Angela Hartnett's 40th Birthday

An invite design I did the other day for celebrity (Michelin-starred) chef and personal friend Angela Hartnett's 40th birthday party the weekend after next. Should be fun.

The image was created with retractable pencil, Staedtler pigment liner 0.3 and brush & Indian ink, coloured up and composited in PS. I really like the simplicity of line and the pared down colouring in this image - its a look I want to achieve more and more, definitely one of my favourite recent creations.

Click on the image to Enlarge

Portrait of the Artist as a Buffoon on Wheels

Me
the Sunday just gone
Green Park, London
at Robert and Sara's picnic
on Pat Beirne's foldaway bicyclette
daguerreotype taken by 'is missis
authress, artist and synchronised swimmer
Claire Collinson

The snap makes me feel queasy to look at it
No, not self-hatred
just the motion and angle
plus its blurred my magnificent ( waxed and ginger) moustache

Guardian Money -16 August 08

A piece for last Saturday's Guardian.

Apparently, now is a good time to rent somewhere, as the shortage of houses being sold has led to a surfeit of properties available to rent, as a consequence of which the prices that landlords are able to demand have fallen.

My scenario above is based on the 1970's UK sitcom "Rising Damp" about a seedy and unscrupulous landlord Rigsby and his three tenants Alan (?), Miss Jones and Philip (who always seemed to get the better of him).

Morning Advertiser - Third Place

A piece for this Thursday's MA ( pub trade mag). The article was about the sociological concept of the 'third place' ( first and second places being home and workplaces respectively), an environment to relax and socialize in, necessary for both the wellbeing of individuals and for the community at large.

The author argues that the pub is the natural claimant to this position, but needs to adapt to make itself more appealing to a broader market, in particular those who have moved away from pubs to cafés as their favoured place to meet, socialize and relax.

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Morning Advertiser - Slippery Slope

Another piece for the Morning Advertiser ( see my blog for others), done last week just before going away.
This was about the slippery slope of excessive government legislation in the drinks industry, excerabating the UK's abhorent and frequently violent binge-drinking 'culture'.

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Morning Advertiser - Traditional Boozer

A piece I did on Sunday for this week's Morning Advertiser (UK pub trade magazine) - the subject was the traditional pub/ shabeen/ tavern/ boozer and how Government legislation is making their survival evermore uncertain.

Staedtler pigment liner 0.3 + PS

Click on the image to see all the details!

Udo and Gretchen

Herr Udo Sweinhoffer and his older sister Gretchen live together in the old farmstead on Bommenberg in the german Swiss Alps that their parents and their grandparents before them lived in - tending goats on the green lowlands below Hasstopf, making the famous (and remarkably sour) Bommenberger cheese and renting out their small upstairs-room to ramblers and depressive landscape painters in the warm wet summer months.
Gretchen is now too old to bear children so this March Udo must leave his beloved mountain home and search for a wife at the Karlswald Spring Fair.

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Guardian Sport -8 August 08

An image for a very funny article in this Friday just gone's Guardian, about the Olympics. The author was looking for a different breed of world records this time round, like the longest nails on an athlete ( a la FloJo) and more nouns than ever becoming verbs in the Olympic coverage - Podiuming, semi-finalling, fingernailing, &c., &c..

Biro sketch worked up and coloured in PS

Illustration Friday - "Canned" No 2

These two are more 'caned' (Londonese for drunk or stoned) than 'canned', but I felt that they had a charm of their own and needed to be liberated from the notebook.

It's a dark, smoky quayside bar.
It could be Dieppe, or Bergen, or Riga perhaps.
The tired and terse old herringboat captain seeks oblivion and solace in a soft warm bed tonight.
The lady has seen it all before through her tired watery eyes.
Many years before, she had been a mermaid of the oceans who traded her tail and kingdom for the love of a wayward sailor she rescued in a storm. He left her for another, without thought, without regret, and broke her heart into matchsticks. Now she sits each night in the dark, smoky bar and drowns her sorrows in the bottomless glass, still hoping for her matelot's return, or the broad valleys of coral and seawrack forever lost to her, or the quiet release of death.