I have moved.

Where have you been? I hear you /  no one asking? Well this is a bit awkward but I have been on another blogging platform. I can only apologise but someone said I should try it out and I did and now I am hooked / using it on a semi-regular basis. If you click here it will send you there.

The Great White Family Show.

I am in an exhibition with my Mum and my Brother. As well as showing our own individual work we will be showing a series of Porcelain tiles which we have all collaborated on, like a game of consequences. It opens this Friday so if you find yourself in Cheltenham or anywhere near come by and say hello. We will also be chatting on the Sunday about our work while people drink wine and try to work out which of the Brothers is the eldest. More info here.

Art Flea Saturday 18th May!

This saturday I am fortunate enough to be taking part in Art Flea in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Art Flea comes from the minds of Jo Fry and Julie Howe and is part of this years SITE Festival. Jo and Julie describe it as 'part flea-market, part conceptual art experiment, and part car-boot sale' and 'ART FLEA is a bizarre bazaar which draws together a dizzying collection of artistic enterprises and creative collaborations. ' 

I will be reconfiguring and re-imagining my Supermarket Sarah wall and will be selling my usual collection of prints, zines, fake tattoos and other printed ephemera including new Zine 'Are we being Ostriches?'. As with my previous wall there will be a plethora of goodies from my PALS too, including Sam Rees, Sister Arrow, Duvet Days, Flawedcore Records, Andrew Rae, Nous Vous and Zoe Taylor to name but a few. Woop woop!

                                        

I will also be bringing my hand-drawn temporary tattoo parlour, as previously showcased at the Nobrow stand at V&A Friday Lates, whereby I will draw you a tattoo of an animal, mineral or vegetable on to your body for a small fee. (Less than $1000)

I haven't exhibited artwork in Stroud since I was there for my Art Foundation all those years ago and it looks to be a real fun day with lots of great stuff going on. More info can be found here and here but not here!

Heavy Pencil at Pick Me Up 2013 Ho!

Heavy Pencil is back at Somerset House for Pick Me Up 2013 and this year sees a whole bunch of great people doing lots of great stuff like live drawing, costume making workshops and musical fun times. Mr Mike Perry and Mr Josh Cochran are even flying over and parachuting in especially for the event to paint up a treat of a mural. Come on down if you can get yourselves in! It looks like it will be a busy one!

Details below courtesy of Mr A. Rae.

Heavy Pencil
Live Art-Live Music
25th April, 6pm -10pm at Pick Me Up, Somerset House, Wc2R 1LA

Live Music
The Dead Pirates
Owen and the Eyeballs

Live ArtAndrew Rae, Jim Stoten, Nick White, Owen Gildersleeve, McBess, Anna Lomax, Jess Bonham, Chrissie Macdonald, Luke Best and special guests from New YorkMike Perry and Josh Cochran.

Plus DJs Miles Donovan and Disco Bits

£8 Entry, £6 Concessions, £15 Festival Pass, available from www.somersethouse.com

David Sedaris - Me talk Pretty One Day. Reissue.

To celebrate 40 years of publishing, Abacus Books have gone and reissued 18 classic books with new introductions by the authors and with brand new covers. I was lucky enough to do the above cover for David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. And boy do feel lucky, as David Sedaris is one hilarious writer man. If you (whoever you are) have not read any of his books or listened to any of his stories on This American Life or seen any of his readings on Youtube, then shame on you. Go and do that now. I will wait .......... Oh hi, thanks for coming back. You've been gone a while. That's fine, there is a lot to take in. He's good huh?

For this series of reissues, the brief was to focus on the title rather than the book as a whole. This meant a lot of the covers are purely typographical, as you can see from the other covers. It was a pleasure to play around with the type, as well as draw some of the bits and bobs mentioned within the book. (Like some fat suit legs.)

Above are some worked up roughs. Some using collage to focus on specific aspects of the book, another using some pretty phallic looking tongues flapping about. I was pretty excited by the bottom right cover, which I thought reflected the tone and odd nature of Sedaris' stories. As well as the fact that it included a picture of some meat, a fly and a shoe, which, in my opinion, all book covers should include. I do concede however, that the final cover probably answers the brief more succinctly and fits in better with the rest of the covers in the series. So there.

Head over to Foyles where you can try and win the whole set that includes such classics as Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory and Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning.

