New Folio Pages and other things of note

I am absent again, am I not?
Well, it is back to school time, fresh start time and all that, so busy busy.
This time of year usually means that I arrange some new folio pages for my books in the USA. Obviously I print out illustrations from actual jobs, but I also like to do speculative pages, personal stuff etc too. It is good to show all the other things you can draw, or think about too. I get quite a bit of work from random drawings or ideas I have printed out and put in the folio, so it does pay off.
Anyway, I am currently working on another animation with Eskymo (an epic - it's half completed but involves animals and cars) and these are SOME of the car drawings I have done for that, which I have composed into a folio page.
Generally I am crap at drawing cars, but I do love drawing them. Students, cover your ears/eyes, but i NEVER go and look at cars for reference, as I prefer making them up. You could never tell, could you.

What else am I up to? Well, waiting for some feedback on the first round of sketches for the new New Yorker/Mass Mutual job. I think Labor Day held everything up but we don't have that holiday in the UK, so I was twiddling my thumbs, champing at the bit to get going on it!

I am also working on a nice wee project with my fellow visual communicators at Edinburgh College of Art as part of the 500 Years of Printing In Scotland celebrations. Jonny Gibbs (my boss!) has organised an exhibition called Imprint and we all have to produce an edition of 15 prints responding to the theme of 500 years of printing in Scotland - quite open.
I have not done much printmaking but I want to get into our juicy new printworkshop at the college and do some screenprinting, but also using digital print too (which I do do) My ideas keep changing, but I am actually going down a bit of a conceptual route, unusually for me. Saying that, I do want to draw King James IV of Scotland (he granted the licence for the first printing press in Scotland to Chepman and Myllar) as he looks such a metrosexual thug, with his spaniel ear hair-do and furry bling bling. He did love his books though, bless 'im.
Anyhow, our exhibition will be on at the Art College in October, but I will post more about that later on, alongside my Imprint image.

Oh, can also say that I LOVE this woman's work - Marian Bantjes - beautiful, brilliant and she writes a mean essay too.

First Animation with Eskymo

YES! Finally I am doing some animation(last time I was still at college). So many people have said to me that my work is crying out to be animated and so after a bit of a hunt around to find an animator to work with, I found Evie Milo at Eskymo...just down the road in Kinghorn.
We had never met spoken or known each other's work before, yet I popped down to her studio, set up my laptop and Wacom tablet and she fired up Flash and we just spent a day fiddling about with a load of inky files I had prepared for potential animation.
We decided that my illustration "Balloon Dog" featuring a shocked looking little girl would be fun to experiment with. Neither of us expected to end up with a complete wee film at the end of the day, considering we had just met for the first time - but we did.
I wanted to keep the inkiness of my original drawings and not have to vectorize everything in Illustrator - Flash did the job beautifully as you could import fully layered files from Photoshop and just start animating and adding sound.
8 hours,a few home made biccies and a bagel lunch later we came up with this cheeky little number. I have a feeling the Quicktime movie uploaded here might be a bit jumpy for some reason - if so, please go HERE to see a better version of it!

Both of us felt that Little Girl should also wet her pants...but that will be in another version, I am sure.
It was great fun to work together and we are planning on producing more films later this summer which will certainly be added to a new Motion section on my website.