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

 Is it 2016 already? 

It seems like only a year ago that I was making that joke about it seeming like only a year since 2013. 

Last year my round up of the last year before that last year went really well, in the blogstats sense, I just went back to reread it and I spotted TWO typos, which I have now corrected, if you want more roundupness after reading this, why not go and read it and see if you can spot the typos I removed. I also added a panda to one of the pictures. I didn't actually do that. 

And if you thought last last year was a busy one, WELL, 2015 was even more busytimes. Or maybe it always feels like that. Like how you are meant to forget the pain of childbirth. No childbirth on the horizon for me btw, although a lot of my nicest and similar agest to meist friends have been taking the parenthood plunge recently. Prompting a range of babywear from yours truly, about more which later. 

In fact I have done so much stuff that I am going to have to release this blog post in several parts. To avoid giving you thumb swipey strain or losing attention syndrome. You know like when you click on a video then you realise it is longer than 3 minutes, so you panic and planbandon and watch five 2 minute videos instead. On the toilet. That's embarrassing. So we don't want that. 

Anyway there have been too many words without a picture already, so here's a picture

This was the only new Christmas card design I made this year,it was made especially for the alternative Christmas fair run by London Below. 

But that's way too recent. Let's cast our brains back into the seas of yesteryear, and January 2015

I don't remember much happening in January actually, I had given up both alcohol and caffeine at the time, so that might be why.

I did do this picture of the wonderful Jennifer King in January. But other that that I was beavering away at the new website and filing my tax return. I have to do that again soon. Yay. 

In February I officially launched my newly revamped illustration website. 

I had streamlined my portfolio into 6 simple sections: Illustration, Drawn Words, Collage Design, Birds, Fashion and Real TV Wisdom 

As an illustrator I've always battled with my creative's desire to do a million different things. What one is supposed to do is streamline one's practice into a cohesive brand that enables clients to see what it is they are getting. And this website is my style streamlined, I worked hard to make sure it all looked consistent and colourful, putting forward the brand of Jenny Robins. And then of course this year, while those featured sections have certainly FEATURED in my practice, I've really made more money doing comics and murals and portraits than any of them. HO HUM.

To celebrate the launch of the new website I did a competition for two people to get a free portion of my time to draw whatever they wanted. The winners drawings are below, as I realised I never blogged them proper. 

Karen Kelleher requested a Granny (who is an international spy) skateboarding with her pet Jack Russells, Charlie and Benny down a London high street. (she has some other specifications too).

Smithy wanted a manga style portrait of his dog.

Your wish was my command, contest winners.

Also in February I did a comic in favour of Marriage Equality, here it is all over again. 

Awwwwww, monogamy eh? Technically this was for the Irish vote, which came out in favour of marriage equality (woo), although I guess you could use it in any pro same-sex marriage context. Although I did Google common Irish names for the gravestone. But big up for Switzerland and Denmark this year guys, and fingers crossed for Australia! I mean, I just looked that up on Wikipedia. so hopefully that's the right countries to big up. Feel free to update me. 

Also in February I had a tube strike adventure. 

It's always best to see these things as adventures I think.

Speaking of adventures, since Alex and I were trying to buy a flat all year we decided we weren't allowed to go on any mini breaks or foreign escapades because money. Being gazumped is expensive. But to make up for this we made an effort to go on London adventures instead and walk places and see things. So we did some of that in February. There are so many good things to do for free in London, some for researching and planning and booking, and also lots for serendipitously happening upon if you just go for a walk around and see what you encounter (It's best to leave space for both plans and serendipity I think, and for the two to combine. In art too). 

Like for example we discovered you can go to the fish shop on Great Portland Street. Which has as many fish as the Sealife Centre (may not be true) and costs nothing to visit. Fish are pretty.

Or this tree that has mysteriously grown up through a star-burst arrangement of gravestones, right round the corner from King's Cross Station. I like how it is called the Hardy Tree, because maybe Thomas Hardy had something to do with it, although maybe he didn't. History eh? 

In March I ran a workshop for some 'disadvantaged' children with St Helen's School as part of the Shine Trust's programme in Middlesex. We built a city out of cardboard and paint

Also in March I turned 30 years old. It's like a milestone or something.

I went to God's own Junkyard with my bestest childhood friends Ellie and Frances. That is where they keep the neon. It is the best place. Another example of a brilliant free thing to do in London, although when I go there I usually do buy an overpriced teacake. 

Ellie also launched a new website in March this year. She has a hand drawn text section too. 

Awesome Stuff like this:

Then on the Birthday Sunday I got some more of my peeps together for all you can eat Dim Sum. 

