Mikal Dyas

Merry Christmas: Dyas cards 2009 & 2011

2011-12-23T22:38:00.006Z

2011

2009

Luke Pearson

2011-12-03T18:37:00.002Z

Came across Luke's work earlier in the year but I'm glad I visited his site today. The cover of his new book is fantastic.

Brutalist Biscuit Tin

2011-10-06T22:01:00.003+01:00

The House That Ray Built

2011-09-09T20:49:00.003+01:00

Pen, white pencil on card. Drawing is 16cm by 31cm.

Detail

Tower

2011-07-20T18:38:00.006+01:00

Currently working on a picture for the next JJ Fox Open Art Competition. I've created pictures of the Tower of Babel before but keep returning to the subject so decided I need to have my own tower to work from so I created this one out of cardboard. Took a bit of work to figure

out how to make the spiral but once I cracked it the rest fell into place.

Jodorowsky's unmade 'Dune'

2011-07-18T20:28:00.008+01:00

Holy Mountain and El Topo are two of my favourite films so excited to see that Jodorowsky's post Holy Mountain project, an adaptation of 'Dune', is finally getting its dues with its own documentary. From that collapsed project the makers went on to write Alien (Dan O'Bannon), design for Alien (Chris Foss and HR Giger) and Tron (Moebius). And after the poorly received 'Tusk' Jodorowsky went on to direct the incredible 'Santa Sangre.'

The story behind the unmade Dune (which predates Lynch's version) is very well documented here. And Jonathan Ross' excellent film about Jodorowsky is on youtube.

Guernsey Festival 2011

2011-07-05T19:33:00.007+01:00

Berol 'cook'

2011-07-04T21:17:00.005+01:00

I buy a handful of these Berol Colour Fine Black pens every few months as I like to always have one to hand and the kids pilfer them for their own drawings. They are cheap but have a nice pointy tip that can make a nice flowing line similar to using a proper brush pen. I used them to draw this bird picture.

They are also cheap enough to use for blocking in large black ares. This mexican skull was taken from a project Sally was working on with her pupils. They coloured them first with stencils and I drew the right hand side as an example of the kind of stuff they could decorate them with.

Midnight Video - Podcast

2011-06-30T23:17:00.004+01:00

I don't tend to just stick up links to stuff I like but I'm really-a-liking this new podcast series, especially since the marvellous Mondomovie podcast is now on a break.

Midnight video covers films that have generally past everyone by, which is as good a remit as you are likely to get for a film show. They have so far covered such ignored classics as '3 oclock High', Lindsay Anderson' s weird satirical farce 'Britannia Hospital', and odd curios like 'Sir Henry at Rawlinson End'.

Don't answer back when I've asked you something!

2011-06-28T23:09:00.002+01:00

'The Tower Of Babel' by John Miers

2011-04-20T20:00:00.010+01:00

In the summer of 2010, following a link from Gavin Burrow’s blog, I came across John Miers’ beautiful series of 9 digital prints entitled ‘The Tower of Babel'. While at first I was drawn in by the tasteful use of colour and shading I was then impressed by how John had mastered various vector graphics techniques to create a rich, tapestry like effect.

I Googled around a bit and found out some more about the series and then contacted John who kindly agreed to be interviewed.

While John Miers’ ‘The Tower of Babel’, is a series of digital prints that illustrate the biblical story it has many allusions and references outside of that. For instance the 5th image (see top of this post) quotes from a picture by MC Escher (see image to the left). But most interestingly John decided not to include any text and instead tell the story in a wordless, graphic style that brilliantly comments on one of the original ideas in the Babel story concerning language.

For instance to illustrate the aftermath of God’s decision to mix up the Babylonian language, so that they could no longer organise themselves to make any more heretical towers, a Babylonian is shown desperately clinging onto the tail of a comic strip word balloon as it attempts to flee away from him (see snapshot to the lower right).

The interview below was conducted over a series of months which meant that by the time I posted it here the series had been shown a further three times, the third at the Marine Studios Gallery , and was to be shown again at the Alternative Press Festival in May.

So onto the interview! After looking through the rest of John’s portfolio on his marvellous, award winning website, one thing that intrigued me was that the Babel series showed a different level of ambition and scope to what had come before. So I asked John what inspired him to create “The Tower of Babel”?

It’s certainly true that “Babel” was something of a big leap for me, in terms of how ambitious it was, and the scale of the project, but the ideas and themes it contains build on things that have been bubbling away for years. The visual style is certainly a more recent, and rapid, development, but there are a few examples of similar techniques on the site.

Given the size of the Babel prints, I wanted them to be intense enough to command the amount of space they take up, as well as trying to communicate a bit of Old Testament awe and a primal feeling to go along with the archetypal nature of the story.I’d been interested for a while in building images by drawing detail into simple, flat shapes rather than defining everything with line work. Illustrator Paul Blow’s work was a particular influence and in some of my commercial work you can see me groping towards working in that way. The first complete image I produced using my current style actually takes this as its subject matter as it depicts the process of (good) illustration which is that the artist’s interpretation adds detail to the reader’s understanding of the writer’s original idea.

Also there were two comics I drew which overlapped with my work on Babel and they were “Circle Man in Rectilinear Town” and “Verisimilitude” (see this posting for examples of both) and, again, they have simple character designs animated by overlaid linework. It was while making these that I also got more into constructing spaces with linear perspective. So while themain ingredients for the Babel series were all there, I think the main difference is the amount of time I put into completing them, from planning through to trying to load each panel up with detail, colour and texture.

So the earlier illustration which depicts the process of good illustration was a precursor to creating a series about the process of communication?

Yes, thematically, “Babel” is of course all about language: the original myth is an origin story “explaining” why we have such a multiplicity of tongues in human culture, and my interpretation uses this as a hook on which to try to hang an exploration of how pictorial language works in comics.

It is also a very loose allegory for how language develops in societies and individuals.

In fact I’ve had a “thing” about language since my teenage obsession with Grant Morrison’s “Invisibles” comic, which has as a central theme the idea of an alien or higher language “whose words do not describe things but are things”. This is also explored in books such as in the first story in Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy”, which has the Babel story as a central motif, and in Umberto Eco’s “The Search for the Perfect Language”.

