2015 in summation, adventures, makings, illumastrations. PART THREE

The month long gap before this final part was obviously a calculated move, and not because this has been sitting half written while I got distracted by stuff. So I'm going to delay no further, and publish this ridiculously long final instalment.

Wondering what I'm talking about? Parts ONE and TWO of my round up of 2015 are available for preamble and context. 

In August of 2015, I was on holiday from my day job of teaching. That's what they give us in return for babysitting their educationlings for the rest of the year. Time off for good behaviour. It's a thing.

By this time, a lot of stuff had happened on the flat buying front. Over the previous year we'd had offers accepted on 3 different places in Walthamstow, none of which we were fated to purchase. 

Then, against all rational odds, we were offered the chance to buy a half share of a flat in Islington, only 10 minutesish walk from the shoebox we'd been renting for the previous 5 years. There is a government scheme set up to help people to buy in the boroughs in which they live and work, even poor middle class young professionals like us. But obviously without it there is no way we would have been able to do so. It's a bit weird. Like those rent controlled apartments in New York that sitcom protagonists always somehow seem to have acquired, to fit the camera crew in. Possibly we have only been allowed to do this because the government are planning to turn our lives into a sitcom to entertain the masses. I mean. They COULD. We are very witty in private. 

This is the picture of us I drew for The Sunday Comics - it's SUPPOSED to be cheesy. 

Alex did not have a beard at the time. 

So anyway in August, we were QUITE sure that was going to happen (the Islington flat), but not actually sure. Because although it's not technically possible to be gazumped out of a part buy housing association property, our experiences in the 'Stow had left us with very little confidence in property changing hands at all. Ever. But I was packing. Slowly. And making a lot of phonecalls to a number of different people who were juggling obscure pieces of paper about land rights and pushing our potential exchange date further and further back. So it was not a summer without stress. But compared to the one where I was writing my thesis, or the one where I was getting married, it was a walk in a park. 

I drew a lot of comics in August, the cat one above, some new Horay Bear strips for The Sunday Comics, and the final version of the 8 page comic for Friedrich Naumann Stiftung's Fur Die Freiheit, the comic about the hypothetical futures of Europe that I had won the chance to contribute to. 

What you should know about Horay Bear: he is permanently excited. We used to write comics about him for a short-lived web comics platform a long time ago. But in 2016, Horay Bear is BACK. Probably. 

This is some of the Europe Fast Forward comic. More about the competition later. But you can see the whole comic and the other entrants here. 

I drew a bunch of portraits for a party, not live but from photos for a change, including this one of the amazing illustrator Willa Gebbie

I had a reunion adventure in Bournemouth in August too, where I got to hang out with some of the awesome people I studied Illustration with at Southampton Solent. We played a lot of pictionary, and went to the beach. It was really fun.

It was also the year of my Dad's 60th birthday - the same year as my 30th! He is like, twice of me. 

We took him for a lovely adventure day and picnic in Greenwich. 

Here is a photo with BOTH my parents in, from the Cutty Sark, because I already posted a photo of me and Dad in the last segment, and I don't want them to think I'm playing favourites. 

It was really hot that day.

On one of my stints doing live portraits at The Big Chill House, I exhausted the clientèle downstairs and managed to blag my way into the private party upstairs to draw people there. Turns out it was the party of the world famous Architecture firm Heatherwick Studio (you may have heard of the Seed Cathedral, the Olympic Cauldron thing from the London Olympics, or that Garden Bridge that Joanna Lummley is not a fan of). I wish I had a better photo than this of the drawing I did of Thomas Heatherwick.

The lighting was not ideal on the roof bar, 

here are some of his colleagues though.

In September two of my good friends celebrated their unborn children with cake and gifts, which is to say baby showers is a thing now. 

Older people have looked very confused when I tell them this, but if our generation have learnt anything from America, it's to never turn down an opportunity for cake and gifts. 

I made these hand lettered baby grows for the (then, as I said, unborn and so unnamed, but now born and named) little Arthur and Felix.

Arthur.

They proved a big hit, and I now offer them on demand here. 

This is me having successfully put a nappy on Baby Christmas, proving my readiness for being friends with people with babies. Or something. We also played pin the sperm on the egg. 

