And ... we're back! And off to a flying (st)art!

Hello you, whoever you may be. I have no idea who reads this blog as no one leaves comments - I'm told that the blog is dead in the wake of such things as Whatsapp, Vine, Storify and Snapchat. But I'm sticking with it, if only to create a searchable archive of stuff I like that doesn't clog up my hard drives!

Well, I've been away for two months and have done a considerable amount of work on the two books. I've also been Edinburgh and done something of a live show thingy. All great fun. But now ... back to the bloggy arty, weirdy, sciency stuff.

I start with the wonderfully original art of mother and daughter team of Mica Angela Hendricks and her 4 year old Myla. Professional artist Mica likes to draw people but didn't always approve of Myla getting into her sketchbooks. But then, one day, she thought ... 'Why not? What if I draw the heads and let Myla do the bodies?' The results, once coloured in my Mum, are brilliant! Look!

The result of this fairly unique collaboration is a collection of pictures quite different to anything I've ever seen before. I have been known to colour in one of my children's, and later grandchildren's drawings, thus:

I've also experimented with adding my own drawing to children's drawings - I did an abortive children's book a few years ago that no publisher was interested in about a land where scribble people live. Here's an example:

But anyhoo ... back to the wonderful work of the Hendricks family ...

Wonderful stuff. If you'd like to see ore, do visit Mica's blog at Busy Mockingbird.

My thanks to Chrissi Hernandez for bringing it to my attention. :)

The Fisherman's Friends

Here's a stage by stage description of my latest painting; another in my series of British stereotypes. Having grown up in Cornwall, a fisherman in his 'yellers' was always on the cards. My first sketch looked like this:

As a kid I would quite often watch the fishing boats offloading in Newlyn and always found the older fisherfolk fascinating. I suppose, in that respect, I was no different from the artists of the Newlyn School of painting. They spent hours watching the daily life of people who depended almost solely upon the sea for their living. Among the artists was one of my great art heroes, Walter Langley. I've been in love with his work for as long as I can remember. And can you blame me? Look:

 

 

Beautiful isn't it? Almost social documentary in its unflattering reality. Go google his name and check out his work. And, if you find yourself at a loose end in west Cornwall one day, go see his originals at the Penlee House Museum in Penzance. I've spent hours in there.

 

Anyway, my fisherman was going to be far more silly and light-hearted than that. Social documentary? Pft. Not when I can stick a fish in someone's beard. So, I started off with pencil on canvas and a bit of a loose underpainting. Step 1 - Get rid of the white!

 

 

I quickly decided to dispense with the fish in the beard and have a stack of fish in the foreground to mirror my previous butcher painting. I also decided to have my fisherman smoking a pipe, maybe with the bowl emulating the bow of a ship with a little figurehead? Anyway, here I am at the end of Day 1 after an hour of painting...

 

 

Returning to it the next morning I could see that the eyes were wonky, the hands too small, the hat was the wrong shape and the moustache was fecking tragic. Sigh. Serves me right for painting last thing at night with terrible light and tired eyes. Day 2 was spent fixing most of the mistakes I made on Day 1.

 

 

End of Day 2 and I was feeling much happier. The hands were still wanky though. So, I photographed the painting, popped it into Photoshop and had a play around. I chopped bits out, added bits in and, an hour later, I realised that my best bet would be to get rid of both hands, make the pipe bigger and more ornate and hugely increase my pile of fish. So, on Day 3 ...

 



 

I painted out the hands, added a scarf, fattened the nose across the bridge and feathered the moustache and beard. Never be afraid to make big changes if it makes for a better painting! Then I marked out where the fish will be ... plus a big octopus. Maybe.

 

End of Day 3, and three more hours spent painting, and it looked like this:

 

 

Day 4 began with a shopping list of things to fix: the figurehead on the pipe needed her head lifting up and the scarf needed detailing, I decided to reduce the number of bags under Fishy's right eye to accentuate the squintyness (is that a word?) of his left. And then there were all those fish to paint. And a red octopus. Here's where I got to by the end of Day 4:

 

 

I should explain that when I say 'Day' I don't mean a solid eight hours of painting. I wish I had the luxury of time to do that. A 'Day' is actually a number of small, snatched moments in between work. For instance, 'Day 4' actually consisted of an hour's painting at lunchtime and another hour at 5pm before the light started to go.

 

I really started to hate that octopus. It just wasn't looking right. So I decided to put the painting away for a couple of days and come back to it fresh. Sometimes it's the best thing to do ... although not when you have a deadline. Thankfully, I don't.

 

Day 5 started four days after Day 4 when I'd had a weekend off and a trip to Glasgow to clear the cobwebs. First job was to paint out the octopus and block in the fish.

 

 

Then, detailed work on the fish. I quickly began to wish I hadn't included quite so many ...

 

But, end of Day 5 (and a lunchtime spent painting) and I was there. Hoorah!

 

So there we go - The Fisherman's Friends is completed. And what have I learned while doing this painting? Well, firstly, that it's okay to make drastic changes to your composition if it makes for a better painting. Secondly, that if you're painting in hot weather (as I have been), you can extend the life of your acrylics by adding a neutral water-based acrylic medium. Now, art shops will sell it to you in a fancy tube and charge you for a fortune for it. By far the cheaper option, if you're someone who doesn't get embarrassed easily, is to use KY Jelly.

 

 

Yes, that's right - the sexy lubricant. Odourless, tasteless, clear and water-based, it works brilliantly. And it's a quarter of the price of an acrylics medium. But if you don't fancy buying some from your local chemist, then you could always buy I online I suppose.

 

Me? I enjoyed seeing the chemist assistant's quizzical eyebrow.

