The Singleton Years

I am attempting to sort through all the STUFF that was moved out of my studio during the great Studio Ceiling Disaster, in an attempt to chuck or save it before I move everything back in to the now lovely, crisp white room.
Anyway - got distracted as I found some old, old artwork, so I thought I'd share it!

I used to draw a cartoon for The Scotsman magazine called The Singleton (yes, very Bridget Jones). I was given free rein by the art director, Sandra Colamartino, who trusted me for some reason (despite my NEVER having written and drawn a cartoon before). She also had a very awkward little space to fill on the horoscopes page!
There are millions of these little ink drawings, all of the characters are based on friends and real life happenings. The idea was that The Singleton was a girl about town, but not as sassy as the Sex and the City lot...more jacket potato and a pint of shandy kind of character.
Date on this one - 2001...and it is number 53!!

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.