I was close, but lost points for being outside of the uterus. 

When not angsting about flat prospects, in the weekends of August and September Alex and I had also been going on a lot of long walks. Not just because we are old now, but in training for the longest walk at the night time; The SHINE walk. So on September the 26th we walked 26 miles from 10pm to around 8am around central London on a Marathon route with a bunch of people covered in fairy lights. It was the first time I've ever done something for charity that I actually felt was hard enough to justify me actually asking people to give money to charity. It was really hard. 

But it was really really good. Watching the sun rise over the City as we walked back along the south bank, foot sore and weary and bleary eyed, was pretty awesome. 

The other comic book thing from 2015 came to fruition in September too, the poetry comic I did for the anthology Over the Line. I wrote about it, and about ruminations on the nature of creativity here.

This is the other page, so if you read this and the other post you will have seen both pages. If that makes sense.

In September in addendum, and after what felt like an infinity of phonecalls, paperwork and bureaucracy, we finally completed on our part buy Islington flat purchase, and were even able to do a large amount of the moving over half term. We did not take a photograph posing in the doorway with our new keys. Sorry. We're just not really into that kind of thing. 

Here is a not great photo of us having pizza and prosecco on moving day in the new flat though. Hazel and I look super serious. Because movings is serious business. 

As is prosecco. 

From a few days later with Alex's parent. Apparently we'd lightened up a little. 

We've since acquired a sofa. And unpacked some boxes. 

In October I finished this piece of hand lettered illustration that I’d been working on between paid work for a while:

 

 I used it to make a series of responsibly sourced sketchbooks that you can own if you would like. They’re very cool and also include some hints and drawing challenges, as well as each one being unique and special (just like you).

It was an appropriate time of year for me to release these books, because it was Big Draw time of year again. Since StoryHands is on a bit of a creative hiatus atm, we didn’t organise an event in 2015, but I was involved in few other ones.

I helped run a skyline drawing drop in workshop with Jeanette Barnes at the Drawing the World event at Granary Square by King's Cross. We stood up on the viewing platform all day and got people to explorative drawings of the evolving skyline, it was a lot of fun.

I also helped run a Big Draw event at the school I teach at, St Helen's School in Northwood. We had a large variety of treasure hunt style instruction tickets leading our visitors to explore the grounds of the school in different ways and to bring back their drawings to combine together in a collaborative wall display. People got really involved despite the weather not being perfect, and we had some really creative responses from people of all ages!

I did the first of many name illustrations for Little Carousel Gallery for Sophie, after a comical false start where I wrote Sopie, but happily noticed before adding any of the pictures, details, colours - all related to Sophie's favourite things. To see more of these and think about getting one yourself see here. They are so much fun to do. 

Also in October I did a limited edition screen print for Art Crank, they're all about the bicycles and the printing, I'm all about the drawing and the birds, so this is what came out.
I went to the show and got a really cool t-shirt printed also.

The big trip in October was my jaunt to Brussels to attend the exhibition and awards ceremony for the Europe Fast Forward comic. I did not win the first prize, but my comic is in the book and I met lots of interesting arty and political types. And managed to see a few pretty parts of the city on my way through. I posted the link above to read the whole thing, but here it is again. Some very diverse international responses to the question of what might be the future of europe, and a range of effective art styles too. 

Spot me in the video.

In November I began painting a nursery mural for the aforementioned baby Felix, he is one lucky little man. 

I'll show you the finished pics in a minute in December. 

Meanwhile here's me and mum at the Wellcome Collection, States of Mind yellowbluepink installation by Ann Veronica Janssens,  which was a room full of coloured mist so that you lose your sense of space. 

That was fun.

The November big trip was an adventure to Sheffield, specifically to the lovely suburb of Totley to do some sign painting for the, now recently opened, Teatime Vintage tearoom and gift shop. I had done the logo design for Julie back when she started the business as a vintage crockery and events catering company back in 2010, so now they are moving in to bricks and mortar territory I got to go and stay in her lovely house and do lots of painting in signwriters enamel. 

It was a very lovely adventure, and I am very pleased to have been part of making this lovely little shop come into being. If you are in the area of Sheffield or walking in the Peak District you should pop in for a cream tea. 

