Small People & Big Ideas

Posted on October 26, 2012 by quirkyjoe

It was such a privilege to have the opportunity to devise a series of activities for last Sunday’s The Big Draw at the De La Warr Pavilion. Ideas that started as simple outlines in my proposal had been brought to life by months of planning and a team of staff and volunteers into a set of activities that participant’s imaginations could really get to work in.

This time last week I was preparing 200 loops of 8mm film for the ‘scratching on film’ activity. And as I was splicing one end of the film with the other,  I was trying to imagine how participants would engage with the activity. What would they scratch into the film? Would they enjoy doing it? What would they make of it when they saw it projected? I wondered how I would know the answers.

On the day itself, seeing children wearing their completed loops of film as a necklace and seeing their parents filming them with mobile phones against the flickering backgrounds of their projected scratching, was enough to convince me the activity was a success. And there were similar clues with the other activities too, like the paint splattered hands from the action painting activity and a fist full of tracing paper from the animated walk cycle. It was such a fun day and I’m pleased I have lots of photos to show for it. Images of all nine activities, including Nick Sayers and his giant pantograph, are collected together below.

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Bexhill & The Big Draw

Posted on October 16, 2012 by quirkyjoe

Every time I’ve been to Bexhill it has rained. And as the weather becomes more consistently wet, I’ve been travelling to Bexhill more frequently . This Sunday I’ll be there again, running activities for The Big Draw 2012 at the De La Warr Pavilion. The Big Draw is an event that the DLWP holds every year with great enthusiasm and success and with a range of drawing activities devised by a different guest artist each time. And this year it’s me. Which is pretty exciting. It will be the perfect way to spend a rainy day.

The theme set by The Big Draw this year was ‘take a line for a walk’. From that theme the activities seemed to suggest little personal journeys or explorations, the title became ‘What’s Your Journey?’ and the tone of an adventure in drawing was established. More details here http://www.dlwp.com/event/the-big-draw1

There have been lots of things to prepare. There have been 8mm projectors to fix, bamboo brush sticks to make, stencils to cut and dot-to-dot puzzles to plan. I’ve also created a series of one-page comic strips to support the instructions for each activity, some of which are below, along with some of the promotional image designs.

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African Folk Tales & Monster Hats

Posted on September 20, 2012 by quirkyjoe

Below are some images from Gather Around the Fire, a collection of Southern African folk tales from Ravi Gupta, published by Pen Press. I created illustrations for 15 tales, each from a different country, and used the colours of the country’s flag as a palette to reinforce the cultural identity of each story. Also, while I was watching the extra features on Monster House (the image of Kathleen Turner stomping around on all fours in a motion-capture suit will stay with me) I decided to draw some monster hats.

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Adventure Time & Dragons

Posted on September 9, 2012 by quirkyjoe

I’d be quite happy to draw dragons and wizards and monsters every week. I grew up with drawing fantasy creatures and fantasy worlds and I’ve enjoyed twisting and turning these images over in my head and trying to come up with ways of seeing that I hadn’t thought of before. Fantasy gives a complete freedom to draw whatever you want to. But when it is a brief, when you are drawing dragons and wizards for a client, there are expectations that come with visualising other peoples’ fantasies. My own ideas about what a dragon or a wizard might look like might be very different to someone else’s and you can find yourself reaching for common ground.  Suddenly a fantasy world can seem like a restrictive one. But it becomes a more rewarding one too, because adventuring into someone else’s imagination can unearth fresh ideas in your own.

I’ve been watching Adventure Time on Youtube a lot in the last week or so. It’s a great cartoon and each ten minute episode is crammed full of strange magical creatures and bizarre imagination. It seems so wild and spontaneous and free from trying to pander to expectations.  I started watching it a couple of years ago, but then all the episodes seemed to disappear from the Internet. Some of the episodes I’ve watched in the last few days have been taken down already; they never seem to be up for long. Like all the best fantasy worlds it is temporary, and I am enjoying the freedom of it while it’s there.

Moving to the south coast from the Midlands had felt like stepping into a fantasy world. For the first time I was looking to become dependent on drawing pictures for a living and it felt unreal. It felt vulnerable, temporary, something to enjoy while it’s there.  But I have drawn and slain some dragons since then and through realising other peoples’ fantasies my fantasy world is becoming a real one, one that can last.

Below are some various dragon drawings from last year and more recent colour images from The Green Emerald in the Book of Dreams by John Santana http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Green-Emerald-Book-Dreams/dp/1780034180

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Time & Time Again

Posted on August 26, 2012 by quirkyjoe

I have had a very busy couple of months. Which is brilliant. A couple of blogs ago I was concerned that my summer of commercial work might be a dry one, but that concern was channelled into finding lots of jobs, and since then I’ve been drenched by a torrential downpour of drawing things for people. Any plans I had to take time to develop my own projects have been pushed to the side by animated tube trains, African folk tales, rainbow worlds and small town adventures. It has been hard work and really tested my ability to manage my time but has also been lots of fun.