 

Maybe I'll paint her next :)



 

Celebrity can be ugly

Watch this slideshow but keep your eyes trained on the white cross between the pictures. Nothing has been done to alter the portraits of the people who appear. And yet, very quickly, your brain will turn them into grotesque monsters.



It's something that researchers are calling the 'Flashed Face Distortion Effect' until they come up with something better. By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like. The effect was discovered quite by accident when an an undergraduate student, Sean Murphy, was working alone in a lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive.

New painting - Lord of the Rainbows

Here's the new picture I've been doing this past week. I like the idea of taking cosy children's book characters or beloved TV puppets and mashing them up with movies. What next I wonder ... Bagpuss as Jabba the Hutt? I was part inspired by some of my previous paintings but also by some doodles I saw a while back by the ever-excellent Warwick Johnson Cadwell, particularly his Rod, Jane and Freddy (and Freddy). I featured his Rainbow doodles on my old blog here.

This is quite a large painting for me being some 4 feet by 3 feet in size. The canvas began life as something quite different, however. It's always bugged me that I cannot get a likeness and, therefore, have never been able to do portraits. So I figured I'd have one last go at it and decided on a self-portrait. Here's how it went. In a word ... badly:

And so, last Sunday, after a last ditch failed attempt to fix it, I gave up. Out came the big brush and the dark lands of Mordor started to emerge from the canvas ...

The fun part is always imagining the shock on people's faces if, in the future, they ever X-ray the painting to reveal the crappy portrait beneath. But it won't be half the shock they'd get if they X-rayed this one I did last year ... 

Sometimes people look like their dogs ...

New York based photographer Ted Sabarese seems to think that some of us look like our fish. I love this collection of photos.







All images © Ted Sabarese. See more at his website.

Source: Scientific American

The Fractal Portraits of Ben Heine

Wonderful portraits made entirely from differently sized coloured discs. It reminds me of those Mandelbrot sets that appeared when fractal geometry was first publicised.

Visit Ben's website here. His blog is here and he's on Twitter as @benheine.

365 Doodles - Day 312

A quick scary self-portrait I knocked up in the wee hours of this morning using a free art program I got with a computer magazine (Paintshop Pro 6). It involves a photo of me, a shriner fez, some 3D glasses, a ping pong ball, a photo of some woods and some free texture layers pulled off the internet. Less than an hour later - voila! Click to see a bigger version (as if you'd want to).

But don't be put off if you're not a digital photoshoppy sort of person. Remember that the postcards I want you to emulate were taken on old film cameras, some a century before computers came into our homes. It's all about the atmosphere, the clothes, the facial expression and, above all else, the sheer incongruity of some of the compositions. It's bizarre I'm after - the creepy comes as the natural consequence of getting the right level of weird. Most of those old photographs weren't taken to be funny.

And remember ... if you can't do the ageing/distressing/sepia-tone stuff yourself, I can. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

The Creepy Portrait Art Challenge!

This will be the final art challenge for a while as I have to knuckle down and finish writing a couple of books (damn you deadlines!). However, one of those books is a surreal comedy and will require some photos of eccentric family members. What I'm after are photos as weird as these:

Those are all real postcards - Lord knows what the story is behind them. These are just as bad:

What I want is photos of you dressed bizarrely - the freakier and scarier the better. Think League of Gentlemen or Mighty Boosh.  Anything goes; odd clothing, fake hairpieces, eyepatches, mad hats, masks etc. Recycle some of that Halloween tat you bought last week. Make a horrid dummy or figure out of garbage. Decorate a doll. Just make it freaky without too much horror!

Send me your photos and I'll then make them all look sepia-toned and old-fashioned. Then I'll use the best ones as family photos in the book. And if all goes to plan and it gets published, the winners get a signed copy and their name listed in the photo credits.

Sound like fun? Then go for it! Cut off date for entries will be December the 1st - you have nearly a month.

One to Fifty

As many of you know, I turned 50 this year. I was looking back through my family photos yesterday trying to find something when I realised that I have at least one picture of me for every decade I've passed. So I've put them all together to show how how I've changed even though it's quite scary to see the damage that nature has wrought! So here's me right at the start in 1961. Everything seemed very simple then. Mum knitted everything I wore.

It's now 1971 and here I am aged aged 10. I was at school in Penzance, Cornwall, at this time and had dreams of being either a marine biologist or an astronaut. I'd just watched the Moon landings and Jacques Cousteau's TV shows were my very favourite thing. Well, that and Doctor Who. I had a mean pout I notice:

By 20 I'd had the idealism kicked out of me by doing rubbish at my O Levels and A Levels. I'd changed ambitions and now wanted to be involved in the arts. I painted and drew, I was in a band and I wrote all the time. But I also realised that I had almost no chance of making any money from it. so I joined the police as the result of a bet with my homicide detective dad. When this photo was taken, I'd a;ready been a cop for two years and was just about to be plunged into several years of riots and violence in London, Greenham Common and the Miners' Strike.

By 30 I had a wife and two young kids. And very dodgy 1980s specs. An eyesight test revealed that I needed them. I wore them for nearly 20 years. My dad died this year at the ridiculously young age of 51. I developed my now legendary bad taste in clothing.

By 40 I'd been in an office job at Hendon Police College for a while, had got divorced, my hair was turning grey and I got fat. Really fat. I peaked at 21 stones. It wasn't the happiest of decades. Fashion sense still terrible.

At 50 I'm now slimmer (though still overweight) and am no longer a policeman, having done my 30 years. I'm finally fulfilling my arty potential by writing books and creating art and music. The specs have gone too - I went for laser eye surgery and discovered that I only need them for reading; I'd been wearing glasses for two decades when I didn't need to. I've been through a lot but I've done a lot too. and I'm generally a pretty happy chap.

I wonder how I'll look in another 10 years?