March 2016

March has been a lovely one. It's amazing what a bit of extra daylight can do. (Although I think there's been a lot of other lovely stuff to help it along)

Our friend Lara came to visit from Haarlem in the Netherlands. Sadly she got a horrible cold while she was here, but I think she had a reasonable visit nonetheless, and we very much enjoyed having her.

I really love my nose piercing. But for a little while back there I honestly thought I was going to have to get rid of it because it JUST KEPT ON FALLING OUT. Turns out I was wiping my nose wrong and knocking it out without noticing, so I’ve had to re-learn that. Either that or the stud is just trolling me.

I went back to the Booth Museum for the first time in years. It’s an amazing little museum full of terrifying taxidermy and animal bones and other natural history curiosities. Weirdly, I used to love it, but perhaps it’s because I’m vegan now, or perhaps just older, or perhaps more sensitive, but I found a lot of the taxidermy kind of depressing this time round. I think I just anthropomorphize things too much. Makes me sad to think about those animals trapped in their poses forever, even though I know they’re just inanimate objects now. I do still enjoy looking at the bones and insects though.

My friend Hannah taught me how to make the most simple but amazing vegan brownies. But I’m not telling you how because I’m a meanie.

Wes cooked us a lovely dinner and then persuaded us to play guitar hero and it was pretty ridiculous fun although he is insanely good at it, and I was just chugging along on easy level while he shredded like a pro. Still enjoyed it a lot though.

Desk detritus.

“Some people made ‘whoop’ noises during my freestyle today, have I ‘made it’?”
Answer: probably not, because I’ve missed two weeks of dance since this and have probably forgotten it all.

We had a St. Patricks day lunch last year and it was excellent, but there isn’t a huge variety of Irish food to choose from, so this year ‘green food’ was added into the mix. I made a soda bread (moderately successful but too sweet) and a delicious giant cous cous and green veg salad, which, if I do say so myself, was excellent.

Ask me about the blood (that is no longer) in our freezer. Go on. I dare you.

Have you ever tried these things?! OH MY GOODNESS. (Even if you’ve tried other nakd things, these are like 100x better than anything else they make)

I always get travel anxious but in the end I had a SUPER FUN birthday weekend... on Thursday 24th I travelled up to London and went to see Battles (who were great), on Friday and Saturday (my birthday), I went to Mike Meyer's 'Better Letters' signpainting workshop... However because I was super busy and/or tired on these days I didn't really do them justice with visual diaries...

Then on Sunday 27th I had a wonderful birthday lunch with friends at Mildreds Kings Cross, and in the evening went to see At The Drive-in at the Roundhouse which was basically a teenage dream come true and they were incredible.

And then when I got back to Brighton on the 28th, I had a pizza party with lovely Brighton friends to celebrate lent being over. Mmmm, pizza.

We’ve been playing “Life is strange”, it’s pretty wonderful, if you’ve got a few hours to spare.

April's looking promising so far, although please tell me when we're all going to grow out of April Fools Day. Next year? Please?

Queen rumbles on

I mentioned previously that I've been illustrating my partner's blog in which they are reviewing every single Queen song in chronological order.

It is a ridiculous project and I still hate Queen, but have become oddly attached to the idea that I must do every song... When the project started I'd happily have handed over as many as I could to guest illustrators, but now I feel compelled to do every single one myself. An irrational and entirely pointless sense of achievement awaits me at the end of this mammoth project.

Anyway, we're onto the fifth album now, so things are going along nicely. Here are a random few of my favourites.

You Take My Breath Away

God Save The Queen

Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy

In the Lap of The Gods

In the Lap of The Gods Revisited

Drowse

Lily of the Valley

Somebody to Love

Love of My Life (which is a drawing of Alex because I'm clearly a soppy fool)

Stone Cold Crazy

She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)

White Queen (As it Began)

Flick of the Wrist

Better Letters

This weekend I had the delight of attending one of Mike Meyer's 'Better Letters' workshops in London.

I've wanted to go to one for ages, and as this time it coincided with my birthday I decided to treat myself. I've loved hand lettering since I could first pick up a pen, and although I've never reached expert level in any form of lettering, I have ended up pursuing a career which involves working with letters in their visual form every day, and I felt like this would be a great opportunity to up my hand-lettering game.

