Year of the Ox

Kung Hei Fat Choi!
Happy Year of the Ox!

Here's a famous Ox to start the year - Babe the Blue Ox, legendary friend and pet of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan.

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Burn's Night 2009

Went to a fantastic Burn's Night celebration on Sunday night at my friend Angela Hartnett's Spitalfields home. It was a great evening - cockaleekie soup, haggis w/ tatties and neeps and cranachan for pudding, to say nothing of Scottish dancing, poetry and a lot of single malt whisky! A lot of celebrations too - several birthdays ( including, of course, Rabbie's 250th!) and a Michelin star for Angela's restaurant Murano.

Angela asked me to do place names for all the guests - here are the lads;-


And here are the lassies;-
As ever, click on the Images to see the details!

Restaurant magazine -February 2009

A piece I've just done for Restaurant magazine.

Its about how these tough times are a good opportunity to invest in restaurant companies going for a song.

Here's the rough, the the finished artwork a few hours later

Seville Orange Marmalade

“Civil as an orange,”
Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare

Labels I've just made for this year's batch of bittersweet Seville Orange Marmalade (which I've also just made). Much much better ( though somehow more adult) than the shop-bought stuff!

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Dublin City Coat of Arms

The Arms of my beloved Dublin, where I lived and studied for 5 years and which I still hold very dear in my heart.

This is for Illustration Friday*
The theme this week is "Pale"
The phrase "beyond the pale", meaning to go beyond the limits of law or decency, was in use by the mid-17th century, and originally refers to the Pale in Ireland, a region in a radius of twenty miles (32 km) around Dublin which the English gradually fortified against incursion from wild Gaelic Ireland.

Guardian Education -20 January 09

My usual Phil Beadle slot in tomorrow's Guardian Education section.

A piece about homophobia in schools, explicit and implicit, and the terrible damage it can cause. Phil argues that this is viewed as an almost acceptable form of prejudice and must be tackled face on.

Something, of course, I had some first hand experience of.

I went for a vaguely graphic approach to this in order to bypass thorny issues of stereotype and characterisation. So there you have it - the school system as a whole trying to force gay children into straight-shaped holes.

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Oliver Twist

A quick sketch
inspired by Roman Polanski's film of the Dickins classic

I like the limited palette and ink washes

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Schnurrbart

The fantastic German word for moustache (at least, according my fine friend Andrea Friedrich)

An inkpen sketch from my current notebook

Morning Advertiser - Cavalry

A piece just done for this week's pub trade mag the Morning Advertiser

A message for publicans suffering in the Credit Crunch:
Don't wait for your Pubco or the government to help you out,
Be your own Cavalry!

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