On Page 51. Some process.

I've just posted Page 51 to The Intercorstal blog. It's very chicken based, and that's only really half on purpose.

I was flicking through the sketchbook I'm currently using for pages of The Intercorstal and found some sketches I did of the Stepney City Farm's animals as prep for the Paul Foot Jigsaw Madness flyer a few months ago. There was a page with three sketchy chicken heads on there, all faulty in one way or another (the drawings were faulty, not the chickens) and I thought it would be interesting to use my own sketches as a base for a page, considering I've used so much else recently (P&O brochures and postcards in particular). This is what it look like to start with:

Then I drew a grid over the top of it and set to work. When I was working on the grid I used some smaller, square frames having been really impressed with the layouts in P. Craig Russel's adaptation of The Sandman: Dream Hunters which anxietydescending got me as an early Christmas present. It's pages like this one, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, that I was thinking of:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/preview2.php?image=previews/dccomics/vertigo/dreamhunters/SNDDH-2.24.proof.jpg

And then, yeah, I laid into it. Normally I'd work on The Intercorstal while watching TV or a film, but since moving house I've now got a desk to work at, which is much more comfortable, but there's no TV. As background I put on Alan Moore's reading of Unearthing which helped a lot, but there came points when I naturally needed to take breaks to free up some ideas. These ideas came from stuff I had lying around, and their influence is much clearer in this page than in others (which is why I thought it might be interesting).

 
Here's a run through of what's in there, other than the chickens, that didn't come directly out of my brain:

Top-right panel: There's an eye-shape near the inner border which I took from a Sandman toy that Anxietydecending bought me a while ago.
Centre-left: In the top-left corner of the frame there's a hand holding a box (you can only see the bottom of the box) which I copied from a photo I had of a Communist Chinese statue of a worker -- the dimensions are true to the sculpture.
Bottom-left: A set of lips copied from a photo of a Chinese statue of Marilyn Monroe.
Middle two on the bottom row: Details from the aforementioned Sandman toy.
Bottow row, right-hand side: A line drawing based on a photo of the view through my mum's patio windows. This was the last frame I completed, and I thought the relative simplicity made a nice contrast to the rest of the page while still being full of Intercorstally shapes.

This is the first time I've gone into this much detail of my process on an Intercorstal page -- if you've got this far I'd appreciate any feedback on whether this is something you'd like to see more of? There are still patterns and shapes and characters in this page that I could wang on about, as there are in all the Intercorstal pages, so if there's any interest whatsoever I'll try it again for Page 52.

#A1Alan, finished!

*UPDATE* 13th August -- Me and my wife Amy went to see Stuart at Man About Town this afternoon because I'd forgotten to add a signature to the picture, and when we got there it was hanging in the doorway... so chuffed with myself, and so grateful to Stuart, Jordanna and everyone at Man About Town.

So, I finished the big picture of Alan Moore in plenty of time, and have dropped it off to Stuart at Man About Town for him to take to V Festival and display at his pop-up barbers. There's not much to talk about in regards to it, so here's 12 of the many pictures I took as I went. They should be in order, to show what happened when.

#A1Alan

On Twitter I've been mentioning #A1Alan, which is my current biggest project, along with lots of other projects I've got floating around.

How #A1Alan came about is this: I went to meet Stuart at Man About Town Barber's in Chelmsford, who I was paired up with for this year's Chelmsford Art's Trail. I showed him a selection of my work, including the portrait I did of Alan Moore for the Unearthing Review I did for Amelia's Magazine (above). He mentioned that he's got a pop-up space doing wet-shaves in the VIP area of this year's V Festival, that he had a it of space going there, and would I like to do a larger version of the Alan Moore Prtrait for display and potential display?

Obviously, I said 'Yes. Yes please' and threw myself headfirst into doing an A1 version of the picture. And it's taking AGES. Here's a photo of 5 hours work:
I'll be taking photos of progress after revery hour of work, to proerly document how long this stuff takes. Check back and follow on Twitter if you're at all interested.

Process for Unearthing Blog (potentially uninteresting)

I recently attended the performance of the multimedia collaboration 'Unearthing' by Alan Moore, Mitch Jenkins, Adam Drucker and Andy Broder, and wrote a blog about it for Amelia's Magazine. I also did two illustrations (posted here) and grabbed some stills from some video.

The illustration of Alan Moore was relatively straightforward (posted above). I had in mind the starting image I wanted to use, and that I wanted to do it in the style I'd used for my Jon Stonehouse image for Cut-Click's mailart exhibition. Once I'd pencilled the broad features in, everything else fell into place. I was going to include a lot more text, but when it comes to Alan Moore, what do you choose? In the end, I just put the word 'Gods' above his right eye (referencing his use of Magick and one of the themes of 'Unearthing') and stuck a 'V' in there (as in 'V For Vendetta', but I suppose at a stretch it could also reference Thomas Pynchon's 'V.', which Moore is apparently a fan of.). There's also two ghosts snuck in there. I actually did most of the beard inbetween multiplayer matches of Bioshock 2.

The one of Crook&Flail (below) was more difficult. Crook&Flail is the moniker under which Adam Drucker and Andy Broder composed the music for 'Unearthing'. There's one image of them together as Crook&Flail out there on the internet that I could find, and it wasn't very interesting, and I couldn't work from it very easily, so I went looking for images of them apart which I could combine. There are loads of Drucker (who also goes under the psedonym Doseone) many of which I was familiar with already, but none were really suitable, and there are very few of Broder. I ended up trawling Flickr for images I could use... I really should have tracked back to their owners (job for later this week). I wasn't happy with the composition at first, to the point where half-way through I was going to give up, but a session of working on it in front of Ghost Dog set me right. The reliance on black and white stripes was intentional, for two reasons: 1) Referencing the style of the Egyptian Crook&Flail that they're named after 2) Alluding to Doseone's old band Subtle.

I decided not to do an illustration of Mitch Jenkins because... well, it din't occur to me. That's kind of awful. Maybe I'll do one and add it here, then retcon this blog post to look like I'd done it all along?

The still was taken from a video I took with my new favourite toy, and Flip camera my Dad got me for my birthday. I only filmed about 30 seconds of the performance, because I realised that the screen, as I was looking at it, was lighting up my face, and making me very obvious to the performers.

I had a very hard time writing the blog, though. It was the most concentrated piece of writing, other than emails, I'd done in a very long time (probably since Nanowrimo 2006). Progress was hampered by: 1) the fact that I had so much that I wanted to write about, but couldn't get it all down succinctly enough* 2) the notes I'd taken got put through the washing 3) the time I'd set aside to write got eaten up by getting slightly drunk at a BBQ and falling asleep on the living room floor. Similar to my problems with the Crook&Flail illustration, it came down in the end to just holing myself up on Sunday night after my wife and son were asleep and banging on the keys until I was happy enough to send it (adding the usual caveats in the submission email to Amelia that if she wanted to reject it, she could).

To my relief it was posted. (HERE, IF YOU'VE NOT FOLLOWED THE LINK ABOVE YET) Since it was posted, I've of course noticed things that were wrong, or I'd change now. But it remains something I'll be proud of for a long time now, whether anybody else reads it or not.

* One thing I desperately wnated to shoe-horn in, but wasn't sure whether Amelia's audience would appreciate is the fact that Ciaran O'Keefe was in the audience! I clocked him as he walked past and desperately wanted to run over and shake his hand and tell him how much I respect his work despite the fact that Most Haunted gets worse by the episode (and that I haven't watched it for about a year)... but I was having a conversation with a chap named Ben and the moment passed.