Blue, blue, electric blue...

I know it's the time for chilling out and letting the glitter settle but I can't not draw. It's like having an itch I can't scratch, like those weird ones you get behind your kneecaps that drive you insane (or is that just me?) Having said that, I needed something swirly that I didn't have to think too hard about so here's an experiment in blue ballpoint pen (just to see what would happen). I thought the vibrancy of the blue ink would lend itself to the ethereal qualities of a jellyfish and do you know what? I think it does. Something has made me display it upside down to the way I drew it, it just seems to work better that way*, like he's diving down to...well I don't actually know what jellyfish do, just float about by the look of things. That's fine by me (we must be related). 

*Feel free to spin it round and take a look at it from my viewpoint.

From my window to yours...

I can't say much about this really, it is what it is. A little festive ballpoint illustration to bring some joy (no irony in the voice or anything...) I'm not going to say I like it because I'm not so sure...it's colour again. In paradox to the real world version of me, the planet inside my head where the drawings live is a monochrome place. When I get the inks or the coloured biro's out, it's never quite the same. I think they lose something of the original idea and then it's too late. 

If you're interested, here it is before I coloured it (I feel much better now).

Anyway, I'd like to wish anyone who actually reads this stream of consciousness a very happy festive season. If Christmas isn't your bag, I hope you're able enjoy some peace anyway. A lot is going on in the world, good and bad. Everyone is trying to get somewhere and everyone has lost something precious. Think on. Merry Christmas. 

Where everything is possible and nothing is what it seems...

Focus your visuals...Look closer...Zoom in...Do you see it? I've always been intrigued by the sort of artwork and illustration that has hidden elements. Pictures within pictures and tiny details. They were always the illustrations I'd gaze at for hours as a child so I suppose they've worked their way to the surface. I'm quite pleased with how this has turned out, it went from one idea to the next and settled itself on a dragonfly with a body made from a variety of human skeleton parts. And I didn't even leave it neglected for months on end, this was done from start to finish over the weekend. I don't know why I keep torturing myself with drawing these tiny, delicate bones but I hope I'm getting better at it... 

Come on let's crawl...

I really love these shield bugs (yes, apparently they're officially bugs not beetles). This little fella landed on me back in the days when the sun shone, so I quickly took a picture before he flew away because I knew I'd end up drawing him. I seem to come back to dots when I draw insects but this is what you might call mixed media. Oooh, branching out! Here we have dots in fineline pen; acrylic ink then not one but two shades of green ballpoint. Oh yes, my friends, acid green biro exists in the world, rejoice! I'd drawn this and inked it up but I really wasn't feeling it so once again it was neglected for a few weeks until I recalled the existence of the green pens (after stating that I had no use for green pens). Now he's a sparkling peridot. Quite a bit more vibrant than the real life bug but wouldn't we all add a bit of glimmer if we were to illustrate ourselves? Don't get used to it, I'll be back in black soon enough. 

I think I'll let you decide...

The idea for this strange little ballpoint drawing came to me when I read a line about a derelict building that "loomed like a giant ribcage" in this book. But I'm not going to discuss that here, let's move on. 

It came and went and then returned again the other day when I found a little sketch I must have made at the time. I wanted to capture the sort of feeling you get when you're amongst the sculptures of Antony Gormley. Beautiful but eerie at the same time. Did it just move? Has it got closer while my back was turned? Is it dead or alive? Organic or man-made? I've purposely left it a bit sketchy and scratchy looking, I didn't want to overwork it, I just needed to get it out of my mind and onto paper. I could have done a lot more with it really but I think the emptiness kind of works. For once I stopped at the right time...

Keep your electric eye on me...

Here's something hot off the drawing board...I literally finished this about half an hour ago. I was asked to draw an Osprey and was sent a picture to work from the day after I'd started...oops. So instead of a raptor catching it's prey in a hail of ocean spray, we have this little baby chick. I think you can see the hunter she's going to grow into looking out from that beady eye. 

When it comes to the natural world, I don't like to draw anything that I haven't actually seen with my own eyeballs. Luckily, I did once see an Osprey battling the elements flying inland across the salt marshes at Arnside. They aren't the prettiest of the birds of prey, they always look startled to me but I think I like them more for that. But if good looking birds are your thing, here's another one on the house...(A Merlin falcon I saw on the same walk I found the waders skull.)

Hit the bottom and escape...

"A mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more..." 

This drawing makes me feel sad. I almost wish I hadn't done it. A captured, lonely thing. I drew the jar ages ago when I was into illustrating glass in a big way...er, yeah. Anyway, the jar sat empty in a sketchbook for a bit and the other day, while I was on the subject of skeletons, this idea of mermaid bones came to me. Are you picking up the vibe that I leave a lot of things with a "to be continued" tagline? 

