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September 4th, 2008
12:47 pm - Alternate universes
Logging on here in order to post link to a very funky alternative Mimi-led version of Low's Hatchet which may be of interest, I mistyped ww.livejournal.com and found myself in a Bizarro livejournal universe. Terribly disorientating.
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August 31st, 2008
08:25 pm - Completed bookplate
I'm quite pleased with how this turned out, though I'd have preferred a more comic book-y stark red and blue, but this rose colour was the nearest they had....
The printing process was surprisingly quick after all our prep, and very satisfying to do.... We were only allowed to make five copies though, which was a shame, one of mine was a dud too, so only four bookplates. One's going on display at Glasgow Women's Library. So I am trying to think of my three most iconic, important books to put the remaining ones in.
Apparently after two more hours of printing time, I'm eligible to join as a member and use the facilities, so may look into that. In the meantime I may try and adapt my original black designs in Photoshop, sure I could get similar effect, at least for online use, and my website needs an update...
In other news...I am turning into my dad. I am totally buzzed, an organisation addict, as Howard Devoto might have it, had he just been to Maplins and bought a selection of Really Useful Boxes of various sizes and brought order to his tool cupboard. C keeps catching me opening the door and beaming at all my newly categorised rawl plugs, paintbrushes, nails etc...
We also did a trek up to the Chinese supermarket where our shopping always comes to £100, despite good intentions. Purchases possibly surplus to requirements were a paper suit complete with small wristwatch, several types of frozen prawn (they were really cheap tho compared to Somerfields) and three types of Taiwan Mochi, glutinous rice cakes, also known as the slug sweets, cos that's the exact amount of resistance they give to your eager mouth... And best of all I can't get enough of them and C hates em.
Lest anyone think I am showing off conspicuous consumption in these credit crunchy times, let me add my income is shortly about to plummet and I should NOT have bought a paper suit that I didn't really need and three types of slug sweets.
Current Mood: organis-ised
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August 30th, 2008
05:38 pm - Garrrn!
Which is something I seem to be saying a lot these days. I blame the muggy low cloud pressure which is passing for summer in these parts, makes me grumpy...
Any cartoonists out there know how to use the scrapbook function in LJ so that one's A4 cartoons are actually readable? I seemed to manage before with linking to my Flickr account but now even that seems to give me these puny panels (see below) unreadable unles sone - yawn - clicks on each on in turn which rather interrupts the flow.
Garrrn! Rain, dammit!
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August 24th, 2008
10:18 pm - Glasgow Print Studio
Very hungover, I did a workshop at the Print Studio today - GWL ran a course on making bookplates and someone dropped out in week one, so I got their place. Worked on my design yesterday (showing the Texas Book Depository, design below). We then prepared fine mesh plates with photosensitive paint, let them dry, then placed them over our designs and fired UV light at them through an amazing Dr Who style contraption. The exposed goo hardened, the unexposed goo didn't. Then we sprayed them with a power hose,to wash off the goo, and we were left with transparent replica of our image. It was quite counterintuitive washing away one's design to reveal it. Next week we are gonna print - I'm going for a red and blue Bazooka Joe gym wrapper effect.
1. My original 2 colour design, drawn in black Sharpie pen, on a special material a bit like very strong tracing paper.
2. Closeup of one of the images after exposure - we did both images on the one plate. By the way, the writing's only back to front cos I shot it from the back of the mesh plate - screenprinting is the only printing method whereby what you see is what you get at every stage, you don't have to write backwards etc.
3. Third Reich style printing press. Not sure if this is the one we are gonna use, I just liked the eagle.
4. A mysterious room I poked my head into, called The Acid Room. Loos like a torture chamber...for pens.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif) drained
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August 22nd, 2008
11:23 pm - Cat Lady Scientist
Things to do after a late shift #1: Expand your cat's frontal lobe
Night vision notwithstanding, from my observations, cats are far more auditory than visual creatures. Ostentatiously hide something from a cat and unless it smells very strongly, it'll tend to lose interest very quickly, where in the same situation a dog will get the game rightaway.
I took my cat's favourite toy (a tiny chewed up fake mouse) and chucked it around a bit. Then I ostentatiously (ie with grand magician-like gestures) hid it under one of two mugs. No amount of reveals would help my cat. It stared everywhere and checked all round the room in the most unlikely places, including under the carpet.
I then hid the mouse under one of two transparent glasses. As he could see it, the cat immediately liberated the mouse though unlike a dog, who'd just tip the glass over, it delicately nudged it till the tail was slightly poking out then nibbled and tugged at that.
I then reverted to the opaque mug again. Moxie still didn't get it. It took another round of the transparent glass and then back to the mug, for him finally to click. But he stared it at long and hard first like a yokel who's just been read A Discourse On Reason.
I like to expand my cat's consciousness of an evening. I recommend it. It offsets the fact my own consciousness has been pummelled by subtitling such delights as "Help! Teach Is Coming to Stay" all day.