Drawing for other people has meant that my own ideas and clumps of imagination have had to spring out in unusual places. When I have been waiting for things or on the phone for long periods or just feeling playful in the gaps between one task and the next, I have scribbled little drawings in the margins of notepads, on scraps of paper or around pre-existing sketches. Some of these drawings are conscious attempts to plan things or work something out but most of them just seem to spill out as absent minded doodles and I’m happy they have a place to go. Each of these pages or scraps of paper becomes like a Petri dish festering with ideas, scribbles mutating into more scribbles. I’ve found I’ve produced a lot of these drawings at writing classes, between writing tasks, and it’s as if the engine of my mind needs to be kept ticking over with drawings between outbursts of words; which has made me think a lot about the relationship between my words and pictures and how I would like to develop that. There’s an interesting collection of ‘idle doodles from famous authors’ here http://www.flavorwire.com/147177/idle-doodles-by-famous-authors

Below are some pages from the sketchpad I make notes in and the notepad I do drawings in.

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Hoodies & Piles of Paper

Posted on June 27, 2012 by quirkyjoe

I have an animation project on right now. 85 seconds of hand-drawn ‘cartoon’ animation for a music video for Kayosoul. It means I have piles of paper everywhere (for every one second of animation I need to do twelve drawings). The first step though, was to design how everything in the animation would look, which meant sketching, storyboarding and looking at lots of reference material. Previous to this project I was drawing warmongering elves, magic pink rabbits and happy taxi cabs, so I’m embracing the chance to be working with imagery that’s more rooted in urban and social realities. Although one of my first first feedback comments on a character design was ‘can you make him look less like an elf?’

For more information on Kayosoul (his music is awesome) visit http://www.kayosoulmusic.com/



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Puppets & The Past

Posted on June 8, 2012 by quirkyjoe

Tomorrow it is the last Stop Motion session as part of the Saturday School at the City College Brighton & Hove. It has been fun experimenting with different stop motion methods over the weeks, from animating with wire armatures to using objects (mainly broken Action Men) and Pixilation.

In the next couple of weeks I’m going to be planning my own stop motion project. This week I’ve been taking the chance to look back at some of the models I’ve created in the past and think about how the images I have in my head will be realised in three dimensions.

Below are images from Jinglething (a project from university), Four Walls (a music video for a band called The Authentics) and The Winter Tree (a dark fairy tale combining stop motion puppets and hand-drawn images).

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Myths & Fairy Tales

Posted on May 29, 2012 by quirkyjoe

Last week I finished the Myths & Fairy Tales creative writing course run by Evolution Arts, Brighton (http://www.evolutionarts.org.uk/myths).  In addition to drawing stuff, writing stuff is something I enjoy devoting time to. Brighton boasts many platforms for creative writing and this year I wanted to explore some of these. In the last six months I’ve contributed stories to a few of the live literature events the city has to offer – Grit Lit, Rattle Tales and Are You Sitting Comfortably. In each of these I submitted a short story to be read to an audience and they were also opportunities to hear perfectly crafted gems from other writers too. I enjoyed the different atmospheres and sense of event with each one. The Myths & Fairy Tales course, however, was a different beast entirely. And it held different kinds of challenges and enjoyments to the staged readings of ‘live lit’. I hadn’t taken part in a creative writing course before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect but I soon found it to be a really useful resource for ideas, some of which turned out to be visual ideas. The course was divided into five themes, and in each section we considered the purpose of the theme, studied modern texts that were interpretations of this theme (from the likes of Angela Carter, Ted Hughes and Alice Hoffman) and then used a series of writing tasks to investigate our own ideas about them. These themes were: Red Riding Hood, Beasts & Monsters, Gods & Goddesses, The Underworld, Transformations. From notes, ideas and rough drawings in class, I created this series of five illustrations for each theme.

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Business & Busyness

Posted on May 17, 2012 by quirkyjoe

I had a list of things to do this week. Some of these things will make me money, some might make me money and some definitely won’t. I would like to believe that some of the speculative things I do will lead to other opportunities. Over the last few months my earnings have come from three sources; a freelancing website, a self-publishing house and college lecturing. There’s nothing to guarantee that I will be able to depend on the same sources of income by the time July is here. There are things pencilled in, there are bits and pieces secured for later in the year, but I need to keep fishing and maintain a constant search for future projects. And really I still feel I need something small and stable that can provide consistent monthly security, a kind of one-day-a-week position that I can depend on, but I haven’t worked out what that is yet. But even without that, I seem to be very busy and always have a list of things to do. I can’t imagine that changing in July. In the meantime, I will be promoting my skills armed with new business cards – designs shown below.

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Strips & Bubbles

Posted on May 1, 2012 by quirkyjoe

I didn’t read comics when I was growing up. I couldn’t engage with them. I found them frustrating and limited and I wanted to see movement. I wanted to see animation, or in picture books, I wanted to see the kind of details that seemed to be lost in comics. The language of comics (the use of panels and speech bubbles and thought bubbles) felt like a barrier. Comics seemed like a compromise. It wasn’t until my parents bought me a book for my birthday called Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels that I started to really understand their potential. The book is a comprehensive illustrated history of the medium and really opened my eyes. It showed me  the sex and subversiveness of Robert Crumb, the horror of the Holocaust story Maus by Art Spiegelman and the dark and beautiful Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman/Dave Mckean, which became the first graphic novel I bought for myself. And I realised that not all comics use speech bubbles or follow the conventions that I found such a barrier as a child.

And now that I am finding myself illustrating comics and battling with the task of composing each panel and page, I am appreciating them even more. Below are a three panel strip exploring the use of speech bubbles and a series of pages from the comic for Shahad Abulainain’s Dual Identity project. I’m still not certain what comics mean to me, and how I want to use them, but I am going to enjoy finding out.

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