The London Transport Museum is currently showing an exhibition of posters as part of its celebration of 150 years of the Underground. It’s a fascinating show in terms of the way the forms of address used have changed (or should that be ebbed and flowed?) over the decades. I was maybe most impressed by the smallest works - little litho prints maybe 8 x 10” created for the interiors of Tube carriages as seen in the third photo above (from this book) - blocky, concise, fun.

Drawing someone in profile: on the plus side there’s one less eye to do, so one less thing to mess up (or two if, like me, you use the relative measurements of the eyes as the basis on which you map out the rest of the features). At the same time, the outline of the profile - the nose shape in relation to the brow, the length of the forehead, etc. - must be done precisely, or else the portrait will ring false. And this line must be drawn at some speed too, or you risk the whole thing looking dead. Tricky.

I think Melville here has come out just fine though. He looks to me like someone who’d be private difficult to know, and who contains worlds upon worlds upon worlds in his head.

For the first time in ages - perhaps ever, in this series of portraits - I used a very fine 000 brush for some additional hatching work to suggest three-dimensionality in some of the features. It’s a technique that takes me right back to the earliest days of my art training, drawing and redrawing sculptures until they gained solidity and weight on the page (and looked like they existed off of it). Back then it was all charcoal and Conté crayon (you can’t beat a 2B Conté for depth of black and unpredictability), but it works just as well in miniature too.

Fans of The Divine Comedy (the Neil Hannon group, not the fun-filled Dante tome) will recognise an echo from ‘The Booklovers’ in the text here. That one was always a favourite of mine. 

The print is available in my shop.

Simone de Beauvoir, my latest print now available in the shop.

This would make quite a nice companion piece to my Sartre print - with Mme. de Beauvoir on the right of course, answering M. Sartre with this pithy rejoinder.

Ted Hughes, available in the shop now.

The private lives of writers are endlessly fascinating (and often morbidly so, as in the case of Mr Hughes here). But what big, weighty biographies often don’t deliver is the texture of the daily lives of their subjects. It’s always ‘she worked on this book, then it was published’ and ‘he went on this tour, had an affair with this person, then wrote this book’ and so on. But where’s the grit, where’s the gristle? I want to know what his favourite sandwich was. I want to know how he got on with the people in his local post office. I want to know what toilet paper he used to wipe his arse (and how did he choose the brand?). I want to know what he was watching on TV on a wet Thursday in March 1993. Despite all the utter brilliance of ‘Hawk in the Rain’, ‘Crow’ etc., I want to know that he was still human like the rest of us!

‘Combined Novels: Charles Dickens’ a new book cover print available now in the shop. 

In the same vein as my Combined Pinter book cover, if you wanted to boil down Dickens’ works into a single-volume paperback that ‘combined the best and left the rest’, this is what you might get. Such a travesty! Although I am quite proud of ‘The Old Curiosity Twist’. Sounds like the most genteel dance craze ever.

‘Half-forgotten Plays: Look Back in Angela’ now available in the shop.

‘Look Back in Anger’ is a bit of a period piece now (hence the brainstumble in the print), but if you’ve not read them I’d recommend Kenneth Tynan’s diaries. They’re, um, rip-roaring. In a 1960s licentious kind of way (best not read over breakfast).

This is another recent print, available now in my shop: William S Burroughs’ Free Jazz Quintet’s disastrous 1971-2 tour of Europe.

I like the idea of things that are very chaotic being represented or communicated in an utterly orderly manner. Hence the Swiss International Style layout & typography in this print. 

Writing is hell. It’s like fighting a war all by yourself for years, and then when you call for backup you have to wait years more and you’re never sure it’s going to arrive anyway. 

Okay, maybe I’m over-egging it, but that’s how it can feel. For decades, centuries even, people have brought their bundles of literary joy to their nearest post box, said a little prayer (even the atheists), and let them tumble - clunk! - into the inevitable. It’s heart-rending, but it has to be done, doesn’t it? Otherwise that novel is just… novelty insulation for your house.

Writers, be brave! Send your stuff off, you’ve nothing to lose.

The print is available here.

An appealing flyer that came with The Wire. (March 2013 issue).

Here’s the latest in my line of ‘Half-forgotten Classics’ book covers, for everyone who’s ever read a book, or is pretty sure they’ve read it, but can’t entirely recall the bit of the plot the person they’re talking to is bringing up… or indeed the correct title of the book itself.

It seems a strange thing indeed to conflate Ian Fleming with Anthony Burgess - so I knew I just had to do it. There’s lots in here, lots of possibilities. I like the idea of Burgess being involved in some kind of spy plot - an irascible polyglot like him would blow his own cover in a second! And what about the idea of one writer putting one of their peers into their novel as a character? Where’s Charlie Kaufman these days?

This print is available to buy in my shop right now.

I’ve been pretty busy recently. Here’s my second new print in two days, now available in my Etsy shop. It’s a book cover poster for Harold Pinter’s Combined Plays. Combined, not compiled, because here’s what might happen if a publisher decided ‘Hey, nobody has the time to read or watch all of this guy’s plays anymore, so why don’t we just boil them down together into a single play?’

Here’s my new print, now available in my Etsy shop. What if Francis Bacon had set up a jazz combo with Lucian Freud and Graham Sutherland?