And now it starts ...

(Various media in A5 sketchbook)

Now that my Sketchbook Circle book has been safely received by Ang, I can show the pages I prepared before sending the book off to her. At least, I can show you all of the pages except the inside front cover and Page 1, which somehow I failed to save when I scanned them in. I hope to add those when they become available again.

Having no previous experience of this kind of exchange, or indeed of this kind of sketchbook work, I simply set to and played with the pages. Some are collaged from magazine photographs with watercolour and body colour added; others are clearly straightforward marker drawings. There are a couple that use fragments of failed etchings salvaged from the bin of the print room at University.

And the last one should be of interest to my old science fiction pals - it's an imprint left on a folder that contained an inked stencil used in the production of one of the many Gannet fanzines.

The stencil imprint and the etching fragments have been in my studio for twenty years or more. A hoarder? Me!? I knew they'd come in useful one day.

What my sketchbook partner will make of these pages is anyone's guess. But that's half the fun. I've now received a sketchbook from Becca, my other partner in the Circle, and I have to start thinking about what I want to do to that. That's the other half of the fun.

The Cartoonist's Hat

(Marker, digital colour)

"It's perhaps important to point out that I find cartooning and painting almost totally incompatible, in that they each require a different mindset. When I wear my cartoonist's hat I cannot paint and vice versa."

"In 1973 .... I gave up all thought of art college. The cartoonist's hat was firmly on for the next 15 years."

"If [painting] keeps me sane, it's worth it, but every now and again I find my head itching for the cartoonist's hat."

Those are quotes from an article I wrote for my fanzine, PIE in the SKY, in 1992 and serve to demonstrate the ongoing difficulty I find in working in both fields at the same time. It ought not to be so difficult. I've mentioned before that Wayne Thiebaud draws a cartoon every day and while I'm far too modest to put myself in the same paddock as Thiebaud, if he can do it, I don't see why I can't. Maybe not every day, but I don't see why painting and cartooning can't co-exist in my art practice.

All of which is by way of announcing the opening of my new blog - The Cartoonist's Hat. There's more work to be done on it in terms of banner headings and the like, but I've copied across all the cartoons from this blog, together with contributions to Moleskine International Exchanges. From now on Moly work and pieces done for Illustration Friday will appear only on The Cartoonist's Hat. If you'd like to keep up with those things, you'll find a link in the sidebar, or better yet, why not subscribe to posts using the handy widget in that blog's sidebar?

Home Again

Corflu Attendees (minus a couple who couldn't get out of bed) (Photo:Mike Scott)

What a wonderful weekend! I met people I haven't seen in thirty years and it was just like yesterday. In all sorts of ways I can't begin to describe, I came back from Winchester thoroughly invigorated. One cartoon for a fanzine cover already under my belt (a rare enough event in itself) and ideas for new paintings in a notebook.

Old Drawings #55

Snake Root (Charcoal, compressed charcoal on A1 cartridge paper)

This seemed an opportune moment to post the third and last of the Picton Root drawings, because I won't be able to post anything new for a short while. I'm off to Winchester for a few days, to have fun at Corflu, "the convention for SF fanzine fans". If you don't know what a science fiction fanzine fan is, don't worry about it.

As a parting shot, here's something I started last night. Can you tell what it is yet?

Resolve

Kevin and Harry resolved never to drink there again.

(Fibretip, digital colour)

Another fanzine cover, this time entirely my own, from a fanzine produced in 1982. Now with added digital colour for Illustration Friday 's brief, Resolve.

Clandestine

Clandestine (Epsilon 11)

Pencils: Rob Hansen; Inks and digital colour: Harry Bell

[Used with Rob's permission]

Back in the 1980s, my old friend Rob Hansen and I collaborated on some fanzine covers. This one, dated 1982, was for Rob's own fanzine, Epsilon, and I did the inking over his pencils. The subject seemed to suit this week's Illustration Friday subject, Clandestine, so this time round I added some digital colour.

"....by the time I'd climbed four flights of stairs..."

Another commission finished. This time for some friends, to illustrate an article in their fanzine. This is just a detail.

I agonised over this one. It's a long time since I did any illustrating and I found I wavered from illustration to fine art techniques. The end result is in pencil with some monoprinting in black oil paint.

My friends are happy with it, which is the main thing.

Seek and ye shall find.

Some years ago, in a fanzine I was particularly fond of, the editor ran a series in which the same 10 questions were put to a different person each issue. I was never asked to complete the questionnaire, but I did it just the same. I don't remember the first nine questions or my answers, but I've never forgotten my answer to the last:

Q. When you look in the mirror, who do you see?
A. Someone else.

Which is a kinda tricksy way of getting to the subject of this post. What I found today was not what I was looking for.

There's been considerable interest in the recipe for Geoff Hamilton's All Bran concrete (well, one person asked), and I've done my best to find it today. I can see it in my mind's eye - a little piece of paper with the recipe

1 part All Bran,
2 parts powdered bismuth
1 part liquid nitrogen....

that sort of thing, written on it. It probably wasn't All Bran. Shredded Wheat? Cheerios? I don't think so. I know I put it Somewhere Safe.....

But my search has certainly uncovered a lot of stuff from my artistic past, and it's been a fascinating unearthing. For one thing (and this ties in with Marja-Leena's comment about papier-mache) I came across both a book on papier mache full of quite interesting ideas for fine art applications and this sketch for a sculpture:




I also rediscovered my old notebook in which I used to write down quotes from articles, books and other sources. Boy, am I glad to find that again.

Diderot developed a theory of ethics based on the idea of the statue; if we wanted to be good, he said, we must become sculptors of the self. Virtue is not natural to us; we achieve it, if at all, through a kind of artistic striving, cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of self-hood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us and living as best we can according to its sublime example. I like that notion....

....What statue of myself did I erect long ago, I wonder? Must have been a gargoyle.
John Banville: Ghosts

I'll continue looking for the recipe, but I determined today to take a radical look at the way my work spaces are arranged. I think I've worked out a way of shifting furniture around, in part from one room to another, so that I have a better organised thinking and writing space, and a more open studio area.

This can only be a Good Thing and may even lead to further archaeological treasures.

Mr Zip Unzips

I spent last night in deepest thought, engendered, no doubt, by my scotch egg curry. Don't knock it till you've tried it! A pack of those mini savoury eggs, a decent home made curry sauce with a few mushrooms and a bit of green pepper, and there you are - ersatz nargisi kofta curry. Made even the can of Fosters drinkable.

Anyway, as I slumped in the armchair, the divine Billie Holiday doing her level best to cheer me up, I fell to wondering whether blogging was really what I wanted, considering the barrage of comments not so far forthcoming. But then I realised it wasn't so very different from the response I used to get from sf fanzines. I'd publish those and rarely get comments from more than a quarter of the readership. OK, there's a question of scale here. I'm talking about fanzines with a print run of, at most, 150, compared to a blog going out to ...well....the world. The world? That's not too many.

But really, publishing is its own reward. I know there's a nice lady who publishes her blog and doesn't even have the facility for comments. Doesn't want them. I'd like comments, but am enjoying simply writing for myself so far. And getting to grips with HTML and like so.

I guess the most obvious way of attracting comments is to tell your friends you're blogging and point them to it, but I wanted to see if I'd get any without them. I thought I'd give them a month of blogging before Revealing All. However, I relented a little when I found Will Barrow was having a Bad Time. I thought it might take his mind off his troubles if he had the scintillating wit and pithy homespun philosophy of Boogie Street to keep him occupied. So he has Been Informed and tells me on the phone that he is Interested.

[This posting courtesy of Initial Capitalisations.]