Early spring clean

Yeah, hi, sorry.

Erm, I've not posted since October. There's really no reason for that, other than becoming a bit disillusioned with blogging. I don't really have a better way of keeping a record of what's going on though, and I have been busy, not so much with new stuff but exciting things happening nonetheless.

The Sketchbook Project thing in London was a lovely little setup, like a library within a library. When I got there I couldn't check my sketchbook out immediately as someone else already had it, which was a pleasant surprise. Here I am when I finally found it anyway:

Ridiculous amount of hair and beard. I found Bambi's as well, it looked like this:

I can't believe my last post was looking forward to the Carefully Planned festival, it seems like ages ago now. Well, it was ages ago... Anyway, the exhibition that Amy and I organised as part of it was a great success as was the entire festival. Here's some pictures from that then.

Great weekend. Looks like I needed a haircut then as well, scruffy git. Coming into this year now (happy new year!!), we went to see the David Shrigley exhibition at the Cornerhouse. I loved it, obviously, what with being a superfan and all. 

Not sure why I look so frightened in that last one, to be perfectly honest. After that, it was the Skyliner Streetview exhibition which has been a long time coming but completely worth the wait. It was packed out, really busy and really impressive in terms of the number of submissions and the quality. Hayley did a cracking job, she can be really proud of herself. I know she's got a couple of ideas for events later in the year which are very much in the early stages yet but sound very exciting.

Most of these photos have been craftily stolen from Kelly's Instagram account, by the way. I should credit her, so consider this a credit. That reminds me, now I've got a phone that's not a complete shed I've got an Instagram account as well. Naturally my username is DeadPheasant so chuck us a follow will yer? Cheers.

OK, what else? The poster thing I did for This City Is Ours has been updated to include their new residents and the Wahlbar logo and I've done another couple of posters for them as well. Unfortunately these events have been and gone by now of course, but here they are anyway. I think the latest one is my favourite so far actually.

Last but by no means least, this past week has been the most successful for me music-wise everrrr. I've done a remix of 200x by Johnny Foreigner which I can't share yet but Junior from the band emailed me to say he was "tripping out" listening to it. It's a seven minute psychadelic thing and I'm pretty pleased with it so hopefully they'll like it enough to include it in the batch of remixes they're putting together of Johnny Foreigner vs Everything for release very soon. Exciting stuff. ALSO one of my tunes Frankenstein's Monster Destroys Wigan Pier has been featured on the second monthly edition of Drowned in Sound Community Podcast Radio which you can listen to right here:

To be honest you should listen to the previous one as well because the standard is very high and I'm really pleased to have been featured alongside such good stuff. All my tracks are still available to download for free from my Soundcloud account still but I have to warn you, Superman vs Freddie Mercury is nearly at its download limit so if you want it, get it now. Although I'll probably just re-up it when it does anyway.

Right, anyway, I think that's everything. Now I've got all this out of the way I'm going to get back into doing this on a regular basis again. Promise.

This City Is Ours end of year stuffs

I feel awful today, I've got gastric flu or something so I've spent the day blowing my nose, drinking tea and trying not to be sick. Gross. Now I feel the most like a person I have all day so I've decided to upload all my design stuff to my Facebook and write this blog post thing. Here we go.

This is a bit mental. This City Is Ours have declared the year over in terms of flyer designing at least. They've done a bit of a combo thing for the last three months so that they can get the student denizens of sunny Fallowfield in the know. Makes perfect sense, but it does mean they're already talking about new years eve. Like I said, mental.

The first two are going to be a double sided flyer, the last one is a poster for the venue. The photos are by Kelly as ever. We actually went around the city taking lots of photos to use for flyers and that, as well as so that I could learn how to use her cameras, but we didn't get them developed in time for freshers week so these pics are (believe it or not) from her phone. Skillz. Anyway, the photos from that day will be posted soon, for now, farewell 2012, you've been wonderful. As far as TCIO flyers are concerned, anyway, this certainly isn't all I'm going to have to show for the year.

While I'm here actually, I've done a drawing for Skyliner, it was for a Streetview competition thing and hopefully there'll be an exhibition to go with it. This is A View From Corporation St.

Kind of. If you went to Corporation St, you wouldn't see that. But I don't think that's important because when I sent it to Hayley she said it was gnarly. Ha.

