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

Gods of Ancient Rome and The Childhood Museum

Goteborg Polis Station

Not so much screen printing in the past few weeks due to lack of decent ideas, kind of wanting to do some larger pieces than the A5 ones I have been, but feel my priorities at the moment should be a website update, opening up an online shop and possibly some small simple prints for giveaways and such. Procrastination is king. I did manage the above print a couple of weeks back, based on a small Swedish Police Station we saw in a Gothenburg park last October. Simple, but I like it.

Jen and I went to the museum of childhood in Edinburgh last week which was rather fun, personal favourites had to be the first room of the tour and the stick doll from the dolls room. Some favourites are shown below. The cars in particular made me wish I was about 6 again (and from an earlier time period than the 80's). Hopefully some more museum visits to come over the next few months.

Junior smoking kit. Go on kids...smoke...

...seriously, even Mickey says it's cool

Rather awesome toy car

Doll made from branch and rag

Due to visits to museums in recent months I've been wanting to do some stuff to do with Roman/Viking/Pictish Gods, haven't had a great chance to do a huge amount of sketching around the subject but here's a starting point. Anyone with any ideas of good places to see collections of Roman/Viking/Pictish artefacts and such, aside from the National Museum in Edinburgh, any help is massively appreciated.

Janus

Gods of Ancient Rome comic (Click to enlarge)

The weather in Dundee has been pretty wild today I think perhaps I made the Gods angry (rapture anyone?). Also, today I purchased L.A. Noire and some red wine, I know what I'll be doing this evening.

JAB