Here is work in progress of painting the shop sign:

In December I went back to Katie's house in Dulwich to add leaves to Felix's animaltastic tree mural.

My favourite part is the giraffe's knees. 

So I entered the Christmas period on the back of two large scale painting projects, but had a lot of small scale drawing commissions waiting for me before the tide of yule, including some of these:

Custom colouring pages from photos.

Pet Portraits

Individual Portraits

And Christmas markets featured in my calendar joyfully.

Then...

Christmas and New Years Familyandfriendstimes. 

New year photography by Paul Lismer.

And Finis. 

It was a pretty good year all in. 

Comics, murals, property and adventures. Tune in next this year for more protracted ramblings. 

Weddings are the new arts festivals, collaboration with dead poets and anonymous copywriters.

I have a two page poetry comic in this new anthology of poetry comics edited by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone; Over the Line.

I went to the first launch party  at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, and the second launch party at Gosh Comics. I'm happy I got to go to both, like coming at the hybrid from both directions, although my foot is probably more obviously planted in the comics camp than the poetry one. I met some very cool poetry people and some equally awesome comic people at both events. 

It was fab to hear perspectives of poetic creatives reading and talking about their work, and it got me thinking about a lot of things. Poetry, labels, contexts and the cyclical nature of creativity.

Words go round in circles, in our heads and in our cultures, so do pictures.

Like these photo collages by Matthais Jung which he calls “architectural short poems” and says that "The composition of the individual elements correlates to a logic, as if in a dream."

This seems to chime so well with Williams' concept of cut and paste poetry comics, a lot of the work that goes on at her poetry comic workshops is of the collage variety - it's quick, it's democratic, hey you already know how much I love collage probably. It also lends itself well to thinking about composition and rhythm, how the former ties the latter together, in poetry but especially in comics. We read images in not all that different a way to how we read words, and the introduction to Over The Line examines how the grammar and syntax of that reading is built visually in poetry and comics to parcel moments of time into nuggets of meaning.

At the poetry cafe half of proceedings there was much talk of 'in collaboaration with dead poets', whether in this literal way of cutting up and re-organising others' work, or as poet and artist Sophie Herxheimer did in her project 'Coffee with Rosemary' taking a dead poet's name as a jumping off point for a poem made entirely from the letters therein. 

Whereas my contribution to the book is more of a collaboration with living but uncredited journalists and copy editors, my poem was forged from my ever expanding collection of interesting words from magazines. I have been making excellent use of the puzzle carrier my mother gave me for Christmas to put together new pieces of found text based comic work. 

To see the other page of my poem and lots of other interesting and brilliant interpretations of the theme, you shall have to buy the book.

Talking to Chrissy, we considered the place of poetry in contemporary society and how for many people it's something that happens at weddings but which they wouldn't expect to pop up in their daily reality feed. Which made me think, yes of the bloated aesthetic hysteria of what the wedding industry has become (my wedding was amazing by the way), but also of how our outlets for creativity and celebrating creativity get squashed by adult life, and how that force springs out of the gaps in the mundane in full force wherever we give it permission to. Working in a school I am aware of how many opportunities for self expression are given to (sometimes unwilling) children every day - they HAVE to write poems in English lessons, and the HAVE to draw in art, at least until GCSE in this country, you also HAVE to go outside and run around. But unless you latch on to that as part of your identity and make it your career or your passion, those opportunities dwindle when we leave education. 

I really believe people need creative and physical outlets, and if a wedding is the only chance you get to choreograph an awesome dance routine, read a powerful poem, make a thousand paper cranes or wear a ridiculous hat, then I say we need more weddings. Although it would be good if people felt less self conscious about doing all of those things in their homes and local church halls and social clubs too. So I would recommend joining the mailing list for the Poetry Cafe and GOSH comics. Or find something local to you. Don't wait for your friends to get hitched, get out there and make stuff. Play with boundaries, explore new mediums and hybrids, look for starting points and inspiration anywhere and everywhere and don't be afraid to collaborate. 

I once had a cordial exchange with Valerie Pezeron on a similar topic, where she posited that carnivals were an equivalent of performance art in other cultures, and I thought it was the other way around. Performance art is what modern western culture had to invent, to make up for a lack of carnival. If you've got an extravagant outfit wearing and political slogan shouting creature singing in your soul, it needs somewhere to come out. But sometimes we need an impetus, a spring board, a prompt; an excuse.  