There was also a painting in my degree show based on one of Bruegel’s paintings of the Tower of Babel, and there’s a similar Old Testament vibe in my comic “A Brief History of Slab”, as well as a brief appearance by the Tower in “Burning Down the House”. So when I started thinking about making a bigger project that experimented with pictorial language, the Biblical myth seemed the obvious starting point.

How long did it take to create the babel series? From initial ideas to the images coming out of a printer?

About fourteen months – not that I was working on it the whole time! I’m working full-time as a teacher so personal projects are squeezed into evenings, weekends and holidays. The vast majority of it was done in the Summer of 2009 and by March of that year I had panel 7 completed, and on the strength of that I was invited to present the whole project at the International Comic Arts Forum in October ‘09. So that gave me a deadline! The final prints came out of the shop about two days before I was due to fly to Chicago for the conference.

How much research did you have to do for the series?

Quite a lot! As I’ve mentioned, the main ideas were things that I’d been interested in for a while, but I did look into various other interpretations of the Babel story. Also, as the first public outing for this project was going to be at an academic conference I thought that if I was going to be explaining my half-baked ideas to a room full of academics I’d better get my terminology correct so I also did a fair amount of reading up on semiotic theory. It seemed to work!

You have already mentioned Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy which in the 90s had a highly acclaimed version drawn in comics by David Mazzuchelli. Are you familiar with that version?

I was asked about Mazzuchelli’s adaptation after presenting at the conference, and the answer to that is yes, and I enjoyed it very much. As I think it says in the intro, it’s a very successful use of a visual medium to reinterpret a very non-visual story. I loved the way that Peter Stillman’s speech was depicted, with the balloon tails emerging from deep in his throat, or indeed from inanimate objects, it seemed to communicate a sense of disembodied language very eloquently. I think Paul Karasik deserves a lot of credit for his breakdowns too, for example the way they mimic the grid structure of Manhattan in the section where the narrator traces out Stillman senior’s wanderings. But because I’d got so into the novel when I first read it, I suppose it seemed more like watching a good performance of a play you’re already familiar with than an entirely new experience. Which is not to diminish its achievement! I’m sure it would have felt revelatory if I hadn’t read the novel beforehand.

What response did you get at the Comic Art forum in Chicago? Were people enthusiastic, thought you were doing something new etc?

As far as the response from ICAF goes, it was overwhelmingly positive. Andrei Molotiu, who edited the “Abstract Comics” anthology that came out on Fantagraphics in 2009, told me it was the best-presented artist’s talk he’d ever seen – but immediately qualified that by adding “they’re usually 45 minutes of incoherent mumbling”! Out of artistic solidarity I should add that that description does not apply to either of the other artists who spoke at the conference… other than that, quite a few guests & committee members said that they hadn’t seen a project quite like it before, and I also had some very useful discussions about ways of presenting it. The powerpoint presentation that accompanies the comic came out of those conversations.

Have you read Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp? It came out in 2009 and is the first Mazzuchelli book in a long time. It was such a tour de force of modern graphic I was a tiny bit suspicious of it as it is as though someone took Scott Mcloud's ‘Understanding Comics’ and created a book that uses all its rules, albeit to beautiful effect.

No, but I will!

Can you tell me about how you work? I imagine its sketches, research, more sketches, scan it in, create vectors, colour etc.

That’s pretty much it, although a lot of those stages happen together. I mostly work straight into the computer, drawing with my beloved Wacom Intuos 3, which allows colour to be part of the sketches from the start. The slideshows at the start of each verse in the aforementioned powerpoint slideshow (http://www.johnmiers.com/files/Babel_annotated.pps) pretty much lay the whole process out, although they don’t show all the intermediate versions. So with Babel there was just one set of very loose thumbnails on paper, and then I started sketching directly into Illustrator. Then it’s tightening up the vectors, and once I was happy with the shapes I’d then use the Wacom to add the linework.

The final stage in each image was printing out the Illustrator file onto off-white, grainy paper, scanning that back in at 1200dpi, and using Photoshop to combine that with an exported version of the Illustrator file. This allowed me to get a bit of texture in there and have warmer colours – I find PhotoShop much more intuitive & flexible for fine-tuning colours than Illustrator. The paint-blobby stuff in the last few panels was drawn using Corel Painter.

One thing that the Powerpoint doesn’t show is that I also had an Illustrator file that combined all nine panels into grid and row arrangements so I could keep an eye on how it was all working together as it went along.

How ideally would you like the series exhibited or bound in a book?

In a perfect world, I’d have the nine panels recreated as stained-glass windows at full size and displayed in a Gothic cathedral in a 3x3 grid! To come back down to earth, I was very happy with the way it was displayed in “That’s Novel”, which also used a 3x3 grid and had a sort of “map legend’ with it that provided a way in without over-explaining everything. But as it’s a comic I do also like having a version that you can hold in your hands and turn the pages. Currently I have it in an A4 collection, which is the smallest it can go without becoming illegible. Bigger would of course be nice – something like the giant Kramer’s Ergot from a few years back. Overall though, having exhibited it twice and presented it twice (the second being at the Caption convention in Oxford last year), as well as reproducing it in my most recent comic, I feel like I’ve got pretty good value from the project.

So what is your next project going to be?

Well, the next project is complete already and is something very different as it’s basically a 10-page fight/chase scene. It uses Kevin Huizenga’s “Fight or Run” template and that will be appearing in New British Comics #3, and I’ll be contributing to a couple more indie anthologies in 2011. On top of that I’m hoping to get a new book out in time for the London Small Press Expo in March 2011, the main feature of which will be a strip I’m working on based on the myth of Sisyphus, both the Greek legend and the Albert Camus essay of the same name. This’ll be a bit of a departure for me as it will feature – gasp! – words, and characters as individuals rather than archetypes.

Further links:

Comica London International Comics Festival: Article on the series.

Paul Gravett's article on the London Print Studio exhibition.

