It's all Bristol.

Also, check out my Etsy shop for some new prints!

The world shines...

JAB

The Man with Half a Beard

A couple more things I've done on this fine Glaswegian day.

Mind you dinnae floss too hard now son

Demented

JAB

Hide Down in My Corner, Because I Like My Corner.

I'm still here. Working away in the background, keeping relatively quiet.

Viking creation comic is underway

Desperate 

 Scruffy but comfortable

You don't look so good Al

Don't be a stranger,

JAB

'Tis the Season to be Moustachioed

This image has been a long time coming. I read an interesting article in the in-flight magazine whilst on holiday about Seattle Sounders' Roger Levesque. He's sadly retired from football now but will likely be remembered by many fans for sense of humor, namely his 'timbers chop' celebration against arch rivals the Portland Timbers.

This video is not of that particular celebration but of another rather comical one, oh and watch out for some superb goalkeeping. Real fans root for roger.

So, continuing with the facial hair theme, Movember is well and truly upon us and is about to enter its final week. I've been raising money over on movember.com and you can check out my progress here. Any amount you can donate can help to make a huge difference to men's health charities, so if you have a penny or two to spare please take a moment to donate them to my attempt at a moustache.

And with a bit of time and some TLC, I'm hoping to achieve a Dalí.

JAB

Sketches From Another Continent

Back from an awesome holiday in Toronto and New York, above are a collection of sketches from museums visited in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Probably a good gauge of what my brain looks like when trying to come up with ideas.

An account of what we got up to can be seen on Jen Collins' blog here.

Hellow Glasgow

Haven't had much time for drawing and such, let alone blogging since making the switch to Glasgow. Starting to settle in now and with a week off on the horizon, I should get some sketching time fitted in and hopefully maybe even a final print for the 'Humble Abodes' collection I've been working on.

Messing around with an ink and water pen that I purchased a few years back and have never actually used.

Queen's Park Chap.

Being less active art-wise, although I don't necessarily see that as a good thing, has given me a chance to enjoy some sports. Starting to get into the NHL this season (in particular the Maple Leafs), thanks to a little guidance from Ian Turner. Also went to see Queen's Park FC (our local football team on Saturday), rather looking forward to following a local team as I can't really watch Everton at the moment, except for televised matches of course. More to come in the next week or so when I'm off.

JAB

I've been enjoying scouring museums of late looking for inspiration and I've found a fair bit. I feel I'm on the cusp of a few nice ideas that I want to take further and maybe screen print or just turn into detailed Indian ink drawings.

The pictures in this blog are a selection of some of the sketches from the past few weeks. Visits include Edinburgh City Art Centre, Edinburgh National Museum (for the third time this year), the World Museum and the Walker Art Gallery (the latter two are in Liverpool). Also with trips to finally see the McManus (Dundee) properly planned and a jaunt to London for a concert there's surely to be a few more sketchbook pages scrawled upon before the end of June. I've finally set myself the goal of sorting out and opening my online shop for the end of July at the latest.

Fierce Head o' Hair

Short Arse

Pagan carving on an early christian relic (I added the text though)

Hellhound

'Drink driving 'carving, early attempt at Humour

Collection of drawings from Pictish stones

Greek Lion

Greek Cockerel

Ba, the Egyptian representation of personality and Nut, Goddess of the sky

Elu Mask, Nigerian

More sketches (and hopefully more prints) to come soon.

JAB

A Sketchy Couple of Days

A few sketches I've been playing around with, trying to come up with some screenprinting ideas. Again, still putting off doing more important stuff.

Stumbled across Brook Pridemore recently, give him a listen here.

Cup of tea

More researchy drawings concerning Gods (Odin)

JAB

Chaos Theory.

So there's been a few bits and pieces going on of late. I've been much more productive with drawing and printing which feels swell, but as a result I've been less active on my blog (surprise, surprise). I got myself a new phone last week so I'm finally with the times in that I own a 'smart' phone, meaning that I should be able to be a bit more active on my Twitter and Blog (once I get used to using it, that is).

