One Of The First Commissions I Got After Leaving University Was To Design A Ghostly String Quartet For

One of the first commissions I got after leaving university was to design a ghostly string quartet for an animated band. It was commissioned by a student called Graham Porter, and I has a lot of fun designing the ghosts. The commission included a painting to use for promotion, and some fairly detailed designs. These are some of the pose and expression sheets I was most pleased with, and a slightly terrible photo of the painting.

Whoa you guys it's my birthday today! I'm 23! Do I seem older and wiser?

Not that I have any special birthday art though. These are the final 4 art cards in the fairy tales series I mentioned, finally finished in preparation for the Bristol Ferment Farmer's Market, although I didn't find time to post them beforehand.

The top set is Rapunzel. In the version I had, the witch finds out about the prince because Rapunzel gets pregnant. She cuts off Rapunzel's hair, kicks her out, and uses the hair to trick the prince so she can drop him off the tower. It still has a happy ending though.

The bottom set is Cinderella, which is incredibly gruesome! The wicked stepsisters cut bits off their feet to make the slipper fit. It's also the spirit of Cinderella's mother, in the form of two doves, that gives her the gown and slippers in the first place.

I didn't sell any of these in the end, so I've put them up for sale in my Etsy shop. Maybe you should buy one to make me happy on my birthday! Although I have just made an entire coffee cake which I have all to myself, so I'm already pretty happy.

Aww wow all the paper people! What started as a weird joke due to Gormenghast exposure became the VERY BEST GAME. Everyone must look at all of these photos and appreciate the levels of hilarity that ensued!

Incidentally Sammy is much more ninja than I am, I am the most unsubtle person in the world and she always knew when I was up to something. By contrast, she snuck up behind me and put one on my studio wall while one of our classmates was talking to me and could clearly see her, and I was totally oblivious.

...

Also Sammy got me with a paper person! Nooooo! I should have known she had an ulterior motive when she gave me those creme eggs.

The ‘paper house’ is the scrapbook I made to contain some of the paper people from years gone by. I decided to start documenting my end of the game, so I’ve made a flicker set showing some of Sammy’s previous victories.

BLURRRRR

Sorry, by that I mean that just over a week ago Sammy and I went to see Blur at Wolverhampton and it was the best thing ever.

The first set includes the... warm-up act? The Bots, anyway. It was a hard-core drawing warm-up, the singer never stood still!

Then I drew a million pictures of Blur. I really liked the sketches, so rather than tidying them up on the page like I normally would I traced or copied them onto different pages. The penultimate picture is the traced sketches, the last one is copied freehand.

All those Blur drawings reminded me that Sammy and I also went to see Dr Dee when it was on in London. For those who don't know (and what poor souls you are) it's an opera about the Elizabethan mathematician/astronomer/mystic John Dee, by Damon Albarn.

The music was lovely, obviously, but we were also really impressed by the costume and set design, so I did a few sketches in the interval.

These are some more originals I'm selling at the farmer’s market this Saturday.

These ones are miniature bookmarks, which I'm selling in these sets of three. The first set are meant to be birds that have symbolic meaning in England, the second set are elemental spirits.

I’ll also have free mini-comics and mini-zines to give out, the latest issue of What’s the Time Mrs Woolf, and a few copies of Science Fiction Octuple Feature and Eat Me! from Inspired.