More.

So, I've been back in the DCA print studio again, and here's what I've been printing.

Strawberry Ice Cream (also in Mint and Vanilla)

Home is...

Tales of the Briny Deep (a Submission for Lovely Pigeon's Beards and Tiaras exhibiton)

Also just back from London and Pick Me Up, great to see Jez and Lizzy doing their stuff too. Also glad to see a bunch of Tom Gauld's work and stumble upon some awesome stuff by Paul Blow.

More about London to come.

JAB

Viva Italia, Viva Screenprinting.

Here's my screenprint from last Thursday. Something simple and small (A5), but felt good to be printing again. Kind of lost track of time and spent about 4 hours in the printing studio. Can't wait to go back on Tuesday and do some more. Looking forward to building up a few pieces of work that I'll be selling - probably via Etsy and my website. This print is also available with red windows instead of green (2 separate editions of 12).

More to come.

JAB

New Hair and Screenprinting.

My new years resolution this year was (and still is) 'to be more active creatively' and although it's been somewhat of a slow start toward that goal, I should hopefully get a bit of a move on over the coming weeks as I'm looking to get back to screenprinting for the first time in almost 3 years which I am pretty excited about. I start my induction on Thursday afternoon so I'm hoping that before long I should have some stuff up on my website and maybe a few bits for sale. The image above was inspired to my trip to Edinburgh Museum a few weeks back and could maybe work as a screenprint. However I have all day tomorrow to work on some separations for printing so we'll see.

Also, on the point of my having new hair I did a couple of 10minute portraits a 'before' and 'after'. It should be noted that I got rid of the beard about a month ago but I haven't done a bearded self-portrait for a while and it looked better this way. It has however, been almost a year since my last haircut. Shocking.

Just started reading Jurassic Park which I picked up in the Barras Market in Glasgow for 50p. It reminds me of being about 8 years old and being massively excited by the prospect of a film about dinosaurs coming out. Oh to be young.

Music-wise we went to see Ben Folds a couple of weeks ago and then The Decemberists last week, both gigs were great and I'm glad to say I've finally seen both live. I'm massively excited that The Mountain Goats are coming to Glasgow in May and I already have my tickets. That, and their new album is available to listen to online here on NPR even though it's not out until the end of the month. Ah, another great album.

JAB

And Then it Rained.

Last week after a few lazy days of not being very productive (again), I decided to take a day trip to Edinburgh in order to try and be more inspired to do some more drawing. As you can see from below it was a rather productive trip but as you can also see I'm still afraid of taking any coloured pencils/pens/paints with me anywhere when I'm doing any sketchbook work.

Well, I decided I fancied looking through the City Art Gallery and The National Museum of Scotland followed by a jaunt up Arthur's Seat for some nice views of the city. However, as is to be expected at this time of year, what started as a gloriously sunny morning in Dundee turned into a pretty wet, wild and windy afternoon in Edinburgh so I never made it up Arthur's Seat and instead dedicated my time to the Museums and Galleries and ended up with a little sketching over a pint of Deuchars in Bobby's Bar (just across the road from The National Museum). Below are my sketchbook pages from my day trip.

(it in fact rained before I started most of these drawings not after)

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

Only Myself to Blame.

A few weeks without a blog and it's been pretty darned busy what with the weather through November/December making work pretty difficult inspiration toward being creative was pretty low. Well that's passed now so we're on the up again. Here's a brief insight into what's been happening anyhow.

A selection of events from this year and last. (Celtic vs Motherwell, Bottom Left)

At the end of December I finally got to another football game, and went to see Celtic vs. Motherwell in Glasgow with my friend Mark and a few others. The game was decent in the first half but the second took a turn for the worse down to some downright terrible refereeing. It was a deserved 1-0 for Celtic and I must admit I never realised quite how epic Celtic Park actually was. After the game my evening went a little downhill when I lost my train pass and then had to get my Mum to pick me up in Perth and bring me home to Dundee as the latest train from Glasgow is around 10 in the evening (I did know this but I just wasn't really thinking).

Luckily after that mishap I having a fantastic New Year I travelled from Merseyside back home to Dundee and I'd just about given up on finding my train pass and had resigned myself to the fact that they were most likely lost and I would need to pay £30 to get them replaced, it turned out that someone had handed them into Strathclyde police.

Good things come to those who do not want.

Another programme for the collection.

Having found my passes Jen and I decided on a small jaunt down to London Town this weekend past in order to cover the cost we had to pay for a solicitors letter.

Sleeper top bunk (with safety straps).

I must admit I'm not quite used to sleeping on a train yet so the night's sleeps there and back weren't amazing and as usual were followed by the whole on a boat/vertigo kind of feeling that I always seem to get from the Sleeper. That aside it was an ace (and cheap) weekend away.

EVERYTHING!

One thing Jen was set on seeing, that I must admit I didn't know too much about until we got there was 'The Museum of Everything' (although, the sign alone shows just how awesome this place is). I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is in London between now and February 11th when it finishes should definitely give it a look in.

Triceratops and I.

And, one thing I wanted to do was visit the Natural History Museum and look at some Dinosaurs in order to satisfy my inner child. This only came about when I realised that in all my visits to London I'd never actually visited the Natural History Museum, very odd. Now I want to watch Jurassic Park.

The Animatronic T-Rex that everyone was queuing to see.

On Saturday evening we caught up with some friends, had a few drinks played a few games and generally had fun. On Sunday we had a trip to the South Bank to meet Thereza and Lucy (twitter friends) for a chat and a drink before later heading back up to Scotland again.

So far this year I've been feeling a bit more inspired and I'm hoping to look into screenprinting once I've actually got some work that I want to print/sell so watch this space. I'm going to post my latest drawings and such in a separate blog to follow shortly so as to keep dinosaurs, museums, trains and football away from art things.

JAB

Photos as usual by Jen.