I have some work for sale at long last, via Two Dolls, who recently opened up their shop in Dundee (proud to say I'm the first gentleman in their collection) so drop in and visit them if you find yourself around the Meadowside area of town. I'm starting to get a few bits and pieces of work together that I feel I can probably sell and so should hopefully open up my Etsy shop over the next few months. Watch this space.

Let's Build a Home

Chaos Theory

Self Portrait

Weathervane

London - A Weekend in 6 Soups

Prescription Sunglasses

As you can probably tell from the drawings I've rediscovered Indian ink and my fountain pen again. I really enjoy drawing with it and love the fact that I don't seem to give a sh*t about making a mess with ink spatters and smudges as I would if I were drawing with a pencil, fineline or brush pen. Marvellous.

In other news, we recently went to London (as mentioned in my previous post) and I was going to write a little more about it but I got a bit sidetracked and can't really remember what I was going to write so - The 'Chaos Theory' picture is based on a super Ice Cream van we saw by the British Museum and ' London - A Weekend in 6 Soups' came about because for some reason I became addicted to eating mostly soup whilst we were away. Damned good soup, mind.

This week I have mostly been drawing with Indian ink.

JAB

Add a Little Colour to Your Life.

Yesterdays entry but with a little colour.

All Around My Hat.

Finally some drawings! I don't feel there's a great deal of direction with my work at the moment, in that I'm just drawing things as they come into my head so nothing really links together and flows. That's miles better than not doing any work at all though.

The picture below was based loosely on this Mountain Goats song which I keep listening to lately (although I do have a habit of doing that with most Mountain Goats songs. Ideally I wanted to maybe adapt this style into a comic of sorts based on the song but I've been getting other ideas that I'm keen to work on so I may come back to it at a later date. Also, it was rather difficult to get a decent photo of this in our studio as the light hasn't been great and it's about A1 size.

A landscape, based on a Mountain Goats tune.

For New Year we had a 'Hat Party', which has become somewhat of a tradition for our family parties back home in Wallasey. The idea arose when we realised some people are reluctant to go full out for fancy dress whereas there's less at stake if you just don a daft hat for the evening. Rules for the Hat Party are as follows, Rule 1. Should anyone get you a drink throughout the evening you must then trade hats with that person (makes for some interesting photos) Rule 2. There is no rule number 2. Anyway, here's a kind of Birch 'Coat of Arms' or a potential invite for our next party. Oh, and excuse my French.

We do like our hats.

It's not really a secret that I like star wars and I recently purchased a couple of stormtrooper figures partly for ornamental purposes and also partly to assist me with drawing human proportion which the below pictures will show I'm not great at.

Ghetto Stormtrooper

The final of this set of drawings is a homage to me losing my train pass last month. I must admit that I do not really lose things but humility is required at a time like this. Hoping I'll laugh at myself enough so as not to do it again. I do feel that this drawing hasn't really turned out as I'd imagined it would and so I may redo it with some colour and less fineline pen.

Loser.

Something I've been enjoying just browsing through of late is this collection of maps from David Rumsey, originally tweeted by artist Tom Gauld some time last week. Have a look if you like maps and hand-drawn stuff, there's heaps of them, I could spend hours looking at them.

So I'm off to get back to some drawings and hopefully a comic and some colour. Watch this space.

JAB

Dum-dee-dum Delightful...

Nothing like a bit of 'Die Hard' for some festive inspiration. Thank you, Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Also for those unfortunate enough to have not seen 'Die Hard', or can't recall what happens - here, 'Die Hard in 5 Seconds'.

Göteborg

So, we've just got back from our short break in Gothenburg last week. Had a great time and would love to go back to Sweden at some point. I'm not really sure what was my favourite part (certainly not the flights) but I really enjoyed being somewhere different than Dundee even Just for a few days. The weather was better than expected too, it was sunny and warm every day and just started to get a little cooler towards the end of the week which was fine as we were well equipped with gloves and scarves.

A walk down Vasagatan on our first day.

In brief we spent a lot of time walking about enjoying the autumn sun, drinking coffee (well, Jen had tea) and eating Kanelbulle and other cake type things. We also spent a day shopping and wandering the streets of a nice little area called the Haga which I'd recommend to anyone who visits Gothenburg.

