Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

Some days, you can just feel like everything is too much, and yet also so very far away...

Facebook Drawing Challenge

I wanted to try something different this evening, so posted the following Status Update on my Facebook page...

...and then sat back and waited. Fortunately the replies began to come in, and after half an hour I had a few suggestions to put to paper. Below are the suggestions I got, along with my corresponding drawings...

(There's always one isn't there...!)



(I'd already drawn some Olympic athletes the other day, so I decided to use this as a chance to draw the Olympic 100m champion, Usain Bolt...)











And that's all folks! I quite enjoyed doing this, so might do it again sometime...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode Three

I've been thinking a bit about my online presence recently, and what people can see when they search for me online. As part of this, I deleted my MySpace account which I hadn't really logged on to in over three years, because I didn't really have time to maintain it, and would prefer people get directed to my current social networking profiles. But before I did, I made sure to copy my old illustrations that I had loaded up on my profile. I posted some of these old drawings to my blog a few years ago now, but here are a few more that I didn't previously post.

Band On The Run

So this was one of the first images I posted online I think. A drawing for my friend's brother's band... I'm not sure if they're even still together now... And I forget the name of their band. But I like the limited colour!

ASBO Koala

A drawing I did for my friend Mel. I often would ask people for suggestions of things to draw...

The Lion, The Which? And The Wardrobe

My friend Janice suggested drawing Mr Tumnus being mauled by Aslan. As you do!

WTF?!?

She also suggested this drawing. But I haven't got a clue what her original suggestion actually was...

I'd rather have a bowl of JOCOpops

Jo Cogan is a talented designer/illustrator who I first met on MySpace. This was a drawing of her I did based on her profile photo at the time.

The Future's Bright...

And here's my version (bottom) of an illustration she produced (top) for the mobile phone company Orange.

Me, Myself and I...

I think this was around the time that I began drawing myself...

...and I didn't have a beard back then.

Happy Birthday Kavita

And finally, here's a birthday card I drew for my friend Kavita who was studying to become a doctor. She wasn't actually training to be a surgeon... But I think she had to do some surgery training... Or else I just thought it was a good idea for a drawing. I forget which...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode Two

And lo, just as 2005 had beget 2006, so did 2006 in turn beget 2007. The year in which Bird Flu struck the UK – and didn't actually lead to the impending Apocalyptic disaster that the media forecasted (...although some sparrows did complain of a chesty cough); the Smoking Ban came into force in England, forcing millions of nicotine addicts to freeze their arses off outside, and Leon Jackson won X-Factor (...I have no idea who he is either!).
I also found these drawings that I did...

Get Well Soon:

An online greeting card I sent to a friend.

"Mmmmm, brains!":

A portrait of me as a zombie. I did this as a Valentine's Day cartoon – literally giving someone my heart!

Amy Winehouse:

They tried to make her go to Rehab, she went to the pub instead. Miss Winehouse's increasingly monolithic hairdo made her look more and more like an inebriated Marge Simpson...

Thom Yorke: Paranoid Android:

A drawing I did for the hell of it, depicting the Radiohead singer as a nervous robot, afraid about an imagined catastrophy. The background is scanned from the booklet to Amnesiac, with various Photoshop filters applied to it...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode One

So I found a whole bunch of drawings that I'd done a couple of years ago, back in the dim and distant past of 2006, when I used to have a MySpace page, money was actually worth something, and Jonathan Ross was still employed – crazy times! Anyway, welcome to my little trip down memory lane...

Spongebob's Nightmare:

One of the first illustrations I ever posted online, slightly perverting a much-loved (by children and students) cartoon character. Possibly the result of too much alcohol...

The White Stripes:

I used to love The White Stripes and saw them live at the Reading Festival and in Alexandra Palace. They're last album, Icky Thump was a bit...odd, but this was when they still had a place in my CD player (I don't think I'd actually bought an iPod back then...)

Euro 2006:

Yes, football! Some of you may be surprised to see that I actually drew a football-related picture, given my general disinterest in 22 overpaid idiots running about on a patch of grass for an hour and a half, and failing to justify the ludicrous amounts of money they get for doing it, but I do at least show a passing interest during any International Competitions such as the World Cup, or European Championships (...well, at least until I resigned myself to the fact that England are useless at these things and will never ever win, despite occasionally managing to fluke their way through to the later stages of the competition, only to lose at penalties in the dying moments).

Anyway... this was done during Euro 2006. Some of the references may not be instantly recognisable to people now that enough time has passed, but these are my drawings of lanky, human bean-pole Peter Crouch, the Burns-esque Sven Goran Erikson, and professional neanderthal, Wayne Rooney, who had recently done a "controversial" poster ad for Nike.

The Mighty Boosh:

What a difference a few years can make. Back in 2006, the Mighty Boosh were actually funny, as opposed to the toe-curling, wannabe rock stars that they've become today. This was my drawing of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt in costume as my two favourite characters from the second series, before they "jumped the shark": Old Gregg and Rudi van DiSarzio. I guess this is quite dated now, but I still quite like the drawing in this one...

Jimi Hendrix: the Original Guitar Hero:

After discovering the rainbow gradient tool in Photoshop, I decided that the best use of this Psychedelic colour generator would be a drawing of the poster-child for the Sixties: Jimi Hendrix. Not much else to say about this one...

Napoleon Dynamite:

One of my favourite films ever – a fact that is proven by the number of times I've watched the DVD – this is a drawing I did of the main characters from Napoleon Dynamite: Napoleon, Kip and Pedro. If you haven't seen this film already, go out and buy it NOW!