I look well popular here right? But also Dim Sum is delicious. So maybe they all just came for that. 

At one point I emerged from a tower of dumpling steamers like a stripper from a cake.  

In February and March I drew these two awesome artist Jos. As in the multiple of Jo. More than one Jo. Plurals of small words look funny to me. 

Jo Cheung on the left and Jo Lawes on the right.

After my birthday I got heavily into Zentangling. Which is to say, I saw some zentangle stuff on Pinterest, didn't read about it at all and just started drawing patterns. So it turns out I wasn't really zentangling 'properly' which you are supposed to do by only using black ink and 3.5inch squares of card. And you are not supposed to plan anything. 

I didn't do any of that. But I like the word zentangling, and the idea of meditative non figurative drawing with lots of fiddly detail. 

I don't like the idea that drawings have to follow rules. 

Except when I am teaching you in which case you should do what I say obviously.

Mostly I will tell you to break the rules. Although sometimes you have to learn the rules first in order to break them. 

Anyway I drew a lot of patterns. This turned into a thing with clouds and roller-coasters. I am not entirely sure why. (plans and serendipity, control and chaos, intention and inspiration etc.).

Which ended up being the back cover for, and inspiring the front cover of the new zine I brought out in April - What Birds are Really Thinking 2! I blogged about it here.

Some other things I did in 2014 spilled over and emerged into April 2015 as I found out that I had won a place on the second stage of the Europe Fast Forward Comic competition; the booklet and CD sleeve I designed for The New Tabloids also came out then and the found text comic I had in  Meanwhile... was reviewed on the Forbidden Planet blog. 

I wrote about all these things at the time here.

In April we also went to a lovely wedding in Cambridge, I was still off Alcohol. 

My friends weren't.

 Pro selfie by Helen Clarke. 

And I went to Brighton with Frances. Also sober in this picture.

Looking at these photos reminds me that it was REALLY cold that day, and then a week later we were barbecuing in the outdoors in dresses. Thank goodness the weather has been more seasonal this winter. (note to people not reading this in a time near to when it was published: no it hasn't.)

I drew this disgruntled pink elephant.

And made some minimalist valentines cards.  

This is all I am going to write for section one of the 2015 summation because it is quite a lot already. 

Coming soon: part two, in which feature things in the month of May and beyond. Awards, symposiums, sketches, exercise and more. 

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.

The Institute of Cool Stuff, or it must be Art, right?

Sometimes I argue myself round in circles about the meaning of Art. I recently gave a talk at a Symposium on Artist Identity at Birkbeck University, about how loaded the words we use to identify ourselves as Artists, Designers and Craftspeople are, and how the foundation for that is laid or disrupted in the art classroom.  and I was going to post the transcript here, but I'm not allowed because they are probably putting it in a magazine.
So today I wrote this instead. 

Editorial illustration for review of Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern 2009 - Jenny Robins

I recently learned about The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, it is quite old, but I learnt about it on a TED Radio Hour podcast that they re-issued this week from some years ago, you can see Thwaites' TED Talk here. 

It made me think about a conversation I had in 2005 with my then boyfriend, now hugsband. I know it was in 2005, because I had just come from seeing the Turner Prize exhibition where Simon Starling's transforming shed had won the traditionally controversial accolade. It was one of those conversations that stays with you forever and shapes and changes you a little bit but more becomes an echo in your brain that pings off when your thoughts take certain well worn paths. One of those soundbites that circles your consciousness. I'm sure you have some of those yourself, I don't know if he remembers it. But more of that later.

Thomas Thwaites decided to try and build a toaster from scratch. Actually from scratch as in mining and smelting his own iron ore to make the steel, apparently it was not an entire success. He couldn't do everything that needs to be done to make a toaster without a scientific lab or high tech factory floor to help him. But he got pretty close, and it cost him £8000 and a year. But then he sold it to an art museum for £20,000. So a profit of £12000 for his work, which is not bad really. This was mentioned in passing on the podcast, and my googling skills have not manage to turn up details of which art museum this was. This contextual titbit seems hidden from online accounts of the project, although I haven't read the book, so of course I don't know whether the toaster from scratch as art object is shown as an endpoint there. I have a feeling the book is more about the journey and the technological economic onion layers Thwaites' researches peel back.

The project raises all sorts of questions about the intense complexity of the web of international manufacture and processing needed to produce even the most seemingly basic of everyday objects. And of science and how remarkably far we've come in industrial processes that the majority of the human race has no more than a rudimentary understanding of. And how even if there was no-one in the world who knew how to make a toaster from scratch it would not stop toasters from being made, as long as someone somewhere is making each little component from materials created somewhere else from resources mined somewhere else by someone who knows how to be really good at that, or at least how to be really good at exploiting their workers. And how efficient the global tides of commodity need to be to make it possible to buy all of this technology and industry in the form of a toaster from Argos for £3.95. It's easy to forget how big the world is and the economies of scale necessary to make it feel as small as it does, but come the zombie apocalypse, we will probably all wish we had learnt how to make industrial grade electronic components. 

