What's deceased and what's alive...

Everything you see here has come straight from my mind. The inaccuracies, the bad perspective, the anguish...yes, I claim them all! I think we've all felt like this; the thing we want more than anything, forever outside of our reach. I hope I've captured something of that feeling and also the physical sense of animate vs inanimate; here but not really; vital parts missing...I park my dark in these crosshatched shadows and laugh a lot in real life as a result. It keeps me on the straight and narrow (most of the time). Finding somewhere to keep your melancholy doesn't mean you have to hide it or hide from it. Throw it out there...it works. 

Hope you're happy too...

One from the archives...Since I'm drawing either very slowly or not at all at the moment I thought I'd share this little ballpoint drawing from a few years back. It was for a (now disbanded) local band that my brother drummed for called J.A.R.S (hence the jar) to promote an EP they made called (you guessed it) My Friend Hope. They were quite specific about what they wanted but luckily at the time I had a bit of a thing for drawing glass jars and bottles. I toyed with the idea of putting something in the jar, I can't remember now what sort of things passed through my thought clouds but in the end it seemed that the title suggested emptiness waiting to be filled so it was left as it was. The typography is a bit dodgy and the perspective isn't right but the lads were quite happy with it...it's all subjective isn't it? 

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... 

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.