Stoute is an entrepreneur and record executive. Marcus Samuelson is a chef and cookbook author. And last but not least, Marc Morial is the president of the National Urban League.
Marcus Samuelson

I was sent a big pile of photographs of each person's photo shoot to understand how each person moved, stood, and talked, in particular noticing what excited them and when they became the most animated. Using descriptions of their life stories and collections of words pulled out from their interviews and photo sessions, I drew illustrations that captured all of those things.

Steve Stoute

I also created an entire hand-drawn alphabet for Target, creating unique typography for the campaign. The typeface I made includes upper and lower case, a set of punctuation marks, and numerals. And to avoid the dead giveaway when playing the ‘is it a font or is it handwriting?’ game, I gave the most commonly used letters two or three different versions!
Mark Morial

Each work started out on paper with black ink – be it fountain pen, dip pen, felt pen, or other. Since everything was being animated, a consistent line weight turned out to be crucial. After everything was drawn and scanned, the illustrations were then vectorized for the animators.
Stills from one of the banner ads

This really felt like I was having the time of my life, doodling away over a big sheet of paper and getting to draw from a long list of different and sometimes challenging little objects – it was one of those jobs where you think to yourself ‘this cannot be my job – I’m having too much fun!’

If you're in the USA look for web banners and print ads across the Internet. More information and videos can be found on the Target website.
One of the print advertisements

Client: Target
Campaign: Dare, Dream, Do
Agency: Little & Co., Minneapolis
Video and Animations: Digital Kitchen
Art Director: Katherine Lamm
Creative Director: Julie ZulkoskyOne of the print advertisements

'I'm Quite pleased with the result of this, it looks brilliant'.

I was sent this by Chris, art director at Sight and Sound magazine, who'd discovered what looks like several A Level schoolkids having a go at their version of a cover for the mag. Interesting that they're posting their work on a blog, presumably because they work 'at home' such a lot these days (but with class sizes becoming enormous, this is less of a surprise than it should be.) Year 12, let's see...that makes them what we would have called 'Sixth Formers'.

My favourite is Jana's, the hand-drawn type version, but look closely...a font? Or several? I rather like the jaunty angle of the model pretending to be 'unknown director'. I also love Jana's ballsy confidence - 'I'm quite pleased with the result of this, it looks brilliant'. Bless the lad - keep that up, it'll be useful later on in life! I like to think this is influenced by Sigh and Sound's recent experiments with hand-drawn covers (ahem).


Chris on the other hand cheerfully goes for one of the cheesiest fonts known to man, and Charlotte does a nice job of saturating a photo rather creepily and remembers to put 'An' before Historic too - extra points for grammatical correctness!





It all takes me back. But putting homework online, Photoshopping an entire creative solution and presumably receiving feedback from the teacher via wires and screens seems a little sad and lacking in something. Let's hope there was fierce classroom debate over fonts and layouts with print-outs waved sweatily in animated palms. Interesting though - give it a few years and they might well be cover stars themselves - though perhaps as directors rather than designers!

Love In A Hurry

I love those super-fast jobs where you think you can't possibly squeeze it in, but you say yes because you love the sound of it, and THEN they bring the deadline forward to 'the middle of the week' rather than 'the end of the week'.

Sometimes the sheer speed I have to work at makes for a rush-job which, despite initial nerves about 'fitting it in', has the strange effect of making me a bit cavalier about the outcome. It's as if the brain says 'Well. They've given you three days, and you've already got ton of things to do, so you'll just have to do your best and they'll get what they're given'. It sort of...releases the tension, and relaxes the hands. Plus, there's no time to get nervous about it - I just have to bash on in.

Brown Thomas in Ireland are running this illustration for their Spring campaign, with window displays and ads, to coincide with Valentine's day. I'd been doing a lot of my more detailed work lately (here) and this job just happened to require exactly that. The letters are 8" high and all done by hand 'in one take' with no digital fudgery at all (except to change the colour to pink for the purposes of this blog!)

It also dovetailed nicely with an illustration for the Natural History Museum, coming soon to a blog near you.

This was, therefore, a joy to do. I made some of the flowers up but in the main, these all come up in Spring. On a dingy wet winter's day, this was just the tonic. Fine nibs, big paper, music on, tongue out...and relax.