London Print Studio: Hosted an exhibition as part of Comica 2010.

2011-03-30T22:46:00.003+01:00

From here.

2011-03-12T18:29:00.008Z

Some examples from a pile of colouring book style drawings I have been doing for the past year. The idea is to draw a very large and detailed picture of an overgrown garden stuffed with weird plants. It is a project designed to get my kids involved in the creative process so we all think up ideas and then sketch them out and I work up the best in this colouring book style. I then comp them together on the Mac and print them out and we colour them in.

When we have some room in the house we will start work on the big version and the kids will get a cut of any of the digital prints we sell of them.

Nobody does it quite like Moebius

2011-02-13T21:29:00.005Z

Jean Giraud, aka 'Moebius', has had a huge influence on comics and cinema. Together with the other Titans of sci fi illustration, Chris Foss and H. R. Giger, Moebius was a designer on Jodorowsky's aborted Dune project. He also designed costumes on Tron, influenced the designers of Star Wars and Alien, and his visionary imaginings of the city of the future was copied in Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. This site details an exhibition of his work in Paris and the front page has a very nicely weird interactive illustration.

Reclassified

2011-02-01T21:23:00.010Z

Visited the latest exhibition in the Greenhouse Gallery in Guernsey. The blurb says 'Reclassified is curated by Adam Roberts who has invited graphic designers from Guernsey and the UK to re-design a classified advert from our very own Guernsey Press. The artists (given just one month) re-imagined how the text from a classified ad could be reinvented as a portrait-sized A4 artwork. The results are now on show at the greenhouse along with an innovative newspaper style ‘catalogue’.'

Given that the source material can be pretty mundane the invited designers came up with some very striking designs and the catalogue was nice take-away. All were black and white, many of them exploited what the ads only hint at (I'll try and source some of them at some point for this blog) with some very minimal in approach. Doodlethug Ryan De Haaff had a nice take on an ad for a kick boxing class.

2011-01-25T21:11:00.003Z

Very nice Star Wars inspired table/light.

Have a Billy Holiday

2010-12-23T08:31:00.002Z

2010-12-18T21:07:00.007Z

Don Van Vliet

aka Captain Beefheart

January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010

This Corrosion

2010-12-14T20:37:00.020Z

In the mid 90s I worked on a handful of etchings, all of street scenes from around the Nottinghill Gate area of London. Technically, they were rather difficult to complete, involving building up a rich body of cross hatching by etching and re-etching lines and shown below is the zinc plate I spent the most amount of time on (the dark spots are where the metal got stained by something). The reflective nature of the metal masks how dark the image was when I printed it.

My aim was to emulate the technique Rembrandt perfected, but that ambition somewhat outstripped my talent so in the end I gave up on the pictures and moved onto something slightly less punishing and more achievable. However all was not lost, as a few years later the church ended up in some of my relief etchings and, thanks to Google, I can now pinpoint the street and building it was based on. The etching is a mirror image of the scene.

Depicting the cars as shadowy shapes was inspired by Bill Jacklin's impressionistic paintings and prints.

Rembrandt

Bill Jacklin

Gyllyng Street early sketches

2010-12-03T21:28:00.000Z

Digging through some old paperwork I found a few preparatory sketches for the illustration I did for the second album by Songs of Green Pheasant (2007, Fat Cat records).

The original brief was for a picture of a guy rowing a viking longship up a flooded Falmouth high street. A tough assignment! The first few sketches shown below missed out the figure in the boat but you can see the progression towards the illustration that ended up in the final CD booklet, also shown below. The final image was composited together in Photoshop from many pencil and pen drawings layered on top of each other.

Also included below is the NME review which liked the album almost as much as pitchfork did.

"This diffuse, spectral approach leads Songs of Green Pheasant to vistas of astonishing beauty, particularly on "Wolves Amongst Snowmen", which gently opens out into a dazzling guitar panorama, or on the instrumental "Brody Jacket" which closes the album with a lyrical, yearning pulse of trumpet and submerged guitar." - PITCHFORK (7.3)

NME review

"Do you know what a palmist once said to me? She said: WILL YOU LET GO!"

2010-11-23T21:56:00.005Z

Vivian Stanshall was an artist, raconteur, singer-songwriter, musician, author, poet, voice over artist, wit and...fan of disco dancing? Whilst enjoying this hilarious clip from a disco dancing championship I spotted Viv in the crowd wearing his unmistakeable hexagonal tinted specs. He is 1:40 mins in.

Pulpy

2010-11-22T20:35:00.006Z

Pulpy and lurid illustrations for some American and English 20th century classics.

Alfred E Numan

2010-11-15T21:19:00.020Z

A selection of Mad paperback covers (mostly belonging to my brother) with the mesmeric face of Alfred E Numan.

Doodlethugs

2010-11-07T22:05:00.003Z

Now also posting on Doodlethugs. Thanks for the invite Ryan.

Light User Syndrome

2010-11-07T19:16:00.002Z

From Peter Root's Flickr Pages.

Visions of Frank

2010-10-16T21:39:00.002+01:00

Very good animated version of visionary comic artist Jim Woodring's 'Frank' comics.

The Biologic Show

2010-10-16T21:34:00.005+01:00

Creepy film version of Al Columbia's comic.

Chickenpigeonpeacock bird

2010-09-03T19:36:00.008+01:00

While I have other projects that I really need to finish, I've kicked off yet another! It will end up being a very colourful digital print of a load of feathery birds, that I'm inventing, perched on a surreal kind of frame.

These are some of the sketches I have done. I sketched the form ofthe animals loosely in pencil and then inked them with a black Berol Fine Colour felt tip.

Guernsey's Sky-otic Monkey

2010-09-01T22:59:00.008+01:00

Aside from covering all the usual things that local free newspapers do Guernsey's 'The Globe' regularly has features on the burgeoning contemporary art scene, normally written by Emily Burden.

Recently she rpeorted that Guernsey local Hugh Rose came second in a toy design competition with this fantastic 'Wooden Sky Monkey'.