On the Friday morning, we started off by looking at block gothic sans serif letters — initially, sketching their outlines accurately ready for painting. Although we spent a lot of time looking very closely at letterforms on my degree, and often attempting to hand draw them, this was the first time I'd ever had any practical instruction on the actual construction of letters, rather than effectively being told by uni tutors to 'just look at it really hard and then copy it'.

I started off with my name. Obviously. Got a bit jealous of other people on the workshop who had way more interesting typographic names like ‘Hermione’, ‘Clement’ and ‘Ruby’. I HAVE NO CURVES!

Had a go at an 'S'. Pretty pleased for my first attempt...

Mike Meyer came over and swiftly, perfectly painted a few of my letters. 'Well, this should be easy enough!' I think to myself.

Side note, the soap in the toilets for handwashing were these crazy soap-on-a-pole contraptions. Initially I was like 'kinda cool', by the end of the weekend, I HATED THEM

Anyway, I got to painting. The paint we were using was incredibly satisfying oil paint, thinned with white spirit. It went down a perfectly smooth, opaque black and dried within 5 minutes. Mmmmmm.

The main struggle I found was finishing off the strokes tidily. It involved a very particular twist of the brush that it took quite a while to master.

(When I say 'master', I mean 'become vaguely competent at'. This guy was the master.)

People might have thought I was kind of strange because I inadvertently wrote the word 'womb' while picking random letters.

We also did some 'thick and thin' block gothic, which I enjoyed a lot.

This next morning we started learning 'casual' style.

I enjoyed this! Here's some signage for my imaginary cafe...

And for the Brighton tourist board... (Mike Meyer lettered the word 'Brighton' for me, which is why it looks so good)

A lot of it was about learning the stroke order, which has been really helpful...

 But then hubris kicked in and I made loads of mistakes.

Those E’s should slant! That kerning is all off! So’s the leading! My T’s are too tall! One G is way too narrow! Oh well.

In the afternoon we moved on to script. I'd been looking forward to this because I love doing script, but with some trepidation because inking curves is HARD and script is basically all curves. And I was right.

That ‘C’ stroke you see there is the starting stroke of so many letters… it can become a g, a d, an a, an o, probably others… And it should have been the simplest thing, and yet…

I did a LOT of those C's and to be honest I never really nailed it, so to lift my spirits I started doing some more free-form stuff.

First a bit of name vanity. I’ve never liked my surname but at least it has more interesting letters than ‘Emma’

Another exercise we got to do was painting onto glass (effectively tracing, but also learning a bit more about what glass is like to work on). Fun trivia, this framed piece of glass was originally created by a photography studio for part of a concept shoot in which Aphex Twin would push his face against it to contort it into horrible shapes. But he changed his mind and went with the elastic band thing instead so it never got used. (He wrapped elastic bands round his face then photoshopped out the elastic bands, with unsurprisingly grim results)

Because I'm actually an adult now, I didn't tell anyone there that it was my birthday. (Because the thought of being sung to by strangers kind of fills me with dread). I did, however, wish myself a happy birthday typographically.

And it was an excellent way to spend my day.. Even if it's not viable for me to quit my job and re-train as a traditional signpainter (although if anyone hears about any evening classes I would genuinely love to learn more), it's been great to learn more about letter construction and hone my painting skills a bit. I would highly recommend it next time he's in town for anyone who loves lettering!

February 2016

February just seems to last forever, doesn't it?

So over cold and dark at this point, but getting through.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in early February drawing Hollywood stars of yesteryear...

These were part of a project to decorate a Los Angeles halls of residence, along with some other quote-based posters.
I find it kind of annoying because they could look a bit like a photoshop filter, but each one actually requires layers of painstaking abstract tracing to produce the final result, and (to float my own boat somewhat), it’s far from a simple process. I really enjoy doing them though, so it was a fun job.

Here are a few of the final posters...

I figure I can probably be open about it now, since I’ve told most people who need to know… I’m looking for a new job. Not out of any dislike of my current job, more the increasing realisation that it might be time to get out of Brighton. Mostly for financial reasons, but also because change is healthy and good and I think it would be a positive thing in terms of both my geographic location and my day-to-day work.