Pen dilemmas

I'm doing lots of detailed busy-busy pieces at the minute and am trying out new pens. It's always a dilemma. I'm so used to working with pens that give, bending and flexing and responding to pressure, that using anything else sometimes feels a bit odd. But when you want solidity from a pen, you need it to perform every time.

The exception to this is the Japanese double-ended calligraphy pen I have with one very pointy, rock-hard end which is a felt tip. It's brilliant, but I have only one left and I've just completely exhausted it on a recent job for the States. Hmm. So. Two of my current jobs involve solid blacks and silhouettes and tiny fine details, and the dip-pen nibs are a little too unpredictable for that. You know - a bit too much pressure here and they'll gleefully deliver a mercury-like mound of shiny blackness just where you wanted a discreet 3pt line.

So, I bought some ZIG Millennium pens in 03, 01 and 05. They're OK, nice and solid, but they rub out when I'm erasing the pencil lines underneath. And the new, better scanner seems to see right through the ink. Result: a non-consistent black which then needs some digital darkening here and there, which I'd rather avoid. Staedtler Lumocolours just bleed. Similarly their Pigmentliners run out very quickly but more importantly, they're actually a dark grey, and also rub out when erasing. I don't like their clumsy blunt end either, just where the fingers grip

In order to get this flat, responsive, solid clean black line I'm considering investing in some new Rotring pens, which I used extensively as a student (in fact my one and only tattoo was done with a 001 Rotring - by accident, of course) I remember their ink is very opaque and VERY black - and they're refillable.

But... pen geeks of the world: can you offer me any suggestions? Perhaps there's a rock-solid standby you wouldn't be without. I've sampled every pen type in the local art shop, and I'm still not armed with the right tool. Tips, anyone?

The Crabtree & Evelyn Sale

Nice to know these posters are up in all branches of Crabtree & Evelyn, as reported to me by Jules at Central Illustration whose office is across from a branch.

Very pretty this, it's also on the website. Lovely people to work with too, it must be added!

Crabtree & Evelyn website

Clean

I've had 11 days without drawing, and observe: how clean the fingers! Even as I type this the middle finger is already blackened with ink under the fingernail from the first morning back 'at work', and the matching finger on the left is already nicely blackened from a pre-Christmas car door incident.

So, welcome to 2010! What shall these stained little digits produce this year, I wonder?

Gocco Christmas

What enormous fun! The annual Inkymole seasonal greeting was produced this year on a recently-acquired Gocco PG-5, a tiny all-in-one Japanese printing machine.

It's a cross between rubber stamping and screenprinting, and my initial results are amusingly oafish - a big loud Christmas greeting rendered in chunky colours which started off neatly contained in their own spaces, but soon bled excitedly into one another making some of the cards outrageously 'spontaneous'. A hefty amount of ink is required, but this little creature can produce up to 1000 prints from one screen. Seeing them pile up over every available surface in the studio, with gaudy Christmas lights bouncing off them, was truly delightful.

I've been moaning ever so slightly over the last eighteen months or so that I don't do enough print, and so in a year where we seem to have received far fewer 'physical' cards, and more 'e-cards', I was proud to be lugging bagfuls of hand-printed, slightly wonky things to the post office. Actually...that sounds like last year. Come to think of it, the year before, too...and...

I think I finally appreciate now that if ever the year comes when I don't send something hand-made (or at least hand-drawn) out into the world in December, there will be uproar.

Thanks little lavender Gocco monster. Can't wait to see what I do with it in 2010!

Prepare, as I geek out most publicly. Here's how the printing was done:

The artwork has to be drawn in one take onto thin non-reflective paper, using a carbon-heavy tool - a pencil, the special RISO Gocco pen, or you can use a photocopy. After an initial disaster using the original art (bottom left) which revealed the Special Pen to be Not So Special, I went for an old-fashioned sticky-with-carbon photocopy.

Gocco lid open, ready for action:

You put the artwork down on the sticky pad, press the lid down and expose the screen using these amazingly glass-fruit-like bulbs, which pop like 70s flashbulbs and die after just one screen. Ahhhhh....

Then you cover the reverse of the screen with as much ink as it will take, blocking off areas you don't want to bleed with ink blocking foam. I only used a bit of this, as I wanted to see just how amusing the bleeding would be.

The screen looks like this after a while - completely smeared with ink:

Press down and clunk to print...

Print again...

Till you can't print any more...