Whether we're collaging to trick ourselves into becoming poets, starting with words and adding pictures, starting with pictures and adding words (many of the works in the book are actual collaborations between artists and writers, and some of their processes are this simple, though more are not); barefacedly pastiching our favourite creators and calling it a conversation, or lying to ourselves about the postmodern condition and claiming originality. I mean. Aren't we all collaborating with dead poets really? Not that that stops us from making brilliant art. 

I've been doing some more facebook portraits recently by-the-by, I've now completed the Johns. Here's the inimitable fellow StoryHandser John Riordan doing a scary face.

I'm also imminently moving house, so I've begun sorting through old boxes and files and have listed some old original illustrations on Etsy and some old (and new) bird paintings on Artfinder - more to come I expect as there's a whole stack of sketchbooks I haven't been through yet. Watch the space that is here.

I've never seen the Dead Poets Society, but I did hear some interesting stories about the Secret Cinema screening of the film, from some of the poets involved, in the pub near the Poetry Cafe. 

Up to date Update date up. Purge.

I have been going through some old work, trying to have a bit of a purge because (fingers crossed) we should be moving soon. Imminent crash sale of old prints and originals on Etsy planned. Watch the media that is social. Anyway. I just found this collage in a sketchbook from 2008/9, which I had really wanted to include in my last post all about what may or may not be called "Art"

wouldn't it have been perfect? I remembered making it but I had no idea where it was. This is why one should scan everything before putting it in boxes in the loft. 

In other news, you can read all about the Big Draw Awards ceremony at Painters Hall that June and I attended to receive our runners up award here. It was good, we got lots of people looking and drawing, and we got to see Bob and Roberta Smith and Mike Leigh give inspirational speeches. 

I was too scared to talk to those illustrious gentlemen, but I did meet lots of other brilliant and interesting people. 

I've also been doing more live portrait events, the most fun of which was this children's fancy dress picnic where I got to draw dozens of small ones in bright colours, can't think of many better ways to spend an afternoon. 

Some of these kids were really good at sitting still. Others really not so much. But that's all good, I like a challenge. 

I also did a portrait session at Blackhorse Workshop, and one at The Big Chill House in King's Cross last week, both great venues with decidedly different crowds. The woman bottom right didn't really have blue lips, but it was her request and came out awesome. 

If you have an event you're organising that you think would benefit from me drawing people at it, why not pop me an email to see if I'm free? 

I have a two page found text poetry comic in the upcoming SideKick Books Poetry Comics Anthology, Over the Line. which I am not allowed to show you. But I can show you this other one page piece I submitted that didn't get in. Boom etc. It's a sort of sketchbook collage love letter type thing. To be said in a deep voice. 

The speech bubble outlines come from the Christmas card designs I made in 2012. So that should give you an idea of the levels of hoarding instinct I am battling with this purge. But also, using offcuts and serendipitous leftovers to make new work that would never have been inspired without them is sexy and cool. Although I really should throw away some of these dozens of damaged prints of work that is not very good. 

It's a BALANCE people. 

I love popcorn though. There's been a renaissance in supermarket popcorn. If you haven't been indulging, where have you been? The economy cannot sustain this level of diversity. Try all the weird flavours now before half the companies go bust. 

I've been on lots of summertime adventures recently, I went to Harry Potter World (which for some reason, pretends it's called something else, like Warner Brothers Studio something or other)

I very recommend it, the models and the displays of the design work are amazing.

I also went to the Isle of Arran in Scotland for my friend Andrew's 30th celebration. This was my first time north of the wall and it was awesome. We walked to a cave on the beach and burnt stuff in it. And ate and drank a lot. It is beautiful there too.

I was too busy socialising to do much drawing, but I did draw this boat and three pieces of popcorn.

Also I made this birthday card while I was on the train. There was an amusing and embarrassing adventure with the train. Ask me about it sometime. 

Andrew likes Meat. Two veg to follow. 

Also I dressed up as a cowboy for another friend's 30th (Paul's). This is the year of the 30th for me. For obvious reasons. The moustache suits me a bit too well.