There was a renewed burst of intensity in my applications at the beginning of the month (and associated despair/desperation/anxiety), because we thought Alex might lose their job. But fortunately, just yesterday they signed a contract for another year, so we’re okay for now… But my intense sympathy to all who are insecure or losing their jobs because of the government’s horrific, ridiculous local authority cuts right now. 

We had a nice houseguest in the form of Tom, a friend of Alex’s from Sheffield. Continuing the slow persuasion that maybe Sheffield is a place I’d like to live.
Also, this tortilla lasagna/taco torte. SO GOOD. (A vegan adaptation of this)

Explored a new bit of Brighton I’d never been to before (and it’s times like this that I wonder whether I am ready to leave). Heaved myself up Elm Grove to stunning views across the allotments to the rest of Brighton and the sea, then back down Bear Road through the most amazing cemetery. Huge and sprawling and old and full of hidden valleys and buildings and monuments… Such a beautiful place, which this attempt at a watercolour doesn’t really do justice. (Watercolours are hard)

Having been applying for loads of jobs and becoming increasingly despondent that none of them were right for me anyway, I stumbled across the DREAM JOB* (*Well, from what I can tell). The challenge was that a) they wanted more than just a PDF CV/Portfolio, and b) they were going to close applications ‘as soon as we’ve found the right person’. So I flung myself into making an exciting multi-part thing to send them. Since I’d been on such a roll with these portrait illustrations, I decided to create a couple of personal ones, of two of my favourite musicians, Tokimonsta and Daedelus.

(I later found the job advertised elsewhere and they’d actually set a deadline of March 4th, so now I wish I’d spent more time and rushed less, but I was so worried I’d miss my chance! So now I wait, although I suspect they’ve had a lot of amazing applications, so I’m not getting my hopes too high.)

Temporary solutions to life-stress.

The main problem I have at dance class (aside from my terrible coordination and poor timing) is my inability to remember the choreo. I feel my my dancing would immediately improve about 200% if I could just remember what the hell I was doing.

This year for lent I’ve — as usual — given up crisps, chocolate and biscuits… But also this year, all forms of takeaway food, which is arguably the hardest challenge because I bloody love getting takeaway at least once a week, often more… plus buying lunch out two days a week. Still, it’s good for my health and my bank balance. I can’t wait for the end of March though.

Sometimes you just want to make a big elaborate den and hide in it, you know?

Got to go on a tram, got a free delicious lunch, ran some good training, and had loads of time to listen to great music. And the sun shone ALL DAY!

Charity shop finds so exciting they’re worthy of a drawing!

We decided to have a breakfast party at work, so we all bought in loads of tasty breakfast treats. It was GREAT. I ate 4 crumpets, a muffin, and about a litre of fruit salad.

I love Vegfest. A big conference centre packed with people, loads of free vegan food samples, and all kinds of weird new vegan food innovations. Previous years I’ve taken Alex, which is a terrible idea because Alex hates crowds and capitalism. This year I had a great companion in the shape of my friend Harriet — we both got similarly excited about similar things, took advantage of loads of buy one get one free deals, got to share two different lunches, and generally had a whale of a time. Here was my ridiculous haul.

Ugggh guys I got carried away. I was so excited about the new Cass art shop that’s opened in Brighton, so I went to take a look. There was a REALLY enthusiastic sales lady who followed me around and wanted to talk about all the pens so we talked about all the pens and she persuaded me that these Windsor and Newton pigment markers were great. But when I went to try them out, the senior sales lady came over and was like ‘um, you can’t test them’, and I was like ‘what?’ and and she said they’d only let me test two colours they had out (green and yellow, what good is that?! I wanna see the colours I’m going to buy!) then she was like ‘okay I guess you can try a bit’, but by that point I was feeling so awkward I was like ‘no it’s fine I’ll just buy them’, while stupidly forgetting to check whether they seep through paper, which they do, massively, rendering them basically useless to me. Plus when I actually got them home and tested them in the kind of context I’d want to use them, they’re pretty rubbish for shading, the nibs are a bad shape, and they don’t even blend that well (which was at least partially why I was sold on them). I bought them as a replacement for my grey shading Tombow brush pens which are running out, but this was a bad choice. Booooo gullibility.

Anyway, onwards. February feels like it's gone on forever. I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) less stressed March.