And get your Mum to stamp and label them! (Note starring sprout being coy behind prints drying in cute Gocco rack.)

Gocco mentalism!

LINKS:

http://www.savegocco.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gocco

Girls' Night In

Not that many people know about all the 'chick lit' books I do, as there isn't room to get them all on the website, but I've worked on an awful lot of this particular genre. I found this as I was stomping through WHSmith today: a bargain 6-book 'Girls Night In' Collection (whatever did the apostrophe do to offend them?) for the silly sum of £4.99.

Can you tell which are Mole's?

It Wasn't Me.

The other day we were sitting discussing the heating system for the new studio (we're aiming to make it as off-grid as possible, not an easy task) when a text popped in. 'Hi, in London. Just saw (insert Ad Campaign/Poster/Book Cover), did you do it?'
Now, often the answer to a query of this nature would be 'yes', but this time it wasn't.

A quick Google revealed both client and illustrator. Nice folio. Lovely job. Did I teach them? Seems familiar. Really nice work. I can see why they thought it was me. Yeah, I can definitely see why...hell, this is practically studied. In fact, if there was an Inkymole School of Illustration, this person had to have put in at least a couple of years graft. I was due for a run that afternoon and, feeling unsettled by the similarities in the work, I ran and ran and ran further than I have for months. It felt good.

See, there is no Inkymole School of Illustration. As I've had to tell a few curious emailers lately, my (current) style wasn't taught in a certain specialist class, nor did I do an extra course, and neither is there one you can enrol on now. Every time someone gives me a platform to pass on some of the wisdom I've gleaned from a few years doing this, I tell students the same thing: keep evolving. Keep moving. You absolutely, cannot, ever sit back and rest on your laurels - there's going to be a litter of pup illustrators yapping excitedly around your feet every twelve months, and good luck to 'em too, because we've all been one - and probably taught a few of them.

Illustrator X doesn't know how heavily they've referenced my work (or maybe they do), nor should they. They're just getting on with 'getting on with it'. When things like this come along it's a reminder that it's time to apply the same thinking as in my run - push a bit further even if the limbs ache a bit. Work it off. Evolve. And take the whole thing as a ginormous compliment. If I didn't...I'd be a grumpy old fool, and the illustration biz has absolutely no room for those.


'Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us'.
Albert Schweitzer
(oh, and this one was me).

Must. Try. Harder. Always.

I love looking at other people's work, especially when it's really, really good. And specially when it's by people who don't know they're that good. Makes me want to be a better illustrator. Like this fella:

I like this font:

A font created using items from the Mitchell Library’s (The State Library of New South Wales) broad and eclectic collections, to celebrate its hundred year anniversary. If you go to the library you can click on any letter and see the elements it's made from.

My Life In Macs.

The other day I found a photo of my friend's baby, 'tapping away' on my keyboard. I emailed it to her and wrote, 'Hey look Jules! It's George on my Mac!'
She sent back the message 'actually, that's Isabelle.'
To which I, gormlessly, replied '...are you sure?'

Of course she's sure - it's her daughter. I on the other hand remain confused about exactly when the PowerMac 4400 was replaced by the G4 (which was like a thousand Christmases at once) and when the 4400 replaced the Quadra 950. The Quadra my Mum and I bought between us - not realising this was a super-powerful server machine capable of running a vast network and built like a tank - and the 4400 was bought with my own money. Gosh.

Every Mac I've owned has been passed on to a family member, sparing me the pain of 'recycling' it or (shudder) 'harvesting' it for parts. The Quadra stayed with Mum. The G4 went to Dad. The 24" iMac went to my sister. The MacMini went to my other sister, but has come back home now for use as a music station. The only one I sold was a little black Powerbook, which ran my other company's* office for two years.
*and that's another story.

I've loved all of them and it's no secret I'm horribly sentimental about them, as each one is irrevocably connected with life events. The Quadra meant leaving college and moving into no. 6. The PowerMac was buying my own house, and George and Isabelle coming into the world. The G4 was finally earning enough to buy a brand new one. And so on.

But there is only so much the house can take. The PowerMac 4400 and the Quadra have to go. They still spring into life when I switch them on.

2 x Classic Macs, a colour Apple monitor, a modem, keyboard, mouse and assorted cable madness plus various geeky bits where I've upgraded.

Anyone, by any chance, want to adopt?