Hugh is part of the 'ReadersWives Collective' whose own small gallery has been the venue for many a fine exhibition of local talent.

Simon Gane Sketchbooks

2010-08-25T17:09:00.008+01:00

Illustrator / comic book artist Simon Gane has been posting selections from his sketchbooks on his blog and they are beautiful.

Effing and Jeffing

2010-06-11T11:18:00.004+01:00

Like race horses (Epileptic Fridge Boy, Christ's Chin, Immaculate Pasta) Fonts can have great names:

Wordle Rappinghood

2010-06-06T22:19:00.006+01:00

Copy and paste a paragraph into Worldle and it will rearrange and colour the text into a cool arrangement. Here are some it made after I fed this classic quote from Bladerunner into it:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.

Peter Root & Mary Thompson

2010-05-18T20:26:00.025+01:00

Over the last few years Guernsey has really come on in leaps and bounds in the realm of contemporary art, a combination of (I think) art college graduates returning to the island and the way the local states funded arts council has developed.

One of the venues for contemporary art here now is the Greenhouse gallery which is a small room above the tourist office, just near the centre of town. Recently it exhibited photos as part of the great Photography festival that went on throughout May 2010, but in 2007 they hosted an installation by Peter Root and Mary Thompson, called 'Space Invaders', which is documented on both their websites.

Over several days Mary and Pete filled the space with a freeform conglomeration of Mary's wall drawings (made from colourful electrical tape) and drawing machines and Pete's sculptures. Pete's sculptures resembled miniature towers, cities and motorways and were assembled from hundreds of identical pieces of metal sourced from factories that had discarded them as unwanted offcuts.

The overall effect of a kind of organised chaos was great. You had to step carefully amongst Pete's constructions while Mary's machines occasionally shuddered to life, scribbling on the paper laid on the floor.

2 years after that exhibition Pete and Mary exhibited together again on the other side of town at the Readers Wives Gallery. Mary showed large decorative canvases and alongside Pete's geometric drawings was an ephemeral miniature city he had carved out of bars of honey and almond scented soap. They reminded me of Paul Noble's Nobson Newtown drawings and also old 80s computer games like 3D Ant Attack.

The last installation I saw of Pete's was when he spent 4 days in April 2010 balancing strips of staples of varying length on end to create a miniature cityscape called Ephemicropolis. If you follow that link you can see some great time lapse footage of it being created, although strangely it was also covered in the Daily Mail and the currant bun.

Pete's flickr galleries document some of his other projects such as time lapse photography to apparently a meal made only with food foraged from the Guernsey countryside.

And coming up this October, Mary is contributing to 'Unleashed Devices' from Wed 1st September - Fri 22nd October 2010, "an exhibition of DIY, hacking and open source projects by artists who explore technologies critically and creatively."

Daryl Cunningham: Psychiatric Tales

2010-05-17T22:20:00.003+01:00

The Bugpowder distro that Pete Ashton set up in the 90s introduced me to a load of comics artists / writers / illustrators who were publishing their own books or magazines and many have continued to produce comics in some capacity, be it as a hobby or as professional illustrators, and many have an online presence.

One of the best of those is Daryl Cunningham and over the last year I have been following his blog as he posted pages from a book he was working on, called 'Psychiatric Tales', which has just been published and is receiving a great deal of praise, such as here and here.

Daryl's subject matter varies from fun and colourful superhero / sci-fi strips to recollections and anecdotes of his work as a psychiatric nurse, drawn in black and white. I have found his style hard to place and the only similarity I can think of is to the angular drawings of some of the comic artists in the seminal 80s anthology RAW. Although the way Daryl places the black areas has something of Mike Mignola about it. I guess what Daryl's black and white style most resembles is the woodcuts of art-comic pioneer Frans Masereel.

The following interview is copied from the blog of Matthew Badham who has given his permission for it to be copied as long as his and Daryl's blogs are credited.

Please tell me a bit about your comics background. You’ve been published before haven’t you, but have you ever made your living full-time from comics?

I’ve never managed make a living from comics publishing. It’s always been a side-project which has occasionally made me a little money. I first got involved in the comics small press back in the eighties, self-publishing as well as appearing in other people’s zines. I dropped out of the scene for years, somewhat disillusioned because I just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Drawing and writing comics involves a lot of effort, and if you’re making no money and you only have a small audience of readers, you do begin to wonder if it’s all worth it. This was before the Internet, so getting people to see any of your work was extremely difficult. Printing up small runs of little magazines, and selling at comic marts to other people who were doing the same, seemed a bit futile after a while. I was always waiting for the next step up, but it never happened, so I gave up for awhile.

In terms of Psychiatric Tales, when and why did you decide to start making strips about mental illness?

I worked for many years as a health care assistant on an acute psychiatric ward and throughout this time I kept a diary, in which I gradually amassed a huge amount of material about the day-to-day workings of a psychiatric hospital. People kept saying to me that I ought to turn these stories into comic strips. I was at that time trying to knock the material into a prose book and didn’t think that adding drawings would enhance the work in any way. Surely all the information you need is already there in the writing as it is, I thought. But eventually, I did start drawing it all up into narrative strips. By this time I’d seen Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis, a simply drawn autobiographical strip about the writer’s childhood and young adulthood in Iran. This book was a big international success. I thought, ‘Well, I can do something like that.’ Persopolis was a big inspiration to me in terms of what you can do with the comics medium. It was not so much that Satrapi was a particularly good artist, more that she had a dynamite subject that she told well and clearly. She threw light into an area that the Western world was quite ignorant about, revealing Iran to be a more subtle and conflicted place than we imagined. So, very simply in black and white, I began drawing up various tales of my experiences working on the wards. I wrote about what I knew and what I felt most strongly about. The subjects in the book include dementia, depression, self-harming, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

You’ve had both personal and professional experience of mental illness. Please tell us about this and how it informed the comic?

