There are Certain Gardening Skills You'll Never Learn.

Another Christmas has passed and another year's underway. So, I've been rather sloppy with blogging and such over the past four weeks (no change there really) with no reason besides my own superb december-related laziness, procrastination and lack of productivity. Here's to hoping that 2010 will be a year of art, blogs and website related things.

Christmas 2009 was an altogether enjoyable one, I spent Christmas day with Dad doing very little besides going to the pub and spending the rest of the day watching DVD's and drinking wine. I also made my first Christmas dinner ever for me and Jen the day before I headed southward for the holidays and I was pleasantly surprised. The Christmas photos below are courtesy of Jen.

Our lovely old, plastic tree.

Sitting down to dinner at our new table, with my eyes closed for some reason.

Christmas dinner before the Gravy.

I'm generally not one for making New Year's resolutions as I can never really be bothered with the hassle and I've never really felt the need to have any sort of resolution but this year I'm vowing to keep my blog and website up to date with work that I'm doing - oh, and a by product of the whole resolution will mean me doing more work, more often. Basically utilising the fact that I work a part time job by having something to actually show for the time I'm away from the office.

So here's some work from this week - I'm trying to get myself out of the frame of mind of 'forcing myself' to produce drawings which is something I seem to have gotten into the habit of doing quite often i.e. trying to make myself draw daily and that sort of thing. It seems to make me feel less creative as I can't seem to think of anything at all to draw. So for the next few weeks I'm just going to draw what I feel like, when I feel like it without any real deliberation over the subject matter or the frequency. So it's basically what's on my desk, stuff around the flat and stuff I just think of - much more enjoyable and much less stressful.

The second of January was I suppose when the 'resolution' truly began and I started just by drawing some stuff on my desk. A piece of wood that Jen picked up on a walk to Balgay Park that she then used to fashion some buttons out of and my trusty date stamp - which will hopefully be getting a bit more use this year than the latter half of last. I also did a couple of pieces for Cut Click's Mail Art Exhibition which takes place next week - the two pieces were just for fun really, drawn on envelopes fitting the 'Mail' theme of the exhibition. And today I decided to go back to producing some larger A2 pieces (like the 'General Store' picture and portraits I produced previously), I find it rather liberating to get out of the sketchbook and create some larger work - I do find myself sometimes retreating to the sketchbook all too frequently and I suppose it can have quite a negative effect on the outcome of work. So today's subjects were again things from around the flat - Mannequin hands from an exhibition at DCA that we've come to reuse for useful things around the flat and my new shoes. It should be noted that I normally dislike drawing hands and struggle like hell to get them right and today that was not the case.

Got Wood?

The Trodat Printy-Dater 4810

On Her Majesty's Service

Post

Three Hands

Adidas Green Star

So tomorrow I have one more day off before I'm back in work again, hopefully I can be as productive as today - if not more so. I had intended to update my website but blogging and drawing has taken longer than previously thought and now I'm getting hungry so it doesn't look like it will happen this evening. So I'm off for some dinner.

Wishful Thinking.

JAB

Heart of the Continent...

It's been a relatively slow few weeks on the drawing and blogging front with the likes of work and a little spot of decorating taking up my time. I'd wanted to draw something American General Store-ish for some time and I finally got round to it. I'm pleased with the outcome but not so pleased with how long it took me.

Listen to this song: John K. Samson 'Heart of the Continent' - I can't switch on my iTunes lately without listening to it.

Christmas time means Blogging time (I think).

Four Blokes and a Mountain Dwelling Mammal.

The past few days have been rather productive after recovering from what I can only assume was some form of Cold from the busy weekend. I decided to take some of the portraits in the previous blog to the next level, alot of the work I've done recently (if not all of the work I've done recently) has been sketchbook based so I nailed a piece of cardboard to the wall (we have woodchip you see, terrible for drawing on) and set out doing some pieces that were A2 sized and larger. It feels good to actually do some substantial work, and the both of the last two days spent drawing took up the majority of the day - time well spent if you ask me.

John Cleese, lately I've been watching ALOT of Monty Python.

Bill Murray.

Dean Martin, from a time when excessive smoking and drinking were endearing qualities.

Me, from a photo taken last year after playing baseball in Morocco. Random.