It's not really turned out how I expected but I quite like it when that happens (which is pretty much every time) it's like these things draw me rather than the other way round. Strange creatures swimming around inside my head waiting to get out... 

Oh heaven knows we'll soon be dust....

I don't want to give too much away about this because it's not really my thing to share, I'm just the illustrator. So in the spirit of science and rational thinking, I'll just stick to the facts: This little skeleton ballerina is part of the dotty Moon drawing I did a few weeks ago. I had to put a bit of distance between me and that Moon, this happens quite a lot but it helps me to think about how to proceed. The end product is absolutely nothing like the original request. The idea was very specific and put me in mind of the art of Roger Dean, whose style is very surreal and sci-fi and one I would only be able to emulate poorly I think (plus, I don't paint, too much cleaning up). 

As I'm still at the stage of putting things out there quickly before I have chance to censor myself, I'm showing this bit off (because I like it) and I promise the full drawing will be coming soon to a screen near you... 

Drawing crazy patterns on your sheets...

Remember when I said I thought about illustrating The Owl and the Pussycat? Well it turns out I made a start on it (must have been a slow day). I came across this in a half finished state last week and having not much to do that day either, I thought I might as well finish it off. I won't be continuing with this as a project, I'm not a massive cat lover and all those swirly patterns in the sea...I tried to keep the same sort of idea going as the original little illustration and, well, they just don't work do they? My favourite part of this is the owls little brother waving goodbye, he looks so excited. I don't think he really gets it (psst...they aren't coming back!)

If I could have it back, I'd only waste it again...

I've spent a disproportionate amount of Earth hours doodling away at this and it still doesn't quite feel done...It's really hard to know when to stop. I miss a drawing when it's finished, it's a tiny bit of me gone forever. Then I forget it exists and start the next one. The circle of creative life.

This is my interpretation of the far side of the Moon, first seen by human eyeballs in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. My name is not amongst those who've seen the dark side so I had to make do with the Apollo photo archives. But since I'm an energy conservationist (lazy), most of the cratering is from imagination. A bit of creative license goes a long way..all the way to the Moon in my case. 

PS - apologies for the weird text alignment, formatting is having none of it today. 

Like drinking poison, like eating glass...

A bit ago I went through a phase of drawing glass jars and bottles. No, I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours (thanks Lewis Carroll). This one was a request for an Alice in Wonderland inspired drawing and because that's another done to death theme, I really wanted to put my own stamp on it. So it got the Holly treatment and became Alice's "Drink Me" bottle, in biro as standard. If I was to go back and add to this I'd make the bottle look more like it had liquid in it but at the time, in my head, it was more of a whirlwind thing going on. I think I must have got my wires crossed between Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Also, because I didn't have a great deal of time, I had to keep it quite small so drawing the tiny objects and animals inside was pretty delicate work. For a bull in a china shop, that isn't easy. For me, it's even worse. 

Why have paper when you can have skin?

Now available on your flesh...Here's something I'm quite excited about today. One of my drawings, etched onto skin forever as a tattoo. Not my own I hasten to add! 

I'm genuinely honoured, such skill has gone into recreating it and I think it works quite nicely (even if I do say so myself). I'm told it was a tattooist called Marcos Ribeiro at Black Garden Tattoo, Covent Garden. So thank you Marcos, you've really done a fabulous job. I feel immortal (well I've gained at least a decade). 

The request was a Nightingale and I decided that because they're quite a plain looking bird, I'd give it a bit of a steampunk vibe. So it became a clockwork toy version with the significant initials "EPN" added to the key to wind it. 

That last picture is a bit dodgy but shows the general size and positioning of the tattoo. I guess it sort of wraps around the arm a bit. I haven't actually seen it in the flesh (yet).

Below is the original drawing, or something like it. I really think this Marcos guy has improved on what I started. A strange collaborative project in which the participants have never crossed paths... 

Spinning a yarn...

Some of the people that I know and love put the odd request in here and there (by odd I mean both infrequently and peculiar). This is one that kept me busy for a short time the other day. Since I quite like creating lettering, and in absence of the mental clarity required to upload anything else, I thought I'd share it. This swirly writing is starting to become my signature text, I'll have to keep an eye on that...
If you're struggling to guess what it might be, it's a gift tag for a "hand knitted emergency allotment hat" (hopefully the potential emergency is just unexpectedly inclement weather). And no, of course I didn't knit the hat, I've never even seen the hat! Biros are my weapon of choice, the pen is mightier than the knitting needle.

The shadow is cast...

Last night I saw an incredible video of the surface features of the Sun called Thermonuclear Art. I love the idea of that but since hydrogen fusion is a process that requires a fair bit of effort, I decided to get the pens out instead and leave the nuclear reactions to the hearts of stars. So here's a little drawing of the Sun's atmosphere (also known as the Solar Corona) visible to us during a total eclipse, a celestial event that I've been known to get a little bit animated over. To witness the shadow of the Moon covering the Sun from the perspective of the Earth is breathtaking. There's no denying we are on a spinning ball of rock when you experience that happening and we are in just the right place at just the right time. What a startling coincidence!
As a little extra (unintentional) feature, if you look at this image and blink your eyes really quickly it creates quite an interesting visual effect.