After a few years as a health care assistant, I decided that if I was going to drag myself out of the minimum wage trap and have any kind of a life, then I should become a trained psychiatric nurse. I had to do a year’s night course, at a local college, just to get the qualifications that would get me onto the nursing course in the first place. This I did alongside my health care job. I bit off far more than I could chew. Two years into the nursing course, and with only one year to go, I found that I could not continue. I began to struggle with terrible anxiety and depression. I had always suffered a certain amount of anxiety in the job, but I’d managed to deal with it. As the last year of the course began, I became completely overwhelmed with feelings of despair and hopelessness. Thoughts of death and suicide haunted me. I ran up huge debts, not caring whether I could pay them off or not. I had to leave the course. I’d invested so much time and effort into becoming a psychiatric nurse, but in the end it had all come to nothing. I was devastated.

In the aftermath of all this, and while I was putting myself back together, I began to look again at much of the old comic strip work I’d done in the years prior to the nursing course. The Internet had arrived by then and this gave me a direct line to a new and bigger audience. The story strips that had the largest impact were the ones written about my psychiatric ward experiences. These strips developed a life of their own, being picked up all over the Internet, on sites such as Digg, Boing Boing, The Comics Reporter, and many others. This led to Blank Slate offering to publish the stories. Well, I didn’t have many strips done at the time (I hadn’t even looked at them for four years) and so I began drawing more in order to have enough for a book. This process helped dig me out of depression and gave me a new direction and a future.

What specific timeline are we talking about for the above events?

I started the diary in 2001 and I had my experience of anxiety and depression in 2006. I posted the first chapters of Psychiatric Tales online in 2005, then there was a gap, and I restarted the work in 2008.

(Above: Darryl’s excellent take on the Thing.)

What are your hopes for Psychiatric Tales? What do you want readers to take away from the experience of reading it? Presumably there’s an educative, awareness-raising aspect…

Psychiatric Tales is first and foremost a book that attempts to demythologise mental illness. Forget what you’ve seen in movies or on TV, this book shows what the experience of mental illness actually is for both patients and the staff who treat them. Media representations of people who suffer mental illness tend to be appalling. We live in an age where racism and sexism is considered unacceptable, yet the mentally ill are still considered fair game for ridicule and are subject to the worst kind of prejudice. I had an email recently from a young man who intended to buy two copies of the book when it came out, one for his mother and one for his stepfather. He wanted to show his family that the bipolar disorder he’d been diagnosed with was a real illness, and that he needed their understanding not hostility. We still live in a world, sadly, where depression is seen as weakness of character, and psychosis (such as hearing voices) is considered proof of dangerousness. Even the psychiatric nursing profession itself suffers prejudice. I’ve worked with many general nurses who considered psychiatric nurses not to be real nurses at all. This is a surprisingly common view among general nurses. I’m hoping that Psychiatric Tales will be a real stigma-busting book.

You’ve drawn on some of your own experiences for the comic, particularly as a professional. Are the events portrayed based on real events or are they entirely fictional but realistic portrayals of mental health situations?

The events depicted are quite real, but I’ve changed many the details for reasons of client confidentiality. I’ve not named the hospital concerned and I’ve changed some aspects of the people portrayed in order to help hide their identity. The character used in the bipolar disorder chapter is more of a blend of people I’ve known that have suffered this illness.

What other projects have you got on the go at the moment?

I’m part of the Activate webcomic collective, where I’m running a weekly serial strip called The Streets Of San Diablo. It’s a fantastical mash-up of the western, horror, and superhero genres set in a small town on the edge of Hell. I’m also in the planning stages of a second volume of Psychiatric Tales. There are plenty of subjects I didn’t get around to covering in the first volume. There’s still an enormous amount to be said. [Since the interview was conducted, this has changed. Darryl's next offering from Blank Slate will be the all-ages book, Uncle Bob Adventures.]

How do you feel about selling Psychiatric Tales to Bloomsbury in the US and what does it mean for you professionally?

This Bloomsbury thing came about in a strange way. I didn’t contact them. They contacted me. An editor in the publishing firm had seen chapters of the work online after it had featured heavily on sites such as Boing Boing and Digg. This is another way that the Internet has changed publishing. Forget sending your stuff to be buried in a slush pile of hopeful manuscripts on someone’s desk. Do good, interesting work, build up a readership online, and the interest will follow.

How this will change me, I’ve no idea, but I fully expect my life to be turned upside down in the coming year. My long-term plans involve giving up the care work I’m obliged to do to support myself and doing this creative stuff full time. Tomorrow I’ll be trudging through the January snow to the local hospital, where I’ll be working on an orthopaedic ward, feeding people and wiping bums though, so that should keep my feet firmly planted on the ground, for now at least!

Ambergris digital print

2010-02-27T20:31:00.007Z

I've been working on this image for many months now (see this earlier post) and as it had finally got to a point where I thought it was nearing completion I put it on a disc and sent it for printing.

While I am really pleased with the quality of the print, some of the darker greys got a bit lost so those tones need some adjusting and parts of the composition need tweaking. Once its finished I will see about selling them on 't'internet. The price will be around the 20/30 quid mark and I will be offering them in a variety of sizes.

More photos on flickr.

Avoid Missing Elfboy for High Score

2010-02-21T21:12:00.014Z

I've been a big fan of indie comic veteran James Kochalka since the late 90s when I got some of his books through Pete Ashton's Bugpowder distro and there was something instantly appealing about his straightforward, stripped back style with its limited use of tone and nice lush brushstrokes.

The subject matter of his late 90s output often seemed to be about small, seemingly insignificant moments in life with characters (often James himself depicted as a kind of rabbit/elf hybrid with a Simpsons like overbite) enjoying 'the moment' and reveling in the simple things in life. And while the presentation of his comics was nothing groundbreaking, with often only a few panels to a page, the overall package was often a nice little brick of a book that could be dipped into at will.

While I haven't really kept up to date with his output the last book of his I really enjoyed was the hilarious superhero spoof 'Superf*ckers' which is kind of a foul mouthed, scatalogical take on teenage superheroes (imagine X-Men & South Park meets Skins).