A Mountain Goat, for obvious reasons.

I've been rather enjoying my Pentel Brush pen as you can probably tell, The Mountain Goat picture was done solely for the reason that I wanted to go overboard on the whole brushstroke marks that it makes, I think that the paper that I've used and the fact that the pen is starting to run out helped this somewhat too. I also like how my beard turned out in the Self-Portrait (I do miss my beard)...all of this brush pen-ness now means I need to purchase some more refills, and I only replaced it a few weeks ago. Oh well, at least I'm having fun I suppose.

On top of the work I've been doing, drawing in the studio and listening to music has given me time to think, which is a side of art I seem to have forgotten about as recently any drawing I've done never really takes up much longer than 30mins or so - drawing in a sketchbook and rather small unadventurous stuff. Anyway, working on the larger pieces has seen me take about two to three hours per piece and the has got me thinking onto a few more ideas that are hopefully going to keep me busy for the next few weeks and create a nice body of work. Hopefully.

After all this busy-ness I'm off to play the latest Grand Theft Auto installment, back to drawing tomorrow. Keep you informed.

JAB

And Now for Something Completely Different...

A man with two noses...

Last week turned out to be a rather busy one, spent a fair bit of time preparing for Mum and Darren's Wedding which was on Friday Afternoon. I was giving my mum away and as a result had to make a speech (well I didn't have to, but I wanted to) and I must be honest I'm hardly renowned for my public speaking, I think I made a speech at my 18th birthday but I was fairly inebriated when I was asked so it never really phased me at all. I was pretty damn nervous at making the speech on Friday though, infront of about 150 odd people and without any of the Dutch courage, however it went okay and a few people even said I seemed really confident...Not likely. I had a fantastic time at the wedding and I'm really happy for Mum and so was everyone else I spoke to. It was great to see everyone together again, I hadn't seem some of my relatives for over 5 years so it was awesome to have a drink and catch up, hope it's not too long before we all see each other again. I'd like to thank everyone who came once again (if you happen to read this that is).

Me and Jen at the Wedding

At least everyone's having fun. (Me, Andrew, Emma and Alison)

On Saturday Morning after the wedding I was hungover, as was to be expected really. So me, Graham and Louise went for breakfast in Morrison's, it's been a while since I've had a fry up and it tastes about 100 times better when you're hungover. Afterwards I spent the rest of Saturday lazing around and slowly making my way back to Dundee where I played some XBOX and watched Monty Python's Flying Circus. Sadly my hangover decided to make it's way over to Sunday morning as well so Sunday was fairly uneventful too apart from doing a few bits around the flat and meeting Jen's family for a chinese. Today I rolled out of bed and straight into my sketchbook, I'm finding it difficult to carry on with the whole 'drawing signs' idea as I had stated in previous blogs, I may pick it up again when I feel the time is right, but this morning I felt like doing some self indulgent stuff, drawings of people with brush pen and fineline. Awesome. After seeing how these images turned out in the sketchbook I am pretty tempted to do some large scale versions of these and maybe a few more, which is nice as I finally have some room to be able to do this.

John Cleese. Inspired by my recent watchings of Fawlty Towers

and Monty Python I love how eccentric his hair makes him look.

Mr. Tarantino

Bill Murray.

So that's that really, I enjoyed drawing portraits again, if you can call them that. I may take a bit of time this week and do some larger scale versions and just go crazy with detail and hopefully carry on enjoying my drawings and maybe build up some steam on the inspiration front to keep me making more creative stuff more frequently. Novemeber promises to be a quieter month than the past few have been so...

...here's hoping.

JAB

If All Else Fails.

Something to listen to this week: 'Kate Miccuci - Just Say When'

Just a short blog today, have had a nice quiet weekend after a night out on Friday and a hangover on Saturday. Watched 'In Bruges' last night, a film that a fair few people I know had been singing the praises of and I finally got around to seeing, I must admit I did really enjoy it, and from watching it I'm now listening to the Dubliners a fair bit today, delightfully Celtic and Jaunty. Anyways, here's some more drawing and the likes.

Roald Dahl from this Saturday's Guardian 'Review' section.

Self Portrait.