Experimentation is an active science...

More dots...I told you it was habit forming! Along with a rarer thing for me, colour.

These little ladies are something I began with good intentions and then promptly misplaced. Having found them again, I decided they either had to go or be finished, so here they are. Ladybirds given a revamp in new, far out costumes. I was going for a sort of experimental ladybird test card using the CMYK colour model that printers use; cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Don't think I'm all techy, I just looked that up. It was an excuse to try out my newly acquired acrylic inks, that's all. They're not very symmetrical or evenly spaced (I just went for it freehand in pen...on wallpaper, which seemed like a good idea at the time) and the colours have bled outside the edges but I quite like them because of that rather than despite it. I don't usually wear rose tinted spectacles to look at my own work but they've made me show these off when I really wasn't going to. I'd better take them off again before anything else weird happens!

Your world has never been my own...

This is nothing new. I drew this ballpoint Raven quite a bit ago, but having no inclination to drop everything and come up with some inherently "spooky" cliché, this is the token Halloween gesture. I don't know why the Corbie has such a dark reputation. Maybe it's because they eat the recently deceased, or because they choose to dress all in black. Maybe it's Edgar Allen Poe's "Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore." Bit harsh. Or perhaps it's because nobody has ever found out why a Raven is like a writing desk. Whatever the reason, I don't like it, cut them some slack. Quoth the Raven, Nevermore...Happy Halloween. 

Carrying around an empty head...

Now, I'm not really the macabre type but when I came across the delicate, fragile treasure of a bird skull on the coast at Flookburgh I just had to bring it home. It's some kind of little wading bird, though there's so many that look identical to the untrained eye, I couldn't tell you what it is (any twitchers out there, answers on a postcard). I really didn't have any intention of drawing it but I never had any intention of drawing anything, I just don't know what else to do with my hands..

Once I started I got a bit carried away and drew it quite a lot of times, which is an incredibly rare occurrence for my non-existent attention span. These are my favourites, drawn in dots (which is a bit habit forming, consider that fair warning!) Some people refer to this technique as pointilism but strictly speaking, it's stippling, which sounds like a style of painting to me. Although it's pointilism that is actually a painting technique. Confused? Yeah, me too. I'm just going to call it drawing with millions of dots. Genius! Like magnified subatomic particles. Actually, nothing like that at all.

This one is my favourite, the underside. These drawings are quite a bit bigger than the real life skull, I can scarcely believe it once housed a miniature brain. 

Sail away for a year and a day...

Talking about Edward Lear the other day reminded me that I'd done this little biro illustration a while back. It was a wedding card for a friend, awww. At the time it crossed my mind to illustrate the whole poem but I think that's been done to death. Be yourself, everyone else is already taken (thanks Oscar Wilde). I do quite like these whimsical little drawings though (when I'm that side out) and there are one or two in my portfolio which may make an appearance here. People seem to enjoy them, they're what one might call a crowd pleaser. Roll up, roll up...

A Moon age daydream...

Tonight's moon is known as a Hunters Moon which is the full moon that comes after the Harvest Moon (and that's a lot of moons in one sentence..) It won't be quite as exciting as the supermoon total eclipse we got last month (if you didn't get up at 2am to catch that, what were you playing at?) which gave us a deep, burnt, blood-red moon that looked to me, as it neared totality, as though there were flames licking up the sides trying to catch it on fire. Just stunning! But it's drawings (not moon related digression) that we're here for, so without further ado...

Sticking with the white on black theme, here's something I've been working on this week. Our beautiful Moon drawn in millions of tiny white dots. This is actually part of a bigger drawing so more will be revealed. Stay tuned. Do not adjust your set. 

Inktober

#inktober

I've just found out about this inktober thing (on the 26th...story of my life!), which coincided quite nicely with starting this blog and with splattering white acrylic ink around the "studio" yesterday. I was going for a bit of a Ralph Steadman vibe after seeing him the other night on a programme about Edward Lear. I've always loved his far out art... Anyway, I thought my splatters looked a bit like fish skeletons so here's one (with the crappy tail bit craftily edited out of the photo). I'm also kind of glad I've only just discovered inktober, there's no way I would have committed myself to an ink drawing every single day for a month! I was bored before I even began..(thanks Morrissey).

Before I change my mind...

Welcome. It's nice to have you here. I'm so glad you could come. I hope you like it...I think you will (thanks Willy Wonka). To avoid agonising over the perfect drawing to start with, I've decided to just go for it and keep it simple with this little Dor beetle. Leave 'em wanting more...