Anyway, all of this preamble is leading up to the fact that I was excited to see he is as much a fan of old retro style computer games as I am and he has teamed up with the video game developers pixeljam to develop an 80s style platform shoot em up called Glorkian Warrior and they are looking for investors. Some of the funding options look pretty cool with a sliding scale of how much you get for your buck e.g. at the higher end of the investment spectrum you can even get yourself included in the game.

Oh and I forgot to mention he is also a musician (I think at one time he was in a band with Moby) and his 'Monkey Vs Robot' CD still gets regularly played in our house. The standout track is Hockey Monkey although Monkey vs Robot is pretty hilarious as well.

Look unto the fan of Dredd

2010-02-12T18:38:00.007Z

As the technology to produce films becomes cheaper the number of low budget fan films are proliferating and while they so far seem to spring mostly from the holy trinity of ST, LOTR & SW work is underway on a cool looking movie set in the Judge Dredd universe. Will it make up for the disappointing Stallone Dredd film?

Resistance is no longer futile.

2010-01-06T17:25:00.013Z

Vinyl art website have announced 'Muse - The Resistance' as the winner of the 2009 vinyl art competition which was possibly...yes, the only album released in 2009 that I bought (although not on vinyl). The designers were La Boca who sell very cool posters of their designs (shown left).

My favourite cover art of the year was the Duckworth Lewis Method with its mixture of decorative heraldry and sporting paraphernalia.

Obviously with the onset of downloading music the packaging of it has gone through some changes and while cardboard covers for CDs are always preferable to the horrible plastic jewel case there have been some amazing boxsets released recently and nothin gatall.net have a good round-up of the best.

Although he would never feature on nothingatall.net (unless he were to join sun 0))) or Lightning Bolt) one of the most sumptuous packages to come out in the last few years was by grizzly faced, gravel voiced exponent of 80s drive-time blues-rock, Chris Rea. The deluxe version of his album 'The Return of the Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes' looks pretty amazing with CDs and Vinyl and a nicely designed book.

In my experience CDs are less durable than either vinyl or cassette so despite their ubiquity its odd to see that alongside CD, vinyl and downloads some small labels are still releasing stuff on cassette, such as the last album by The Love Story, Mink, who used some of my artwork on their first album.

To NK Roachment: Cobblers

2010-01-03T23:17:00.016Z

Watching 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' last month reminded me that when it came out in the 80s there was some mention that the animation director fort it, Richard Williams, had a pet project, called 'The Thief and the Cobbler', and the few clips they showed were very impressive.

Wikipedia details that at 26 years it was at one point the movie with the longest production history and that it was only finished when control of it was taken away from Williams when he couldn't meet the final deadline in the early 90s. Pressure was also being put on him as Disney had Aladdin in production and the similar subject matter was seen as a competition (and in retrospect 'Thief' clearly influenced its style).

Another director then took over and 2 versions of 'Thief' were released, one in 93 ('Arabian Knight') and the other in 96 ('The Princess and the Cobbler'), containing many changes from Williams' original vision. As one reviewer put it 'almost half of the film was deleted or never finished, wonderful vocal performances were re-dubbed, and extensive re-editing destroyed the lyrical narrative form.' One of these versions even ended up being given away with cereal packets but luckily some of Williams' working prints have turned up on youtube and they look amazing with the Persian influence giving it a very distinctive look and the music adding significantly to its exotic and unusual style.

The thing I remembered from the clips I saw in the 80s was that the camera often moved through the scene, which due to the complexity of doing so is pretty rare for cell animation (can't think of any other examples) although it is standard in CG. This technique is also used in the first few minutes of 'Roger Rabbit' (and the 3 spin off shorts they produced) to breathtaking effect as the 'camera' point of view zooms about as Roger frenetically tries to save Baby Herman from injury.

Even after the non-Williams versions were released others took up the project albeit without Williams' input. For instance Walt Disney's nephew tried to reignite the development while fans released their own edits and a semi official bootleg version cut together from all the sources was released as 'The ReCobbled Cut'. There is a big fan community on the net for the project and they are still lobbying the owners of the owners of the copyright (Disney) to restore it to what it was meant to be.

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!

2010-01-03T23:14:00.006Z

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9! from Cartoon Brew TV on Vimeo.

Found a great little animated film about alien bounty hunters. Could there be anything better? The style reminds me of french comic superstar Lewis Trondheim's work.

Comic cuts of 2009

2009-12-29T20:26:00.013Z

I was asked by music site nothingatall.net to reflect on my cultural highlights for 2009 and my favourite comics were:

'The Hunter', Darwyn Cooke & Richard Stark: Cooke is most famous (if you read comics) for being the writer and artist for 'DC: New Frontiers' which stripped the DC universe (Superman, Flash, Batman etc) back to its origins and baked it in the light of JFKs famous speach. His Catwoman comic, 'Selina's Big Score', was pretty great as well and he also worked on the 90s 'Batman-The Animated Series' which is the best incarnation of the character so far (although I like the 60s tv series as well).

2009 saw the release of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of a Richard Stalk story, a hard boiled / noirish tail about a crook who steam-rolls through the dark underbelly of the city trying to get revenge on the creep who stitched him up. It's not surprising it reminded me of the stylish 60's Lee Marvin classic 'Point Blank' as I found out its based on the same writer's work.

I got my signed copy from the best comic shop in London (GOSH opposite the British Museum) and I've been rubbing the ink on the signed bookplate hoping some of Cooke's genius will rub off on me.

'Yesterday's Tomorrows', Rian Hughes: In the late 90s Hughes devloped a style of illustration using vector graphics that went on to influence a generation of illustrators. And although he may now appear to be Gerry Halliwell's illustrator of choice I keep returning to this guy's comic work from the 80s which was finally collected a few years ago in this wonderful book. Although it is his line work for which he is famous for (influenced by French masters of the 'ligne claire' style Serge Clerc, Yves Chaland and Herge) his acidic but tasteful colour work is beautiful as well. The book contains his and Grant Morrison's Thatcher bashing Dan Dare revisit from 80s comic mag 'Revolver.'

