Guess Who's Back, Back Again...

And so I return to blog a bit more about the utter randomness of life in the last lane. It's been a while, and this is down to a few reasons -

1. I've been busy

2. I got bored

3. I aint got the internet anymore.

1 and 2 aren't really that interesting, but 3, 3's been the bane of my life. We had to move house a few weeks ago, but the new place isn't ready so I've had to find a stop gap for a couple of months. That means no internet unless my useless wi-fi is strong enough to piggy back a signal from one of the surrouinding businesses. My dongle wasn't even strong enough to pick up a signal from a router 15 feet away in the house so I wouldn't hold your breath. If only there was an advert where a strong wi fi card kicked sand into the weedy dongle's face encouraging the weak one to buff up, but alas....

So, I have to make do with work's net, and it blocks all the good stuff so don't expect a return too soon.

Angels

What did you do this weekend? Nice trip out with loved ones? Bit of a binge down the pub? I spent my Friday night in hospital.

I had a fairly routine op on Friday. Starving through not eating since Thursday tea my good lady and myself spent 4 hours in the lounge in the day ward watching daytime tv while she ate crisps and drank pop - never has the smell of sweet chilli crisps and Pepsi Max been so enticing yet so violently offensive especially to the sound of Angela Rippon wasting licence payers money at some French car boot sale. Eventually getting to a bed about two o'clock where we waited and watched old men with waistbands around their nipples trying to walk on crutches while being told that the current op must be a bit tricky cos they were running late. Eventually I went down to theatre in a open back gown with my arse on display to the world until I put my robe on.

While waiting for my anaesthetic I informed the staff that I was crap with needles so a nurse held my hand still while they put the cannula in. I say held, it was more of a wrist lock/chinese burn combination and that is all I remember until 2 hours later when I started to come round in recovery with a plastic mask on my face. That's when the problems started.

On coming round I was told my sats were low.

"wur?" I enquired.
"your sats are low Dave"
"whudamin?"
"there's not enough oxygen in your blood. It should be over 95%, yours is 89"
"whu?"
"Are you a smoker?"
"uh"
"Right. I think we need to keep you in overnight for observation"
"uh whurami?"

And then they trundled me back to the day ward to where Mel was and connected me up to an oxygen supply and stuck some things on my fingers then told me how to breathe. I was the only one on the ward.

"You ok baby?" she asked
"whudaydoowin?" I answered
"You look like shit."
"fankew"
"We're keeping him in overnight"
"Oh, is he okay?"
and the conversation continued like I wasn't there, which to be honest I probably wasn't.
"Does he smoke?"
"He gave up yesterday and went on the patches"
"oh, right"

Then in arrived my anaesthetist to talk about me to Mel instead of talking to me. Then my surgeon turned up to tickle my foot. Closely followed by the porters to take me to the ward, all the while I'd still not eaten. Before moving me off they gave me an egg mayo sandwich to take with me. I was so hungry I almost ate the box as well.

After a session or two with me breathing in steam Mel left me at 9, to the sound of the tv showing some sex swap comedy. That's when things got trick as I really needed a wee.

"Nurse, can you help me to the loo please?"
"You can't use your foot yet sir, I'll get you a bottle."

And so I had to piss in a cardboard bottle in a room I shared with three men and by this time Arnie and James Belushi. There is nothing more embarrassing than urinating while sat in bed knowing people can hear you. I don't suffer from performance anxiety, I can happily piss and talk in public loos, but this was different. And I was behind a curtain.

After a patchy night's sleep I woke up on Saturday about 6 am with my cannula half hanging out. Being stubborn I hobbled to the loo, I wasn't even asking this time. Shuffling down the ward I almost ran to get in to the toilet, dragging my heavily bandaged foot behind me. Dropping my arse onto the seat I didn't mind the severity of cold plastic on fleshy cheek because the pleasure of release and flow of warm wee overtook every sensation I could have had. It was like being blessed by Christ, seeing your first child being born or kissed by Molly Ringwald, I was nearly crying it was such ecstasy. So hands washed I get back into bed and press the buzzer. Up pops the nurse and with a smile on my face I ask to go home. One check of sats later and I'm on the phone to the missus asking to be picked up at 9.

With my bag packed and my gown on the bed they came with my medication and release papers then provided me with a Velcro canoe.

"This is your flat shoe. You need to wear it when you walk."