Of course. It's a brilliant project, that holds a mirror up to the world we live in and investigates it while telling us a story. 

It must be Art, right? 

Thwaites was a student at the Royal College of Art at the time of this project, and of course the toaster itself has now been legitimated as a piece of Art by its sale, embodying in its ugly melty self all of the big ideas and the labour intensive project. 

On his website Thwaites describes himself as "a designer (of a more speculative sort)." The Ted Radio Hour editors curated the Toaster Project into a category of inspirational stories about the pursuit of curiosity. I think there is a tendency today, to avoid defining these kind of imaginative and ambitious projects that the Ted Talks roster is full of with the capital A word. 

Which brings me back to Simon Starling. 

In 2005 Starling won the Turner Prize with Shedboatshed, a project in which he found an old shed he found on the banks of the Rhine, took it apart, used the pieces to make and fill a small boat, then used the boat to travel down river to Basel, Switzerland where he dismantled it and turned it back into the original shed inside the Museum there, and later in the Turner exhibit at Tate Modern. 

So I was doing a unit in Art History as part of my degree in Illustration at the time, and I went to the show and I made a powerpoint presentation about Simon Starling's shed. Sadly this slideshow seems to have been lost to posterity, but needless to say it was excellent and insightful and contained rotating shed graphics. 

In terms of successful craftsmanship this project might be seen as the antithesis of Thwaites' toaster. Although both draw our attention to the individual maker within a mass produced society, and the temporal nature of design.

Starling's shed MUST be Art though, right? It won the Turner Prize! 

So I was telling Alex about Shedboatshed. I remember exactly where we were, walking down Bedford Place in Southampton towards the centre of town. And he liked the idea of a shed becoming a boat and then becoming a shed again, but he was having trouble with said project being considered capital A Art. Just like the majority of the population, and probably more art students than would admit it to their tutors, that category was reserved primarily for objects made to be looked at, paintings mostly, for things that give you something aesthetic without having to know their history. The majority of classical and modern art in fact, whether figurative or abstract. I asked him whether he thought the project shouldn't have happened, and he said no, and he didn't think it shouldn't be exhibited either. But not in a gallery. There should be a place to show things like Shedboatshed without calling them Art. An Institute of Cool Stuff. 

The Institute of Cool Stuff has existed in my head ever since.

Imagine that you could show your work, or apply for funding for a project, simply on the basis that it is pretty cool. 

And the great thing is that today, you kind of can. The democratic nature of the internet rewards the pretty cool project with clicks, views and funding if the initial bridge of communication can be achieved. 

People have always made things without a good excuse. Which is to say, because they want to, because they are driven to, because they have ideas that they think are cool and want to see them happen in reality. 

Sometimes this gets called Art. Sometimes the makers get to a place where they self identify as Artists and even persuade the Art World to pay them lots of money for these projects.

We have to be realistic about that £8000 and a year of his life Thwaites was able to dedicate to his toaster, and that profit he was able to make. Most people are not in that position. The kind of Art that engages with the real flow of power and money in the world on it's own terms is a gross parody wrapped in a greedy realism. Starling had another work in that 2005 exhibition called One Ton II in which 5 platinum plate prints showed photographs of the South African mine from which one ton of ore had to be mined in order to produce the platinum used to make the prints. These works are subtle and reflective and hold dark mirrors up etc. etc. but really I think they are not much separate from Damien Hursts' diamond covered skull. 

Ordinary people, and I assert there is no such thing as an ordinary person but for the purposes of the argument, make cool stuff all the time. Anyone could make an ugly and non functioning sort of toaster from scratch, or take apart a shed and make it into a boat - well they would need to take some courses and do some research obviously, and they might need some help, but what it a project without research? What's the point in making if you're not learning? And most of those plucky creators wouldn't expect or receive the return on investment that Thwaites and Starling did, or that in the case of the diamond skull, Hurst tragicomically failed to receive. Making in the corners of our lives is cool too. It still takes courage. If doing a project takes you ten years because you have a day job and a mortgage and mouths to feed, that makes it more impressive in some ways. Whether you have the luck and the privilege to be able to dedicate your life to making, or whether you have the luck to have been born with the courage to dedicate a chunk of your life to making even without the chance to go to art school or to do internships or know the right people or any of that. Either way sometimes it pays off, and the unnamed art museum buys your toaster, and sometimes it doesn't. 