Current Mood: frazzled
Current Music: just the humming of my hard drive
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July 19th, 2008
03:39 pm - Superstition
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03:18 pm - A Shout in the Street
Talk by Kenny Hunter at Tramway. His usual articulate self - perhaps in the case of this exhibition, too much so, in that every possible subtext of the pieces was drawn out. Not that he was a bore - he's a really engaging speaker - and everything he said about this exhibition was valid. Only it was interesting the piece which gave me the strongest emotional tug - Citizen Firefighter - was one he passed over briefly. He did give a lovely reply to a guy's question about the reasons for his pursuit of this medium over others which was essentially Joseph Campbell's follow your bliss. Afterwards in the bright new exhibition space which opens onto Albert Drive, a mother to her child - Don't touch them! Yet that's what you want to do - firstly because his sculptures of pigeon, cat and fox are so cuddly, neotic; but also because of the trompe l'oeil of cardboard boxes cast in resin, right down to the brown tape. Much smaller than I'd expected from the slides but of course I should have known, you cast a microwave it's gonna be 1:1 scale.
In the street after, everything seemed to have a potential for being cast, from my bike to an Asian bloke in garage overalls. Govanhill needs a Kenny Hunter sculpture (rather than the incongruous giant urn of flowers that's been plonked by the council on a street corner.) Who do I call?
http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=9BB5C692-C2D1-592B-A55AC1A30F1D80EF&commissionid=22
Current Mood: alert
Current Music: Moxie settling down to sleep in his wicker throne
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January 19th, 2008
01:02 am - Gonnae just play some bluegrass...!
..and other heckles to that effect, at tonight's Punch Brothers gig at the Fruit Market.
It was Stefan Grapelli meets Schoenberg at points; a mandolin odyssey about divorce in four movements. But I'd rather see that than ye tired old celtic mist. As I waited for someone to yell Judas! - Chris Thile remarked that even crossing the Atlantic doesn't mean you escape the bluegrass police. It seemed a well-rehearsed remark but it still seemed to sting him - later in the ladies loo, when I couldn't hold out any longer, I hear him say something defensive about them not being bluegrass.
But although the attention of the crowd waxed and waned and the buzz of conversation grew behind me, he won everyone back with two superb noodly covers of Baby's In Black and Morning Bell by Radiohead... That heckle just seemed to stiffen the crowd's resolve to give the Punch Bros a damn good listen, even if it made your forehead pop.
I'm gonna check out their beautifully titled album, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground.
Current Mood: Muso
Current Music: Weird key changes and nitpicking
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August 25th, 2007
11:20 pm - Peej
Just browsing some of P J Harvey's old vids on youtube after trying to gert a sneak preview of White Chalk and amazed at how radical and, well..womanish she used to be.
That oft-quoted comment about how she resented being identified with Riot Grrl or feminism always made me smile cos the subject matter of many of her early songs was like something out of Women's Studies 101. Dress, Mansize, Davil's Gateway, Sheila-na-Gig... I also like how she wears her art student past heavily in these early vids.
Then I watched her and Nick Cave sing Henry Lee, such a pair of big showoffs but riveting...
In other news...halfway through a cartoon for the Observer comp after procrastinating and fretting all month about it. At least now I'll enter SOMEthing. Even if it's not a comic that will redefine the limits of depicting spirituality in drawn matter. More one about leeches....
Current Mood: awake
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November 18th, 2006
06:49 am - Insomniac
Why else would I be up at 6am on a Sat? C on the other hand is sleeping off jetlag and is more asleep than I have ever seen him. He is a mound of inert flesh, rising and falling slightly.
Well, since I am awake I thought I would tell you the tale of my narrow escape from marriage earlier in the week.
When C went off to India with his family, we joked he'd better not come back married to some village girl - but in fact it was me who nearly got hitched.
I live in an area of Glasgow with a large Asian population. Mr A, an elderly Asian gentleman who lives downstairs (as seen in Period cartoon dated 9 Sept, below), has taken a bit of a shine to me. I think it's quite pragmatic. He lives alone since his wife left him with their teenage son - they used to have the most terrible rows which we could overhear - and seems to have numerous health problems. I've occasionally helped him out with translating and binning letters that tell him he's won a million pounds, put in his eye-drops once when he couldn't manage, that kind of thing, and unlike the delightful Sharon on the ground floor I never call him "a black bastard". When I've done work on the back court he used to make us a curry. Nice man.
But I got invited down the other night, just before C came back, to meet his nephews; didn't really wanna go as I had cartoon stuff to do for c/o MINX. I eventually said I'd pop down for half an hour. I joked with someone that it was probably a set-up and he wanted to fix me up with one of them. I even wore my owlish glasses as a precaution.
Well, what do you know?
