'Wish List' Wednesday

Here's a little idea suggested by my good friend and studio buddy Gaz. 'Wish List' has been around for a couple of years now and started from me getting back into the pocket sketchbook and just drawing. These drawings then seemed to develop voices and i added their little mutterings. The words were always mimimal and started to become hopes and dreams that they might have. It slowly developed over the year and finally found an outlet as a rather beautiful poster that was produced with my agent Heart. It even recently popped up on my good friend Lydia's blog recently ( if you have kids you'll probably already be very familiar with her work. Who knows how many fantastic kids books she has out there now?).You can also see more of my work on my agent's website here. Now i'm going to feature one 'Wish List' each week and maybe show the workings or thoughts about it. Some even came from objects i have around the house and a couple of my kid's toys developed into little characters. I'm starting with this one, as it always seems to be most peoples favourite and sums up the whole concept. Actually, you can have two, as this was one of the first and another firm favourite.

Folk

Here's a few more of those good 'ol folk from Tennessee.

Behind the curtain

I thought i'd show a vague working process for a personal project i've been toying with for a while.
It's preliminary title is "Folk". I've about a dozen at the moment, but haven't found the thing that will gel it together yet. I'm thinking of having groups of certain kinds of Folk and finding quotes from each group and switching them over with another group, for what i hope will be both insightful and mildly humorous.... well, i can hope!

Anyway, here's the initial photos taken from a great book i have on Tennesseans.

Then here are a couple of little notebook drawings, loosely based on the photos

Then scanned and coloured up simply

..and finally re-hashed versions taking them a step further.

Ball Rolling

Well, now where do i go with this? It's odd because i'm writing to an audience of one at the moment, while i find my way around. These will be old news by the time anyone reads them, so bear with it, i'm pretty useless at sussing this kind of thing out, mistakes will be made! I'll add some of my favoured blogs soon. For now here's a couple more shots taken around my studio space. A space i share with  5 other fantastically talented creative guys, more on them later.

A New Dawn

Well, here goes....
I'm taking the plunge and trying to make sense of the various strands that are my creative life. A Blog. Why not? I know there are lots of views on how best to represent yourself out there in the modern world and not everyone likes a Blog. I've done the website thing.. and i still intend to give mine a makeover... but something about them starts to feel like a museum the moment it gets put out there. It's a bit like a portfolio and how you feed new pieces in as time passes, but it still seems to capture moments passed. The excitement is at the moment of these works creations and the thoughts that went into them, there's so much more to any work than the finished product we see, it's the tip of the iceberg. It's the reason so many people are more interested in sketchbooks/notebooks than the works they lead to. A process of refinement has taken place. We lose a lot of the blood and guts, the true soul of the work. Some folk manage to get this through to the end product, but the rest of us wonder how it slipped through our fingers..again! Hopefully, by logging, sorry... Blogging some of this process, i will find new ways to hang on to this soul, to make everything a bit more 'honest' with a bigger beating heart.