Andy V's Sketchbook Project 2012

Right, I don't think I mentioned it at the time but I am taking part in this years Sketchbook Project. Basically, you get sent a sketchbook, you fill it, you send it off, and then it gets taken on tour around the world (including a yet-to-be-confirmed date in London) followed by being kept on permanent display at Brooklyn Art Library in New York. Pretty sweet. Bambi's done it as well, and his entry kind of illustrates the best thing about the project: the variety. His entry is very much fine art; it's a collections of paintings fitted into the book. Mine, erm, isn't. The category I chose was The Worst Story Ever Told, so that's exactly what I've done. I was aiming for a lo-fi, stream of consciousness style surrealist humour. When I showed it to Jo, she laughed in all the right places, so I guess I've done OK. Anyway, it goes kind of like this.

The Worst Story Ever Told

or;

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Fourth Wall

(A Documented Minor Breakdown)

There we go. Might do some prints of some of the pages, might get it printed as a zine or summat, I dunno. Let me know what you think of it though!

No need to send out a search party

Its been a very long time since I have posted anything on the DP blog site. So it's time I have brought every one up to speed. The last 8 months have been up and down for me. I was made redundant from my designers job. A lot of my time was spent trying to find a new job but I did try and carry on my art.

With more time on my hands I wanted to loosen up my art. The way I think things through, the way I paint and draw I wanted to re-invent everything. With the supplies I had, I went to work. For a while I had been playing around with faces but it needed something more then just a single drawn face on a canvas. What I came up with was these for images. Drawn with a paint pen on thick card paper. I think that it has a certain style towards them. I don't know where I'm heading with this style but I'm liking it more everyday.

I looked up similar artists like David Choe (www.davidchoe.com). He came up with a method of drawing a face using to spray cans in each hand. The results are pretty amazing. Of course they wound't be fully coloured master pieces but none the less the style of them are a sight to see.

With nothing to do during the day sept to sit around, watch crappy day time tv and draw or even to boot up the old ps3. I wanted to keep active and not fall behind in shows, so I set out on the net to see what i could enter.

I remember around each summer theres a project to do with sketch book in America. After an hour of searching online I came across The Sketchbook Project. The idea behind it is that you get sent a random theme for your sketch book and a small sketchbook is sent to you. As well there were some simple set of rules to follow. You have to use the sketchbook provided and you can not over exceed the dimensions of the sketchbook either. You may add pages to the book if you wish.
My theme that i was sent was timetravel. I had all these visions of things that I could draw. Some relating to tv programs like LOST and Quantum Leap or books like The Dark tower. After 4 weeks and only getting trough 8 pages of the book I got bored with it. The whole thing, hated time travel by this time so I went on the Art co-op website to get some inspiration. See what other people are doing.

It seems the rules went out of the window. I was looking through of already submissions and there where people just using other sketchbooks and other methods to get their art in to the show. But the organisers didn't mind either. The biggest piss take of one tho was that someone sent in a homemade wooden box and filled it with photographs of clouds. So thought well this is a piss take now So I am going to do my own thing but stay with the rules just in case.

I ripped out every page sept for the covers and replaced the paper in the sketchbook with a thick paper that was A3. The sketchbook given was only A5. I filled each page with a A3 painting but by this time it wasn't anything to do with but anything that came in to my head. When I was finished I was able to fold the pages down in to the book. It made it the size of a brick but I didn't care.

The project will be going to all of the major American cities (New York, Chicago etc you get the idea) but as well London, Melbourne and Toronto. Tho this isn't a solo show or a gallery show of selected artists I'm glad I did enter it. Just for the fact my work is been shown in major cities in other countries.

Once the tour is finished the art work will be in a permanent display in Brooklyn Museum of Art.

During summer I wanted to dive in to the abstract work and wanted to see what I would come out with. I would get a canvas and would layer paint over each other. I would then swipe away layers of the paint away using a screen print swiper.

Like I said in a previous post I came away from this experiment with 4 paintings that I liked above the rest. Two of them was in the Winter blues 2011 Gallery show in liverpool and the other two ("Apox" below and "Obsidian" bottom) are the others that I feel strongly about.


So with summer and a sense of adventure. My friend and fellow artist Sam (Allofusarelost), I took to the street on what could we find. It was a spare of the moment adventure and armed with a bottle watered down poster paint and some wheat pastes we set out on our cruisers.
We found a park and ride that have not been use for years and a rail way bridge. The bridge seems to be a hot spot for graffiti. You have your everyday crappy Blar Blar waz ere crap but there was also some decent street art there. People had been there with rollers and brushers to create their art.
To see what else I have been doing in the last 8 months I will be posting more posts on here and my tumblr. www.zephyrbaby.tumblr.com