Breads vs Heads

A couple of months ago the marvellous William Edmonds invited me to take part in his brilliant curatorial project 'Colossal Space', several months later I managed to pull my finger out and actually do it. For those not in the know, Colossal Space is a 55mm x 55mm x 95mm glass case exhibition space. The chosen artist, then decides what to exhibit inside the case, as well as what to exhibit outside of the case. They also get to decide where, when and how the exhibition will occur.

I won't say too much about what I did as I explain it all in far too much detail on the site but it was a lot of fun and a great project to be involved in. Cheers Will!

Head here to see the all the action and while you're there be sure to check out the other artists interpretations too.

NY Times - The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain

Illustration for the New York Times' Sunday Review. It's a fascinating piece that looks at a new research initiative into the Brain that hopes answer, among other questions ... 'how the brain generates thoughts, dreams, memories, perception and consciousness...' This was nice, quick job with the turnaround ending up being about 4 hours for roughs and final.

At first I was thinking about focusing on the neurons in the brain but replacing the 'cell' part with faces. Which, although was getting there wasn't quite working. As the art director quite rightly informed me, the neurons looked more like trees or onions.

 

 In the end we went with the classic Head option, with the final image being stretched out to fill the space and the various parts moving around a bit. Normally going from rough to final I would swap over to using gouache and painting it, which can sometimes mean I tighten up and make the image a bit too clean. This time however I was enjoying the pencil marks so stuck with it. Thanks to Alexandra Zsigmond for the commission and great art direction.

The Nightmare before Valentines

On the 13th of Feb to celebrate the day before Love day (where everyone gives strangers hand made cards with hearts on them and scrawls sweet nothings inside with their non writing hand), we aka Owen & The Eyeballs, the band I am in, have a gig at Catch. We will be playing with the marvelous Dead Pirates who contrary to their name are neither dead nor pirates. (I could be wrong).

 

Details below. Poster above by Jim 'Jimbalaya' Stoten.

 

The Nightmare before Valentines.

Live Music, Good Times, Much Fun

featuring live music costumes and visuals from: 

Owen and the Eyeballs 

http://owenandtheeyeballs.bandcamp.com 

http://vimeo.com/owenandtheeyeballs

The Dead Pirates

http://thedeadpirates.com

At Catch 22 Kingsland Road E2 8DA

February 13th at 8 till late

Free Entry

The Future of Illustration

In the future (give it a few years) all Illustration will be done using a giant telescopic pencil that shoots Lazers onto the side of the moon.

Only joking, in the future all Illustration will be made by robots shooting lazers from their eyes.

More predictions about the future soon.

Limner Journal #2 Launch

24th January sees the launch of issue 2 of Limner Journal at Beach London, from 6-9pm. For people not in the know 'Limner is a new critical journal of illustration. It's aim is to provide a platform for the exploration, critique and contextualisation of contemporary illustration. Issue #2 takes the form of a 168 page book featuring new writing and illustration.' 

It has some great people in there including 

Jordan Chatwin, Blaise Larmee, Colin David Stewart, Peter Willis, Penny Klein, Murray O'Grady, Stine Belden Røed, Grace Helmer, Jay Cover, Holly Mills, Reena Makwana, Kai Nodland, Reuben Mwaura, Joe Kessler, Liv Taylor, Eric Timothy Carson, Charlotte Mei, Umberto Eco, Ella Mclean, Florence Shaw, Nick White, Alice Lindsay, Good Press Gallery, Joakim Ojanen, Mike Redmond, Jon Pilkington, Chie Miyazaki, Lisa Wilkens, Rose Blake, Megan Woof, Dan Shapiro and Isabella Toledo.

 

If you look closely you will see my name included in that pile of names, this is due to me writing a whole bunch of words in an order and doing a few drawings too. (Though it is mostly writing.) I wrote the words in Limner a wee while ago and was pleased with them at the time. My piece is about Procrastination and the two people who read it said "It's not the worse thing I have ever read.'' Which is pretty high praise and also odd that they both independently said those exact same words. Thankfully there are so many other clever and talented people within the Journal so I am sure it will be great!

I know Peter Willis and the Studio Operative guys have worked darned hard on the Journal so If you live London way be sure to come down and grab* a copy.

*Buy.