Illustration Friday - I Spy!!!

If you look carefully, you can see good old Wayland the Smith peering out of the darkness of his smithy to take a good look at this nice drawing of a horse which has replaced the photograph in
the previous version.

The more perceptive among you will have noticed that I have inverted the image of the
monument itself so that it is a bit more decipherable.  Recognisable, even.

Next stop ... I'm going to the British Museum to get some drawings done of the other photographed elements in this ... and have a look at some mummies and that sort of thing ...

Travelling Sketchbooks

The 'Floating Ducks' Travelling Art Journal seems to have got stuck in the mid-Atlantic, so when the opportunity came up to contribute to the 'Real Illustrators Phrase Book', and I've got a couple of days before I can continue my researches and therefore my MA work ... I went for it.

Here's the result.  The text, if you can call it that, reads:

The bat was holding a fish. 'Bats eat fruit and insects mostly', my mother said.  Sometimes they swallow cars.

It's not my fault, honest.  That was what was written on the page!

Top Ten Albums

A challenge has been issued!  From Real Illustrators!  To list your top ten albums ... I'll try not to think too hard about this, so here goes (for today anyway, and in no particular order)

Rain Dances - Camel
Automatic for the People - REM
The Captain and Me - The Doobie Brothers
A Richer Dust - Blowzabella
All Together Now - Argent
August - Eric Clapton
Six Wives of Henry VIII - Rick Wakeman
Close to the Edge - Yes
Foxtrot - Genesis
Protection - Massive Attack

This could easily change at a moment's notice.  

Why do you get the impression that I listened to most of my music in the 1970's???

More work in progress ...

Next of three panels for Wayland's Smithy - this is mainly to establish the design, as I will be using a real, live drorin for the horse rather than a photograph.  The other bits, coins and the bit of carving from the Franks Casket, will eventually be my own drorins cos for I'm going to London to seek my fortune next weekend, 
and that's where they are too.

Illustration Friday - Total!

After all this computer-generated and composittitted stuff, here's a bit of unadulterated watercolour.  Although, that said, these fish are totally p*****d off with all the pollution in their river, which is why they're sitting here with such grumpy expressions.

Hope they bring a smile to your face, though!

Aha! To stop all the text turning into a hyperlink, you do your writing first, to fool it, then upload the image ...

Here's a design from the rufs - better think of something else now!

Will it - won't it - let me put this up?  This is a sort of final design from the rufs shown below, and various others, all put together nicely in potatoshop!

Does anyone else have problems with Blugger turning all their text into one huge hyperlink, like this one?

Is it just me?

Apologies to readers, but Blugger won't let me type anything in the text box. The headlines seem to be OK though, so I'll do my best with them.

Will it?  Yes, it's letting me type something in here.  It took five goes to get the pictures up, and it would lose them the moment I tried to put in anything verbal.

I've been listening to the news.  Blue Peter has just had its wrist slapped for fraudulent phone-in practice.  Sort of makes you despair, doesn't it?

Next thing is that Paddington Bear will be convicted of people trafficking or Tinkerbell, for running an illegal lap-dancing club.

Anyway, below are a couple of pages from my sketchbook, yes, it's still Wayland's Smithy I'm afraid, but there are more animals on there now than just the horse.  And it's still my archaeology notes.

Blugger is having one of its days today ... but here goes ...

I'll put up these pictures and try to explain them in the next post

Here are some Book Titles I've just heard about.

When I woke up this morning, the 'Today' programme was on, and they were discussing book titles.  I'm not at my best first thing in the morning, and the bits of radio reportage which manage to penetrate my consciousness often seem a bit surreal.  Today, in both senses of the word, was so surreal that I went and looked at their website to check whether I actually HAD heard what I thought I'd heard ...

Anyway, here are some of them:

'How Green were the Nazis?'

'D Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream:  D. Di Mascio of Coventry.  An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans'

'The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America.  A Guide to Field Identification'

'Tattooed Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan'

'Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium'

'People who don't Realise they're Dead.  How they Latch on to Unsuspecting Strangers, and what to do about it'

I'm pretty sure I heard the last one.  It's not mentioned on their website, though, so it may just be a product of my imagination (shut up Chris!).

I think these are all wonderful titles, and I don't just want to read the books but illustrate them as well.

More interesting facts about Wayland's Smithy

Anyone who reads this blog regularly, and probably rather a lot of other people besides, will know about the legend around Wayland's Smithy long barrow.  The Saxons gave this Neolithic tomb the Name of Wayland's Smithy, identifying the site with their Smith-god, Wayland. Tradition has it that if a traveller's horse has lost a shoe, they can leave the animal outside the monument, with payment on the capstone.  If they come back later, the horse will have been shod and the money gone.

Apparently, this isn't quite as far fetched as you might think, and not because Wayland didn't think much of the British climate.  Historically, it has not been at all unusual for tribal people to provide goods or services in exchange for money without the purchaser ever catching a glimpse of the craftsperson/vendor, and it is possible that an arrangement like this existed between the invading Saxons and the Romano-Britons.

When the site was excavated in 1920, they found two iron age currency bars, which would also suggest that people have been giving money to this monument for an awfully long time.

Next thing is  they'll be telling us that the tooth fairy has been positively identified and has gone into retirement since the demise of the sixpenny piece.  (Aah, those were the days ...)

Illustration Friday - HIDE!!!!

And that's exactly what I'm doing at the moment - being closeted with lots of ACADEMIC WORK. Which would be OK if it weren't for doing things like REFERENCING  and BIBLIOGRAPHIES.
I'm crap at organising these sorts of things, always forget to write down page numbers
when I'm taking notes and all that, and find that finishing off these things takes even longer than it does to write them.  
And Blugger is doing some really funny things with my text and layout.  
And I JUST DON'T CARE ANY MORE.  Well, not much ...