It was a massive cast shoe The label said medium. If this was medium then I was Cheryl Cole. This made clowns look like Chinese ballerinas.

"Wear it, I can surf on the bloody thing." The last time that I'd worn anything like this it was strapped to my leg and I was opening the batting at school.

"We'll have to go to pediatrics for a small then."

I was being given a kids shoe. Not only a kids shoe, but a kids spacca shoe. I was a junior Joey. Would the earth open up and take me now please.

And so I was released to limp down the corridor, head slung low, chins to chest, into a world where I have to keep a carrier bag in my pocket in case it rains. A world where I can't get out of the bath without a intricate system of ropes and pulleys. Where I can only wear one shoe, which is good cos I only have half the socks as usual in the wash. I've got this for at least two weeks. Bugger.

The Key - inks

I am a freak amongst most comics people, because, with the exception of of fellow PJANG artist Uncle Tony, I am the only person I know who enjoys inking.

Back in college when everyone else was learning how to mix gouache properly, I was spending my time perfecting the art of dipping pen and brush. I mean, I could actually draw using a paintbrush, who'd have thought of that? Brian Bolland for one. The skill that man had with a 00 Windsor and Newton sable was immense. I'd got pissed off at a very early age of the 00 as you kept having to refill the tiny brush head every two or three lines, but according to Bri, he drew whole episodes of Judge Dredd with the dreaded 00. Me, I was drawing with twigs and cotton buds dipped in thick black India ink. Loved the stuff. And I loved the feel of drawing with a spindly metal split point mapping pen, attempting to perfect the delicate and scratchy John Ridgeway approach. Even when the nib got stuck in the paper and cut it up, throwing spatter over the page.

And so we get to the inking part of The Key. Lately I've been inking with a Pentel Brush Pen which runs off a cartridge like a fountain pen but has a thick brush point that when mastered produces some mighty fine lines like a dip pen. I'm still trying to get a consistent result doing that and I decided that for The Key I wanted a delicate line to contrast against blocks of solid black and white spaces. Instead of reverting to the trusted Gillot nib and holder I went and spent a fortune on a Rotring art pen. These are like a fountain pen in look and in nib , and again run off a cartridge but the handling is far better as is the quality of line they produce and don't dig or splay whilst being used. However you don't really get the variety of line a mapping pen gives because the nib is fixed and doesn't open very far when you apply pressure.

These are the last two frames of the first page, which are in flashback. In his script Rol asked for an obvious visual difference between flashback and modern day, which will be the topic of the next blog.

The Key

So I started on my next venture with Rol - The Key, and decided that I'd like to keep a log of what I'm doing with it. I haven't kept a work log since Uni when I had to keep a journal of my work in video production as part of my assessed work. They could have been written on a Rizla - "Made shit film, put very little effort in. Was alright I suppose" I hated video production, lugging around a weighty Super VHS camera and having to knock together something I wasn't really that interested in. I only took it because the other option was Broadcast Journalism and you had to do a production module every semester. I wanted to be Paxman, they seemed to churn out a lot of people wanting to be Ben Shepherd.

I had received the script from Rol about a month back when I was still working on Blinded..., and had intended to leave it a while so I could get on with my own stories but I hadn't finished writing the strip so decided to start on this one, reckoning I've a good four months to do it in, and at a page a week I could manage that easily while still having time to do my other stuff. So I went down to the swimming pool , and after finding the deep end I went and jumped in.

I'm a bit odd in as much as if I have a full script I tend not to do thumbnails. I look at the script and do a little frame layout based on how much text there is on that frame or if I need to do an establishing shot, and then get on with it. Why repeat work? I won't be talking in depth about stuff, and I won't be spoiling anything, just concentrating on the odd panel here and there that I like, along with different stages of the work. And there's definitely NO SPOILERS So here goes, as we start at the beginning with page 1 frame 1...

Frame 1

Script by Rol Hirst

1. A suburban street – starter homes and flats rather than family homes. A
summer evening, still light. Richard (30s, scruffy, stubble, jeans and denim
shirt) walks towards one particular house, trying to look like he belongs here,
trying not to look shifty.

I hate doing buildings, and as the opening scene I had to do a good job. Enter extreme close up to avoid drawing all those pesky windows and details. Also, shove in some hedges to avoid that too.

What I do love doing is little details not mentioned in the script to create realism. There's no request for a car, and I hate drawing vehicles so why put one in? It's not too bad a job either?