'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazuchelli: Every few years Mazzuchelli pops up with a book that shows why he is still one of the best practitioners in the field of comics and in 2009 he delivered what will undoubtedly be seen as a classic of the medium. Gorgeous production values and an abundance of thought provoking ideas and graphical statements mean this more than deserves to sit on the bookshelf next to such 'graphics-for-grown-ups' books as those by Posie Simmonds (Gemma Bovary) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).

Ambergris poster: Work in progress

2009-11-18T21:40:00.005Z

I've been slaving away at a poster based on my designs for the Ambergris artwork and a number of early drafts are posted on flickr. This is the one I am working up into a final, hi res version so that it can be printed really big.

Charnal house part 2

2009-09-09T22:23:00.006+01:00

Nothing to do with what this blog is supposed to focus on (music related art) but I thought I would post this anyway. I put this print together for a local art competition that I like to enter every year (to keep my hand in). It was a bit of an experiment as I created the dot textures on the Mac and printed them out on coloured paper and then added the lines with a felt tip and highlights with a white pencil.

I did the original sketch years ago when I was putting things together for my degree show so it was good to revisit some old ideas. It was inspired by Picasso's unfinished picture 'Charnal House' and also the paintings of Desmond Morris.

Ambergris by Mank: Creating the artwork.

2009-08-06T17:23:00.015+01:00

Designer's or illustrator's blogs (such as D'israeli's, Craig thompson's or Lou Romano's) are great for the insight they give into the genesis of an image. So once one of the hand numbered, limited edition (just 100 and only GBP 4.50), beautifully printed, hand folded, logo-bestickered, plastic vellum encased copies of the 3" CD, 5 track album of darkly ambient piano led music, 'Ambergris' by Mank, fell through my letterbox I was inspired to put cursor to monitor (not got a flatscreen yet) and get down once and for all the convoluted story of how the cover was designed.

When I embarked on this project who would have thought I would have ended up covering loo rolls and cereal packet cardboard in tinfoil? Or covering plastic footballs in paper (causing me several times to utter 'no son, you can't have your ball back)? Or that it made me use that last roll of double sided sticky tape that has, for the last 10 years, been lurking down the back of the bits and pieces draw?

First, feast on these photos of the finished article and then read the riveting 'making of'...

Three copies in their plastic vellum slipcases (real vellum is made from 'mammal' skin).

All the constituent parts spread out for all to see. NB: tiny logo on sticker.

Opening the pack reveals another spike-covered orb.

The whole pack opened out to reveal the tracklisting and credits.
The small, 3" CD comes mounted on that little brown nubbin in the middle.

First Draft

Having liked (and bought an original print of) my work on the 1st Songs of Green Pheasant album cover Rich Jones of nothingatall.net contacted me asking if I would design / illustrate an EP he was publishing by the electronic music artist Mank. The brief was simply to create something that complemented the music, and as I like to try new styles with each project, there was luckily no pressure that the design had to be like my previous work.

But what sort of image would be suitable? For ambient / electronic music the artwork that accompanies it tends to be of photos of wide open spaces or are photos that are slightly out of focus or are images that involve diagrams or geometric patterns. But I wanted to try something different and my initial thoughts were to come up with an image that contrasted the electronic-ness of the music with something organic.

Rejected first draft.

The first idea I came up with was to have an image of wires and plugs on the back of the CD and have them snake to the front where the closer they got to the name of the band/musician the more they would morph into flowers.

Had Rich liked this idea I would have ended up sculpting the image out of wires and paper and flowers and photographing it to create something similar to the paper sculptures of Canadian Designer Julien Vallee's. But as Mank's Ambergris music is dark and spacey Rich agreed that this flowery idea didn't fit the music so I went back to the drawing board.

Second Draft

Sketches for second draft of the cover.

After listening to the tracks again I decided to reflect how the music can suggest microscopic as well as infinite space so I sketched some spheres surrounded by glowing streaks of energy and spheres covered in spikes and cylinders. Rich liked these so I mocked them up in Photoshop by cutting and pasting photos grabbed off the net. The first image looked quite naked so I added a border with ornate corners.

Thumbnail Photoshop collage.

Creating the Spheres

Once Rich gave me the OK I set to work on creating the hi-resolution images. As I don't own a 3d application to render the objects I had to make them instead (much more fun as well) so I searched the Internet and found instructions on how to make a sphere out of paper. I redrew the plan and printed it to the right size so that it could cover a plastic football.

After I photographed it under different lighting conditions I piped the images into Photoshop where I cleaned up the imperfections. The end result is below on the left.

A grided sphere and tinfoil spikes on football.

The spikes were made out of cereal packet cardboard, folded into shapes and wrapped in kitchen foil. After I stuck them to the football with double sided tape and photographed the results I then carried on creating different combinations of foil covered spikes/cylinders until I had built up a small library of variations.

Xmas bauble combined with spikes and made to glow.

The photos were then fed into Photoshop and the spiky sections copied and pasted onto a photo of a Christmas tree bauble. I then added some inside / outside glows with the layer filter feature and added a layer of white lines and some extra glowing spots to give the impression the light emanating from the sphere was very bright.

Corners

Three examples of the corners drawn with custom brushes in Illustrator.

The corners were created from custom brushes in Adobe Illustrator and after experimenting with a number of variations I ended up with the image above right. I hadn't really experimented with custom brushes up until this project but they are brilliant. Any vector image can be converted to a brush so that whatever you draw (e.g. a leaf on a stick) it bends the shape along it and, in this case, creating beautiful, flowing plants.

As with many things in Photoshop once you learn how to do them you suddenly spot loads of examples of it in magazine illustrations, web design, logos etc.

Logo

The logo developing from sketch to finished article.

For the logo I used a similar ornate style as the corners. As illustrated here it went through a number of changes, none of which I was 100% satisfied with until I inverted the black and white, combined the swirly shapes with plant leaves, and redrew it by hand to give it a rusty look.

Mank: Ambergris videos

2009-07-09T12:49:00.005+01:00

5 videos have been posted on youtube to accompany each of the tracks on the album. They were filmed on board the same vessel the music was recorded on. And Mank's blog is here.