I went down at 8 sharp, and Mohammad from Dubai was there, complete with lady-pleasing conversation and a briefcase full of laminated letters from partner companies whose goods he was going to distribute (including skin whitening cream and Red Bull). He also specialised in palm reading. I got given the strongest measure of whisky I have ever had in my life - a dash of water (Mr A is a heavy drinker), and generally talked up in the third person by Mr A. as the nicest, most caring-est educated woman who ever walked the planet. And single, 'tho she has a boyfriend, but I don't know about him'. Excuse me? I was like I wasn't in the room!
Mr A's main objective appeared to be to get M to give me a job and for us to travel the planet together ('and maybe more', as they say in the small ads) despite the fact I don't remember applying for this, have just got a very good new job and am in a blissfully happy relationship. Resistance and protest was futile. The evening was surreal. I felt like Max Bealystock in the Producers: "they come here, they all come here - how do they find me?"
As Mr A got more incoherent on the booze, I managed to have a reasonable conversation with Mohammed while making it very clear that (a) I had a job and (b) a boyfriend.He had some good stories about King Abdullah of the United Arab Emirates, who apparently moonlights as a taxi driver to get closer to his subjects and gives daily pep talks on TV to his populace. He (the King) is also building an island with architecture from all round the world, which sounds spectacularly vulgar.
As time romped on, I was just about to try to make my excuses when Mr A offered to make us some chapatis and sauce. I thought this sounded quick so agreed; however an hour later, after much drunken clattering about in the kitchen, nothing had appeared. Mr A would come in every so often and remonstrate with M. to treat me well (to their credit they never once slid into Urdu in front of me, which I had been worried about) and call me his daughter - he even ruffled my hair, like a labrador's. Then it all went very quiet through in the kitchen. Mr A was apparently sitting quietly eating having apparently forgotten all about his offer to cook for us.
Well Mr A eventually tottered off to bed, leaving us two lovebirds together. By this time I think Moha was bored of me, or perhaps just embarrassed by "Uncle", and had put on the telly. Torchwood was on and I discovered he had never heard of Dr Who (at that point I knew the marriage would never work out). Predictably enough for such a thrusting young businessman) he liked factual programmes, news, no nonsense. Yawn. I made my excuses and left.
Everyone I have told about this seems to find it very creepy but it was pretty hilarious. C finds it sinister. At least he's back now and I can drape myself round him whenever we pass Mr A or Moha on the stairs.
But seriously, um, I think it's time to set some boundaries with Mr A.
Current Mood: wide awake
Current Music: don't want to wake C
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November 11th, 2006
02:24 pm - Period September
Just posting another explanation of what follows - have posted my fourth zine below - should be read in date order, from 2-30 Sept. (Maybe it would have been better to post it 'backwards' for ease of reading - may do that next time...)
Here just to bookend it, is the intro (again):
"Period is a project where I do a cartoon every day for a month.
There are variations in quality depending on time and motivation on a particular day, and there are some panels that make me wince. However I don’t think I would have wound up thinking of doing cartoons in fuzzyfelt (see 21st Sept) were it not for having to produce something every day. I’d recommend this kind of time limited project, particularly if you’re prone to perfectionism.
This was my first Period: there is also now a Period Jan 06. It just took me a while to print September up. I hope there will be more.
I can be contacted at Honeypears@yahoo.co.uk and like receiving mail (hint). I have made three other zines, called Honeypears, and I can give you details if you want to order some.
Lastly I want to say thanks to the person (see panel 1 opposite), who sparked off the idea.
Honeypears
Glasgow
6 Feb 06"
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02:17 pm - 29th Eugene Kelly Gig
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02:16 pm - 28th The Eternal Male
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02:15 pm - 27th Jumpers, Coke, Sweet Mary Jane
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02:14 pm - 26th Telephone Conversation
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02:14 pm - 25th Grey Owl
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01:46 pm - 24th Fuzzyfelt
Marketing Director
Fuzzy-Felt
Hornbeam House,
Wootton Road
Tiptoe,
Lymington SO41 6FT
240905
Dear Sir / Madam
I would be grateful if you would comment on the enclosed artwork.
I realise that communicating in fuzzyfelt is an unusual method of protest, but I felt it was the best way I could demonstrate my feelings, and seemed appropriate given the subject matter.
I was a great fan of fuzzy felt as a child and it pained me to find that my recently purchased Anniversary Compendium Tin was more suited to the collector than to the imagination with an urge to externalise itself in sticky fabric.
In this age of happy-slapping and blast-em-up games, the world needs a gentler method of play. However the Anniversary edition is no match for Grand Theft Auto. For instance, what’s with all the filler? Children want figures on which they can project their imagination, not flotsam and jetsam like Microsoft Dingbats. I myself owned the ‘fairy’ set of fuzzy felt when I was small and I definitely remember it being more magical than this.
I await your comments with interest.
Thanks.
H_______ M___________(Ms)
PS You are very welcome to use my artwork in your marketing.
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01:42 pm - 23rd Sleeping Beauty
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honeypears's journal
