National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.


Never drive here on a weekend, the traffic is diabolical. There’s a one-way system in Greenwich which, with its multiple unsynched traffic lights, creates a faithful recreation of the brutal, futile and desperately long impasse that was the Western Front during World War I… but in car form. Maybe they designed it that way as some kind of ‘heritage experience’.

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on some new prints for the shop (none of them shown here, they’re still being proofed and tweaked), plus some new versions of existing prints. It. Is. All. Rather. Good.

Royal Festival Hall, London.

Here’s my Oscar Wilde/Morrissey print (or at least a TV version thereof) appearing in the first episode of season two of HBO’s show ‘Girls’.

NB This image has of course been cropped - it’s not like HBO is broadcasting in some super-super-Cinemascope now or anything. It’s cropped because the rest of the image is somewhat NSFW and, you know…

Alfred Hitchock, my new A3 print, completed on Friday 18 January 2013. It’s available here in my Etsy shop.

Hitchcock was surprisingly difficult to draw. Some people have features that are angular enough that you can take measurements pretty easily, a bit like navigating via fixed points in space. With Hitchcock, no such luck - he’s all curves, and very few of them intersecting. So this portrait took a lot of looking, a lot of redrawing (in pencil)… and then getting a feel for when it was right not to look at the source, and instead let the pen do its semi-random thing, to give the drawing some life and become a thing in itself rather than just a slavish imitation.

After that, the brushwork was pretty much plain sailing and I was able to improvise the layers of wash nicely, pulling the ink back off the page with a rag when I needed. That kind of painting is always the most fun. I’m pleased with the outcome, and my artist’s proof is now on the wall above my computer as I type this. ‘Good evening…’

I went book shopping for more material for new prints. I emerged from Skoob Books into the snowy London lunchtime yesterday £39 lighter in the pocket. £39! Talk about suffering for your art.

This is a good notebook. After falling out of love with Moleskine thanks to their atrocious, ink-killing ‘sketch pad’ I’ve started using this, from the Hand Book Journal Co (or Global Art Materials Limited, or whatever). 128 pages of 160gsm paper, ever so slightly shaggy. Does not leech the life out of black ink, but does slightly fuzz-up a fountain pen nib. Pricey too, at £13 a go. But it’s a solid book that accepts note-taking and drawing (and some watercolour) without griping, so it’s currently the best one going for me, for now.

Marcel Proust

Proust is one of those figures who kind of towers below a lot of writers. It's the damn length of A la recherche du temps perdu that's the problem. Like Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest et al it's one of those works that everyone should have read but just hasn't got round to reading (or has reached page 63 and given up at the sheer cliff face of words ahead). Personally I was always fascinated by Proust the man semi-retiring from the world (partly through intention, partly through a frail constitution) to write for years in his cork-lined room. I like small-scale heroics like that.

I was pretty pleased with the drawing that this print is taken from. Faster than other recent pieces, and possibly better.

Anyway, the print is available now in the shop.

Giil Sans in My Shopping

Haven't had a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer for ages, saw them in the supermarket the other day, loved the (only slightly - grudgingly? - updated) package design, bought them. Almost chipped a tooth on them. The secret is to let them come to room temperature, and for that room to be somewhere outside the Arctic Circle (they're made in Uddingston, near Glasgow, so draw your own conclusions).

But yes, check out the Gill Sans. Who these days would have the balls to stick so such a classic weight and draughty track? They're simply not cool, just functional, delicious, gone in about 45 seconds. That's design right there.

Write-Ups

I've been working on other projects for about a month, but now I'm back and I find the shop has had a couple of very nice write-ups online. The first is on Thrillist:

http://www.thrillist.com/home-gadgets/standard-designs_art_books_online-shops

And the second is on sofa.com:

http://www.sofa.com/uncategorized/its-a-witty-sign-of-the-times

Ah yes, all public appreciation gladly accepted...