Mank: The Interview

2009-06-29T18:31:00.027+01:00

Ben Powell aka Mank has been recording music for over 10 years and his latest release, 'Ambergris', is 5 tracks (21 minutes) of beautiful piano-led electronica.

In the last decade technology has grown in sophistication and shrunk in size to empower musicians to have total control of the sounds they use and granting them the luxury to get out, be inspired and record wherever they want.

So what connection is there between this 'darkly uplifting ambience' and the nautical theme of its title? To find out I put some questions to Ben:

‘Ambergris’ was recorded on board the Icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn. What's the story behind that?

I work at Bangor University in the School Of Ocean Sciences as an instrumentation technician, as such I spend a lot of time on boats of varying sizes making oceanographic measurements. This was my second visit to the arctic ocean (the first being in September 2007 when I recorded Isbjorn) measuring turbulence, a by-product of mixing between the fresh and salt waters, in the water column.

Obviously with the current changes occurring in our climate there is a lot of interest in the arctic ocean and how the fresh "melt water" mixes with the saline seawater. The measurements made by my group were the first of their kind made in Russian arctic waters, the cutting edge of arctic oceanography ;-)

Knowing now where it was recorded, it's very evident from the music that your surroundings shape the music.

The majority of the Mank albums were born at sea with the ideas for songs being recorded individually where and when they happen. So the albums as a whole were usually realised on a boat in the early hours of the morning.

Working on boats I usually end up doing shifts through the night and I find my down time the perfect place to focus on a project - the rocking of the ship, the constant drone of the engines. Even though I'm used to these unusual recording conditions my trips to the arctic were something else! It was like an alien world within our own and everything seemed different - the 4 hours of daylight which consisted of one long sunrise / sunset, the ice, the cold (-25deg) , the regular aurora sightings, constant shuddering of the hull and thunderous sounds as we ploughed through the ice, the incredible serenity when the boat stopped.

One thing that occurred to me was the thought that our ship was this very isolated little microcosm in the environment, that we were there on our own and without the ship working as a whole we would perish.

Were the Ambergris recordings finished on the boat or did you continue with them when you got back?

The time I spent on the boat was very focused as there is little else to do but play with my computer, so I don't get distracted. I find this time is a superb opportunity to finish off songs and pick the best ones, or more usually, choose songs that "match" and then mix them for the next project.

Is it a long process from inspiration to the final piece of music?

Usually the best ones are those that pop out pretty much complete, but most of the time my songwriting process is a very long and drawn out thing.

I'll get the basic "riffs" done fairly quickly, then the song will sit on my hard drive where I keep revisiting and revising it until it doesn't need any more. I will listen to a song for about 20 minutes trying to hear what I can add, then move on to another, and while this process can last from a few days to a few months, it usually takes months.

While ‘Mank’ is a solo project, you have worked with other musicians. What's the biggest advantage of working on your own? Is it easier? Harder? Different?

When I was a kid I played guitar in a lot of cover bands and I remember being very frustrated at having to rely on the others so I decided right then - I'm going to do this on my own. It takes all the pressure off creatively and allows freedom to work on your own time scale.

I have worked with other people like micrographia, but we didn't really function like a normal band. With them, the other two guys would work together on a track, putting the bass and guitar together, then bring it to me and I'd do my thing.

What was your recording set-up?

Obviously the amount of equipment I could take with me on the ship was limited so it consisted of a laptop, a midi keyboard, headphones and a minidisc / mic rig for field recordings.

What music do you listen to on these voyages?

When I'm not working I am usually busy on my own music or trying to sleep - it's noisy on board a ship so I always have headphones on to go to sleep. It's usually something quite droney with few beats / surprises. My favourites are Biosphere, Sleep Research Facility and Harold Budd but it usually changes each time I go to sea.

What are your plans for the next year? I see you’ve already released another EP on your own label.

The 'llyn y cwn' project is ongoing and I'm working on the sequel at the moment.

There are some nice Mank tracks coming through, and I'm not far off an EP's worth, but then I have to sit on them for a good 12 months. Its like cheese!

Pop Tart

2009-06-28T10:12:00.017+01:00

When I was an art student, a housemate had a copy of this image hanging in our scruffy communal living room. The picture is a painting by pop artist Peter Blake, most famous for the cover of Sgt Pepper, but the copy my housemate owned was about A3 size and silk screened onto tin.

Its design, and smooth tin surface, made it ideal for firing sucker ended darts at so another housemate and I enjoyed using it as target practice, especially since it made such a nice 'bong' sound as they hit. When the owner of the print found out about our firing range she wasn't amused and quickly removed the print back to her room saying it was a limited edition, and that we should be more respectful.

Fast forward to 14 years later and last month Peter Blake was visiting Guernsey, for a few days, to open an exhibition of new prints. He also took part in an interview about his career with journalist Mark Ellen and after that Blake agreed to sign books, copies of Sgt Pepper etc.

I told him the above story and in memory of my student days, I asked him to sign the page of a book about him where the 'Babe Rainbow' print appears.

Vinyl Pheasant

2009-06-28T10:04:00.014+01:00

After the release of the first Songs Of Green Pheasant album, Fat Cat records licensed a small label to publish a limited edition of the album on vinyl. While it would have been great to have seen the image I created adorning the big, vinyl sleeve, they instead did their own take on a small section of the original cover.

Ambergris covers have been printed.

2009-05-24T23:44:00.001+01:00

The cd covers are back from the printers. Sneak preview here.

Ambergris by Mank

2009-04-30T00:00:00.000+01:00

Nothingatall is releasing the new EP from Mank. Ambergris is a 5 track, 21 minute 3" CDR of darkly uplifting ambience composed recorded and mastered on a boat somewhere in the Arctic Circle. The EP is packaged in a three fold oversized cardstock case with beautiful artwork and lettering courtesy of myself. All housed in a semi-trasparent vellum slipcase.

If you want one of the first 100 copies the Nothingatall Shop is taking pre-orders.

And now that the CD artwork is complete I am working on a poster based on the many different variations I came up with of the glowing spheres / spikey spheres theme (only 4 of which made it to the final cover).