London Bloggers

This great site has classified lots of bloggers in the London area according to where they're located on the Underground Tube Map! Quite cool to browse familiar stops and see what characters are there! There's even 8 other bloggers in my home town!

Illustration Friday - Daring

Flying in a big hunk of metal is pretty daring at the best of times in my opinion! Going up in the new airbus would have been even more daring.

My lack of time over the past couple of weeks has forced me to go for a very basic style directly in Photoshop for this weeks Illo, but for me it conjures up those brilliant summer skies to come, which can't be a bad thing!

The Art of Music

It's amazing what you can do on only three hours sleep. Despite being partly on another planet, our band had a good gig last night at a London club (and the crowd seemed to like it too which is always a good sign)

With all the upcoming gigs we have, I thought it'd be nice to show some music related sketchery and cartoons but they're suprisingly hard to track down. Maybe I'll just have to do some myself!

I did find some good music related cartoons by a guy called Mark Parisi though, who has a nice Garly Larson infulenced style. There's also a typically American strip about some struggling BLUES musicians by Jason Nocera which is worth a peep!

Athlete : Brixton Academy Gig

Saw Athlete on Wednesday night at the great venue Brixton Academy. They're currently touring their new album Tourist but played lots of crowd pleasers off their previous album Vehicles & Animals (including both my favourites Shake Those Windows and the title track!). Top tune of the night for me was 'Tourist' though - great sing along track!

Support acts were pretty good too - Iain Archer whom I'd not heard of before did a solo acoustic/electric set and, apart from a couple of songs with rather tame 80's drum backing (get a REAL drummer!), I really enjoyed. Then came on The Magic Numbers, who were a little bit cheesey with lots of male/female call and answer style songs. If Abba were dark haired and more chubby this is what they might have looked like. To be fair, if you do like folky type rock then they might well be up your street, and they do have a great illustration of the band members as their logo!

Athlete blew them away though, the drummer was excellent and made it look very easy using lots of electronic samples etc. I find myself watching drummers more closely than ever these days for technique hints and tips.

If you can still get tickets for shows I'd highly recommend you bag yourselves a couple.

Illustration Friday - Re-invent

I really wanted to get a full cartoon in for this weeks topic so worked flat out to get this one finished! I started off with a pencil sketch and traced this in Photoshop. For the details I used a mixture of freehand sketching and Photoshop tools such as the shapes etc. For the background I just used really (really) simple sketches to keep focus on the action in the foreground.

Relax ? Maybe next month.

woah sooo much going on at the moment. Annoyed that I missed last weeks Illustration Friday topic 'alone'. I think I was trying to be a bit ambitious and tried a full 3-sketch cartoon that I started on the plane back from San Francisco. It's all good practice I suppose! This weeks though I'm ready for, and it's going to be a belter!!

So our landlady has up and decided she is going to sell her house, which leaves us, well, without one. It's back to looking round nice places we can't afford and crappy places with brown patches on walls trying to find a compromise I guess. The only thing we can do is try to delay the inevitable by cooking fish and leaving socks around the place for viewers.

My band has announced a tour too which will be good practice for my live drumming, but leaves not a whole lot of time in my schedule. This means less time for my girlfriend and less time for my sketching so I forsee a frustrating few weeks ahead.
We have an exclusive press launch party for our big gig at Shepherds Bush at a club in London on Saturday too, though apparently there will be a load of hairy spiders in attendance too - I do not like spiders that have hair. Maybe after a load of cocktails or some virtual reality , or both preferably, I won't mind so much.

I really wanted to work on my technique for some drumming styles, and maybe even hire a pro teacher. These things might have to wait until I'm in a new house and off the tour now. At this time I'd give anything to be able to relax and spend all my time on my hobbies (and with my girlfriend too)!!

ps - Ironically enough the top search result in google for 'relax' is a rather frantic and bold cartoon sketch page. Try it!

San Francisco Holiday Highlights

Well I'm back from my travels from "Frisco", what an amazing place! The sun was out for the entire time (bar a couple of early mornings), we didn't bump into any crazies and from all the walking we did I am now a bit pink and peeling horrendously, but someone at work did say I looked tanned huzzah!

We did too much to mention everything, but highlights were:

• The Modern Art Museum with some excellent media exhibitsThe classic tram ride, which required the purchase of a banana to get the right coins
  
• Lots of great restaurants - Considering I'm not really the adventurous type, we managed to go for a different style of cuisine every night! Highlights here were the amazing brunch at the vegetarian Greens restaurant, and Gaylords Indian restaurant (no snickering)
  
• Alcatraz, particularly the audio tour which is great.
  

I thoroughly recommend spending at least a week to get to know the place, we did lots but still didn't tick everything off our list.
Hope to get some of my airplane sketches and photos up soon.

Travel - Illustration Friday

Wow! I am off on holiday tomorrow to gorgeous San Francisco and so came up with this character sketch directly in Photoshop - I was just going to post it & begrudgingly skip this weeks topic. But huzzah- I think it's actually relevant, I bet that doesn't happen too often!!

I was unsure how to mask off the guy, but in the end I decided to make it look as if he was saying goodbye to maybe a neighbour in an over-the-garden-fence type of way.

By the way I believe there's no resemblance to me, apart from maybe the over excited look of going on holiday.

Any feedback appreciated, though be gentle it was my first sketch directly in PS!