But as my friend Rebecca of The Pigeon's Nest points out about the people who look at her lovely crocheted products at craft fairs and say 'I could make that' - yes, but you DIDN'T! In other words, it's only by putting in the time and the balls and getting our hands dirty that we have created the new. The worthwhile. The cool. 

The Toaster would have a place in my Institute of Cool Stuff, along with Starling's shed. And so would crocheted bunny slippers. And lego sculptures, and Szopki and Baining masks and teddy bears dressed as popes. All of the peaks of human creativity and courage. 

But would it have painting and drawing in it? 

Now there's the real question. 

I mean yes, obviously it would.  

In drawing and making news, I made these last week. 

They are the actual migration routes of the birds, cool right? 

Two sold at the Blackhorse Workshop market, but two are available in my Etsy shop now. 

What Birds are REALLY Thinking...... 2!

Although I am trying to buy a flat in London with my husband and am therefore filled with a constant gut tearing terror and dispair, there are good and exciting things happening which are good and exciting. 

Mostly I am happy and excited that I have finished the second edition of What Birds Are Really Thinking. Here exclusively and for the first time I will show you some pictures. 

This has been in the pipeline for a while, moving between back and front burners to make way for aforementioned housing angst and other exciting projects such as those detailed in my last post.

The first edition of What Birds Are Really Thinking, including spoonbills thinking about Britney Spears and starlings thinking about soft furnishings is my all time bestselling thing that I have made (apart from the Magpies print). In addition to being one of the very first things I made after moving to London to seek my fortune as an illustrator back in 2008.

 And this edition is soooooooo much better.

 I decided to revisit the topic in 2015 as an excuse to make some multimedia work and draw birds (my favourite things) and as a promotional follow up to the launch of my new website (jennyrobins.com). Much as I have a fondness for the original zine, this second issue really does show how far I've come in terms of skill and design. I will be sending these out as a mailer in the next month with a few postcards I also have in the pipeworks. 

 If you fancy owning your own copy, they are available here, or pop me an email if you can think of a good reason why I should send you one for free.  

In other good news, the event June and I organised for the Big Draw back in October/November 2014 has won a runners up award in the Drawing Inspiration Awards. That's good eh? We are going to the awards ceremony and will probably wear nice dresses, definitely do some live drawing and possibly make a speech (appropriatness of speech not yet confirmed.) I've announced the news officially on the Storyhands site here. 

This is me taking a short break from running the Sketchbook Scavenger Hunt in my F(Art)S T-shirt. This is what it looks like to be AWARD WINNING. 

Goeiedag, Good News,

Hello hello hello, bonjour, guten tag and indeed goeiedag.

Reasons to be famous, completed projects and all sorts of illustrated high-jinks abound in this springtime season of newness and tidying.

A short while ago I made this first page of a comic about what Europe might be like in the future, and sent it along with a summary of the rest of the story to the nice people at Friedrich Naumann Stiftung for their Europe Fast Foward competition.

Along with six other comic artists I have been commissioned to complete the story and then go to Brussels for an awards ceremony and the launch of the book of our comics. Which is cool.

I'm not going to share the story with you, because I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise of what European culture will be like in the future. Because I am that prescient and clever that I have figured out what that will be. 

ALSO, I want to tell you that drawing lace is really enjoyable and I want more excuses to do so.  

In other comic news you can see a review of the second issue of Meanwhile... featuring my found text comic (Loved and Found, the serendipitous love story) on the Forbidden Planet blog here. Which is quite exciting. 

Also and as well, a somewhat longer time ago, the magnificent Christopher Kear of The New Tabloids commissioned me to produce some collagey artwork and designs for the album Good News including a full colour 12 page lyrics booklet in the found text style.

It is now a real thing in the real world and I went to the launch party although I think I missed my shout out which is a little bit embarrassing. 

The music sounded really good tho, you should check it out. 

Here are some of the lyric pages

I love the mix of serendipity and intention that is in all creativity but comes out especially much in abstract collage. The materials and colours that I used related to the theme and mood of each individual song, with a theme of using newsprint and jagged edges throughout, relating to the idea of the band's name and ethos of fractured journalism, commenting on modern life seen through the bottom of a broken bottle, dancing in the wreckage of the scene. You know, that sort of thing. Right? 

I've been doing lots of other fun drawings for fun and profit, much of which I am not sharing yet. But here are some sneaky, cheeky, peeky work in progress (or #wip to those in the know, or #itk) pictures from the new edition of What Birds are Really Thinking I am working on. 

It is going to be so so so good. Probably.