On my twitter I posted saying: My artistic words of wisdom for the week - "If all else fails draw a self portait". But what then do you do when the self-portrait fails? I'm not overly impressed with the self portrait, firstly, whenever I draw myself lately I have this tendency to draw my eyes too far apart, I end up looking like a frog or something and secondly, I feel that the shirt pattern was a bit too much, and it looked better before I added it. I suppose my twitter should've said - "If all else fails then carry on with what you were already doing before". Which is what I did.

Pepsi-Cola

Jasmine Tea

7up - YOU LIKE IT . IT LIKES YOU. (treating a sketchbook like a sketchbook again).

This week promises to be a fairly eventful one, despite having only one day at work this week on Thursday, it's my mum's wedding day on Friday during which I will be giving my mum away and making a speech, I must admit, I'm fairly nervous about the whole thing but looking forward to it all nonetheless!

JAB

A Place to Begin Again.

Please, feel free to listen to some new Mountain Goats whilst you read. - "Genesis 3:23"

So it's been a busy old few weeks in my world. After finally putting together my website last month my Mac decided that it'd had enough and just packed in, all programs and such that I was running slowed right down and then ceased to be...so another joyous trip to the Apple store in Glasgow was needed. That said, after waiting over a week for my Mac to be fixed I was given a larger hard drive by the Apple folk and luckily didn't lose too much of my data as most of my stuff is backed up to an external Hard Drive.

The Life of the World to Come, the latest Mountain Goats Album.

I've travelled back down to Merseyside twice since the last time I wrote, once to accompany my mum who was going to visit my sister and then just a few days ago whereby we (me and Jen) went to my Dad's via Manchester to see the Mountain Goats...well, it wasn't so much the Mountain Goats as just John Darnielle on his own which I actually think is miles better anyway. I majorly enjoyed the gig but I suppose that's to be expected, John Darnielle could show up and play a few chords and I'd go away happier than most. The one downside to the venue was how small it was, I know that this generally makes for a better gig but for some reason there were so many tall people at the Ruby Lounge which made it very difficult to see even a few feet infront of yourself, that said the setlist and the fact that he played a few piano numbers made it excellent.

My workspace (taken by Jen)

Illustrationwise I seemed to hit yet another brick wall after my computer died and then I set about reupholstering small pink cabinets, decorating rooms (see photo above for my new workspace), and spending alot of time playing new XBOX games generally anything that meant not drawing. It's odd though, writing that makes it sound like I'm effectively trying to avoid doing any drawing which I'm not. I think that I'm generally trying to force myself too hard to come up with an idea that will become some amazing piece of work, which I suppose is my greatest hinderance at present.

Old man and old car.

There's something that I love about the old style FIAT and it

seems to be somthing that I simply cannot capture in a drawing.

In an attempt to get myself moving again creatively I've taken to drawing signs and alike, anything really that maybe contains text or some form of visual identity, from street signs to cars and crap like that. I see it as nothing more than a starting point for now if I'm honest, some active research in order to get some sketchbook work together and get the cogs inside my head moving (albeit rather slow and clunkingly at this moment in time but moving nonetheless).

Racecar and a selection of other things.

Front of Moroccan train.

WMU insignia from my new mug, found by Jen at the Recycling centre.

"R" from Boris Bilinsky's Metropolis poster.

West 44th Street sign, New York

Street signs by day and by night in Marrakech, Morocco.

Some text.

I find the whole blogging about work that I have/haven't been doing to be rather theraputic, putting everything that I've been doing together in a spot like this makes it fairly obvious to myself that I have actually been doing something besides sitting on my arse in the living room drinking beers and playing FIFA 10, which makes me feel less guilty about doing that. Now I'm off to make some bread and the bed.

Keep listening for more.

JAB

New website at last.

So, at long last I've managed to put a new website together, I must admit I didn't care too much for my old site and I've wanted to change it since day one but it's done it's job over the past year or so. I did half expect that the creation of new site would take me a long while to put together and I was rather surprised at the fact that it only took three days (still, I'm totally unaware if this is a good frame of time for web design, but for me, a laymen, it seems quite good.) Hopefully getting the new website out of the way will pave the way for me actually using my free time more constructively over the coming months and actually put some more substantial work together. Anyway, check out the site if you have 5 minutes - www.johnalanbirch.com