Sitting on a small dock kind of thing on Asperö Island.

One of the things I wanted to do was to take the Ferry over to Asperö Island - so with the weather being what it was we did that on the second day. A lovely picturesque island but it was incredibly quiet due to it being autumn - apparently during the summer it can get somewhat busier with many tourists using the ferries to visit the Southern Gothenburg Archipelago. Oh, and there was a lot of cats on the island - I think we saw about just as many cats as we did people.

I still make Cat friends, even in Sweden.

Friends.

On our last day we did a little more shopping and visited the Röhsska Museum (Design Musuem) and the Natural History Museum before heading back to the Haga for some awesome Vegetarian food at a small, but very popular café. Being in a foreign country without having any grasp of the language whatsoever has got me inspired to take up learning a language again - I think I would quite like to learn French although, having done German at school I should probably take that up as I image most of it will come back to me, it's just a shame I no longer have my old school text books.

Crazy Pilot Fish in the Natural History Museum.

All of the above and a few more pages of sketchbook based work on a couple of productive days off since being back brings us back up to date. I really loved the simplicity of the Swedish transport network - Something that we in Britain should probably strive to emulate - if only it were that easy, when are Edinburgh's trams finished again? The Strong Man drawing is hopefully going to fall into pace in one of my comics that I'm currently planning.

Tram.

Strong Man.

JAB

(Photography by Jen as per usual)

An Inherent Appreciation of His Own Absurdity.

It's been a good few weeks since getting back to part-time hours again. I had my driving test a week or so ago which sadly, I failed. I must admit though that it went a lot better than I was expecting, which is positive for my next test. Having the extra time on my hands, I should've started doing a whole lot more drawing and such but I've only really gotten down to that this week, I've spent the last few weeks transcribing from recordings I made back in March about family stories that I'm hoping to form into a collection of comics. I've also been enjoying experimenting with cooking again including three new soups and new homemade veggie burgers (also the leftover Veggie Burgers made quite a nice addition to a veggie pasta).

Homemade Veggie Burger on a whole-meal handmade roll with Sweet Potato Chips.

At the beginning of September, my friend Mark and I headed down south to watch Everton. As I mentioned in my previous blog post I hadn't been to a Premiership game in 10 years, and what a game it turned out to be. Unfortunately Everton's season is proving to be the worst in quite some time, but the game we chose definitely gave us our money's worth - 6 goals (3-3) with some amazing last minute action that left me with quite a sore throat and resulted in me not being able to speak properly for the next three or four days.

Our view at Goodison.

Following the game we headed back to New Brighton to attend the Magazine Hotel's beer festival and to say farewell to Dave and Jen who are off travelling around the world at this very moment (jealous much). All in all a very good weekend and I can't wait for my next premiership game (well at least if Everton can pick themselves up sometime soon) and trip to Merseyside.

Our Beer ratings.

Yesterday I rooted out my sketchbook after finishing the longest of all the transcriptions and just started some drawings, some related to the comics idea and some not at all. Still it felt nice to be drawing for drawings sake and not from making myself feel guilty for not having done any drawings in such a long time.

Work space, mid-transcribe.

Over the next few weeks I've got a few things going on. Including my driving test, our trip to Sweden (which I can hardly wait for), brand new FIFA for the XBOX on friday, setting myself the task of producing (at least) a drawing a day and a blog (at least) once or twice a week (depending on whether I actually have anything interesting to say). The latter two means I will actually be ensuring that I now take a sketchbook with me pretty much everywhere I go, something that I used to do but have gotten out of the habit of doing since it was basically just taking up extra space in my bag and meaning that I was risking losing my favourite pens (somewhat of a defeatist attitude, I know).

Grandad affectionately became known as 'The Cockleshell Hero' after crashing his van through the promenade railings and ending up on the beach.

Evil Eric Sykes with Big Hand. Reference for a possible character.

Bat-Man Jacky? Grandad had a very posh friend who never owned a television.

The Case of the Missing Forty Pages.

Jen's St. Michael Cash Register.

Fem Hundra Kronor. Can't wait for Gothenburg.

Back to the sketchbook!

JAB