Note the blue lines - I sketch layouts first in non-repro blue, normally inking straight from there, but here I used the blue to draw perspective lines in without confusing myself. Also I've roughed in where the title will go so that I don't put any important detail there that may get covered up by text

I had Get Carter on while I was drawing the page. I love that film, so bleak and yet so vividly colourful. It's the best film Caine ever did. So I decided to pay tribute in one of those unscripted moments to one of the greatest film score composers for his chilling theme.

It was then that I noticed I hadn't drawn the lead character walking through the frame.

Next: I probably forget to draw something else important

Blinded By The Light

Finally finished drawing Rol's Blinded... strip this week which will appear in his PJANG #3 alongside two other strips. Next up for Rol is another 20 page story called The Key which I hoped was an adaptation of the Urban Cookie Collective's house track The Key The Secret but unfortunately it isn't. Here's the first page of Blinded in it's full glory. Further details for PJANG can be found here

Fast Broads Sketch revisited

It's been too long between posts, over a month and it looks like it's not gonna be much more often for the foreseeable future due to work, the course I'm doing and my life interfering with things. So to try and keep up, here's a sketch of Carl from Fast Broads.

Carl is Scam's best mate, they've been together since school, and he's the eternal optimist, the dreamer. He knows life is rubbish but tries to make the best of it. He likes Pulp, William Shatner, pub quizzes and Cinnamon Grahams. He doesn't like the girl from 4 music who keep popping up on T4 and ruining his weekend with he personality free presenting. he wonders how many cocks she had to suck to get that job. But he hates the girl with the mad hair from Big Brothers Little Brother more. I mean, what kind of name's Zezi? And don't you need to be able to read if you use autocue?

Fast Broads sketch

Lately I've been drawing strips written by other people but have had a hankering to get back to doing ones I've written myself, mainly a series of short Fast Broads stories. I started FB about 13 years ago as a series of single issues and mini series that interlinked through a set of characters. I was trying to see if I could write a generational dynasty thing - you know, the story of a family throughout the generations told through one or two members of it. I started it with Modern Life Is Rubbish drawn by the glorious Chris Askham which featured a drug addled Scam and Carl on a night out. They popped up again with Scam's cousin Holden in Wake Up With Peter Engel which never finished as I got embroiled in my final year of degree studies while working a million hours a week and drinking pretty heavily. Scam's brother Will turned up in Fast Broads: Worthing drawn by Chris. Written in full but never fully drawn it'll stay in the ether of small press history as Chris went through a crisis of artistic confidence and I sold the computer it was written on to pay for baked beans but never kept a copy of the script. Two issues were printed and published a few years back. I wrote some more strips starring the McNeill family and started to draw them but gave up to do other things for other people and found them again recently while cleaning out a cupboard. Looking back through them I got ideas to start them again as the art needed tweeking and the dialogue was a little clunky in places. So I started to do some character sketches. Here's one of the young Scam McNeill done for a story about youth clubs and Yazoo. Expect it, at my current rate of drawing, in 2010, or sooner if I get the chance

Nigel

Going through the cupboard i found this old portrait of my old mucker Nigel which I knocked up in a couple of minutes using a Blue Black Lettraset marker at a pub meet. I love Lettraset markers, they're three pens in one with chisel, thick bullet and thin nibs all on the same body. I coloured a whole comic with them a year ago as you can get a blender and various tones of colours.

Unfortunately I stopped using them and opted for Photoshop to colour everything I'd drawn for speed reasons as I had less and less time to dedicate to drawing. Sat here are boxes of paints, inks, Chinese brushes and pencils all waiting to be picked up again when I have the time. The only implements regularly being used being a blue lead pencil, a Rotring art pen and a Pentel Brush Pen. The idea of going back to life classes keeps going around in my head and if I do, I can't wait to get out the old tools of the trade

Interview with the Dave-l

As part of Chris A Free Man's Interview 2009 I was interviewed by Meghan who very kindly asked me the following



You have many references to your artwork and illustrations (which are really great, by the way) on your blog… when did you first become interested in the art world?

