The above images were made for Help! My Vagina is Falling Out! - a non-for profit organisation run by volunteers that have experienced - either personally or professionally - the struggles of being a mother. They want to work together to help anyone struggling with postnatal depression, pregnancy or being a mother.
I had loads of fun making these, particularly that elephant.
Moby Dick illustration - inspired by my inability to get through the book. I borrowed this book ages ago from a friend and have so far failed to get though it. I believe we even had some sort of bet that I would get through it in 3 months or something. Try 3 years.
Inside the book is this inscription:
"To my long lost friend Ernie, may we live forever
love, John Gray."
I think that's pretty beautiful and inspired me to really really want to want to try to read this book. It was going great, then I stopped. Perhaps this post will really relight my desire to find out what happens. Or perhaps as is more likely, it won't.
It really is a great book though, I'm about half way through it, and will endeavour to get it read. The illustration came from the feeling that I had to get back into it. I also wanted to make some more covers as I had done for 'The Catcher In The Rye'.
There's something really nice about making book covers, especially a book like this, where there is so much to draw from, which incidentally I have made it all the way through. This was made for a Forbidden Planet Blog I wrote about in a previous post. I don't know if there was ever a winner but it was good to do and was posted here:
I recently created this image for my friend Dave's Folk Punk project, Pullman Porter. His music can be viewed here, the first song is my favourite, which incidentally has me and my wife to be on backing vocals on the chorus. Hooray!
While we're on the musical thread I also made this for my band 'The Dead Anyways'.(also with Dave) We needed something green and anarchic, so who better than lovable Children's TV pantomime villain/Witch, Grotbags. I'm pretty sure she didn't dribble like this but these things just happen when I'm drawing. Will possibly be coming at you as some sort of tee shirt soon!
We play some exciting 3 chord punk music, a selection of which, as well as my face in deep concentration can be heard on bandcamp:
Over the years I've made a few different things with Dave; I made the video below for him about 6 years ago, for an acoustic song called 'Bred From Honour'. Basically, it's filled with big robots destroying stuff with an underlying message about big corporations and all of that. The robots themselves are now being incorporated into a new project I'm making with my studio mate Anthony Lamb.
I think it is always good to revisit old pieces of work - I think there are a few faults in this, but there's a lot of fun bits and pieces in it - it's pretty simple too. I'd almost forgotten it existed up to a short while ago, and enough time has passed where I don't look at it and feel too critical, it's just having fun creating something for someone else.