Thanks. I kind of got into drawing when I was about 7 or 8. There used to be a couple of TV shows that showed you how to draw on kids TV which I used to watch between coming home from school and doing my jobs on the farm I grew up on when I was about 5 or 6, and I was an avid reader of British comics like 2000ad and Look and Learn, but I wasn’t really interested in it, we had countryside to play in and animals to look after. When my folks split up and we moved into the town I kind of lost myself in reading and drawing, as the fields were quite a walk away and there wasn’t much else to do. I kind of taught myself to draw from watching Tony Hart and Rolf Harris on the TV and looking at my comics. Look and Learn was great because it was an educational comic and you’d get these lush oil paintings of nature and it kind of got me into trying to paint as well as do these crap biro pictures of Dan Dare.

What's your favourite piece you've ever created?

I don’t know if I have a favourite piece, but I really liked the work I produced in life drawing at college and it was the only part of the course I’d really put effort into, as I hated the rest of it. I couldn’t afford to get new glasses at the time and spent most of my time there squinting and trying to bluff that I could see when quite obviously I couldn't because my eyes are worse than Mr Magoo so I'd end up with all these blocks of shape and shade rather than a proper image, but our tutor for those classes didn’t care about how exact your work was, she wanted to see how you were pushing yourself to be better than your last piece. She forced me to look at stuff differently and try to approach things in new ways so I'd end up working in negative space or in scribbles rather than lines. They were possibly my favourite pieces, which is a shame because I left art college in the early 1990s.

Who is your favourite artist/favourite work? Why?

There’s too many, but I really love Hopper and Lowry for their depictions of average people going about their days. They may be very different in style and subject but it’s that glimpse into other people’s lives that I love. I like David Hockney, who is from where I grew up in the north of England and his bright splashes of colour and movement which contradict so much the grim and gritty place he grew up in that you can see why he had to move to California and more up to date I love the elegance and mystery of Jack Vettriano. His paintings remind me of old pulp thriller covers. I also love comic artists like Philip Bond, Jamie Hernandez and Sean Phillips.

What do you like best about living in the UK (yes, that's an odd question, but I'm a boring American…)?

At times I can’t stand the place, with it’s nanny state government and the idea that seems to be over riding the population of that nobody is responsible for their actions. I keep reading about people who’s only defence is “It’s not my fault, I only did it cos I didn’t know any better.” These are adults. And if the adults are like that what hope for their kids? But then I think of the history of this country and the culture, that where else would we have something so rich and full of life as the words of Shakespeare, The Smiths and Olivier. Where you can walk through towns where you can physically see the country 500 years ago. I like the idea that we have a sort of free press, and that the media isn't totally controlled by advertisers and putting out lowest common denominator product all the time. We seem more open to trying new things but reserve the right to complain about it while doing nothing to change things.

And then there’s the countryside. Man, the countryside is beautiful here

What do you plan on seeing next "Wednesday Film Night?" If you could only watch three movies for the rest of your life, what would they be?

That’ll be a surprise as it’s the girlfriend’s turn to chose, but I hope it's not Confessions of a Shopaholic. If I could only watch three films for the rest of my life, it’d have to be The Elephant Man which is the most beautiful film ever made, Breakfast at Tiffanys, which is the defining George Peppard moment (and I’m a massive A Team fan) and The Breakfast Club. But it’ll change tomorrow and probably include Dunstan Checks In

In one of your recent posts you question what the "Big Guy is playing at behind his pearly gates." What would be your idea of the perfect afterlife?

I don’t really believe in an afterlife, but if I pictured a pefect one it’d be in a bar in the countryside of Ireland with all my friends, family and my heroes drinking Guinness and having a sing along the world’s greatest supergroup played all our favourite songs while the chef cooked dinner for us all. Music, food, drink and good company, what more do you need in this life? It'd be a shame to lose it for eternity.

Random question: what's your best/funniest/oddest memory of your childhood

I don’t have that many memories of childhood, but when I was about 5 we were at my brother's friend's house after school playing Scalextric. My brother was being a goon and not letting me have a go, so I thought I’d be sneaky and pull the plug out enough to stop the cars but not be noticeable. However I wasn’t looking and touched the pin with my finger while it was still in contact and gave myself a massive shock. I got sent home for messing about and had to tell my dad who gave me a slap for playing with electricity.
On a similar note my mate and me found some porn by the canal a year later, and took it home. My dad asked me where I got it from and I told him. He gave me a slap not for being 6 with porn but for being down by the canal without a grown up.

I'm interviewing Ryan, and it's all good fun. If you fancy a go at being the next Paxman go over to Chris's blog and sign up for a random victim and inquisitor. It's a good way of finding new blogs to read and to probe the mind of someone unknown

blinded page 3 detail