Puppies: Better than social media

A graph showing the change in my attention from social media to my dog over the course of time

Two things have happened in my life over the past eighteen months-or-so that I didn’t think were related, but I think have proven to be. The first is that I got a dog, and the second is that I have dramatically reduced my use of social media. And I think the net benefit is that I’ve been happier for it.

I was never particularly big on social media, and my drivers for leaving it behind were I think more down to decisions being made by the platforms themselves. Nobody needs another blog post nobody will read about the downfall of Twitter or how much Meta absuses Instagram notifications, but what I will say is that one of my favourite technological discoveries of the past year is that you can post to Instagram straight from the iPhone’s Photos app, without ever having to open the Instagram app itself. It’s been a joy – I’m still showing the world that wants to see that I’m still thinking creatively every single day, but I don’t have to get sucked in to whatever its algorithm wants to show me when I post my daily drawings.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that having a puppy is a bit like a victorian TV set. It has been surprisingly hard work training a puppy, but boy is it entertaining. Our border terrier is a very funny dog and she provides so much amusement it’s become clear to me that dogs were probably a very good way of keeping people amused in an era before mass media. And boy does she get fed up with me when I pick up my phone!

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I would recommend a puppy as a good distraction for breaking the social media habit.

Two Achievements for Twenty-twenty-two

It’s funny how sometimes doing stuff means you don’t end up doing stuff… like updating this weblog. A year has already passed since my last entry, but that’s because I’ve been doing other stuff. I have two achievements from 2022 that I am quite proud of though, and are definitely worth not disappearing into the sands of time:

I didn’t (but I came close to) win the Klaus Flugge Prize

It’s really been one of the greatest achievements of my career as a graphic artist to have been shortlisted for the 2022 Klaus Flugge Prize – an award for newcomers to children’s illustration – for Alley Cat Rally.

To have been considered one of the six best of the year was just amazing – I’m really not used to having such recognition for the stuff I make. To have had the book published in the first place was amazing (and frankly still kind of hard to believe happened!), and to have seen parents and kids enjoy the book has been just as difficult to imagine, but to have people who clearly know kids’ books and illustration pick mine out from a huge pool means surprisingly a lot to me.

I made a little video about being shortlisted for the prize this summer. I’m not too disappointed that I didn’t win the whole prize in the end – having a certificate to put on my office wall means a surprising amount to a precious artistic ego.

My certificate for being shortlisted for the Klaus Flugge Prize 2022

I bought a house

Speaking of my office wall, the other massive thing that happened in my world this year is that Lilly and I bought a house! It’s a hundred-year-old house in the woods with a garden and a surprisingly generous workshop, and we love it.

As anyone privileged enough to have gone through the process of buying a home will likely tell you, the process was painful, and ours especially so, but it did eventually happen, and we are glad it’s over.

It has been an endless source of projects since we got the house, and in 2022 I managed to make videos about a couple of the many projects I’ve already undertaken. As I’ve probably mentioned if you’ve read my past postings here, I’ve been making videos mostly to try and improve my storytelling and to be less afraid of my own voice, and secondarily because it’s quite nice for me to have a record of what I’ve been up to – something I can look back on and remind myself I did actually do. Chasing views and trying to go big on YouTube definitely hasn’t been my priority, so it was a massive surprise when one of my videos this year did – somehow – go big.

The video that found a surprise audience on YouTube was one about me getting a used Henry Hoover vacuum cleaner and repainting it. I’m usually pretty chuffed if my video view counts get into three figures, so seeing this one ramp up to what is now 160,000 views was just bizarre. It’s a pity that I haven’t earned anything for the entertainment I appear to have provided (especially considering YouTube has been running ads against it, whether I want them to or not), but I’m glad it has provided intrigue.

As far as I can tell, there’s a surprising vacuum-cleaner-fancying subculture on YouTube that picked up on the video. I had no idea why it was this video when it happened though, so it made uploading the next video all the more intimidating. I eventually followed it up with a nice tour of my last Post-it book, which didn’t get the traction at all, and has an otherwise better-than-usual 150 views at time of writing. Hey ho.

Having the house is good fun though. Although I didn’t try and document it in video, I am just a couple of skirting boards and paint touch-ups short of having finished redecorating our new living room now, which is exciting. Maybe some of 2023’s projects will warrant more videos though.

So with those two things alone considered, 2022 was a pretty good year, not to mention a couple of record cover designs I thought were particularly successful last year also. I hope that the highlights continue to outweigh the lows for all people on this planet and others!

Toothpaste and Garage Doors

I continue to find documenting some of my projects by way of video an interesting challenge. I’ve averaged one video a month in 2021, which is a pretty good pace, and think I’ve been getting better at making them, though I’ve no idea how I could get anyone to actually watch them. Here are a few of my more recent short videos I haven’t mentioned on my website until now:

Improving my Game Boy Advance

My little old Game Boy Advance got the consumer-tech-equivalent of sunburn this year, so I set about making it look less putrid, then got carried away making technological improvements to it while I was at it too.

Painting a Portrait of My Dog

I set about painting a portrait of my dog, and timelapsed the process of painting it. I thought it was a really terrible portrait when I was done but not a bad video – and now I think the portrait is OK. I still don’t know if I’m going to put it up on a wall somewhere though.

Toothpaste

This video wasn’t very favoured by the YouTube algorithm, if the fact that nobody has watched it is anything to go by. Or maybe it’s just too random – my better half certainly thought so. Just a little video about finding inspiration somewhere strange and making something from it!

Hospital Top 5

I had posted about the Hospital record cover exhibition in a more timely fashion here already, but over the course of the past couple of months I put together a video about my five favourite covers from the exhibition, and some of the design thinking behind them too. I think it turned out pretty good!

Papa’s Garage Door

My grandpa, who helped me on so many of my random endeavours over time, passed away in 2020. The pandemic dragged the process out, but his passing means that we have been clearing my grandparents’ house recently. So before the house leaves the family, I thought I would document one of my grandpa’s finest domestic engineering moments for historic value. I think an automatic garage door doesn’t seem very remarkable to anyone these days, but if you watch the video, you’ll see how brilliant his home-made one is!

Twentieth Century Maps

An illustration of a lost robot attempting to look at a paper map

My grandpa passed away last year, and though it wasn’t Covid-19 that got him, one of the nth-order-effects of the pandemic is that I’ve had loads of time to explore my grandparents’ legacy. They were fervent travellers, and I recently discovered a box of old tourist maps from some of the places they visited across their lives.

Tourist maps may not seem like such an interesting artefact today, but some of these were just plain lovely. Products of a pre-computer design era, and before they became cheaply-printed vehicles for advertising, they’re just nice to look at.

While I’m sure a 45-year-old map of bus routes in Rome isn’t going to have a functional purpose any more, they’re still such attractive images that I’ve decided to share them with the wider internet under a liberal usage license. I think some of these images have the potential to be used in artwork in interesting ways, which is part of the reason I’ve digitised them myself, in arbitrarily high resolution.

How high-res they are largely depends on how big the physical map was – for the bigger maps I photographed them in pieces, then did a quick stitching of them in my ancient version of Photoshop. Some of the seams aren’t perfect, but that’s not really why the images are there.

Two crops from some of the old maps I found

Surprisingly, this isn’t anywhere near all of the maps in the collection I found, but I just picked out the ones I thought were the prettiest. I particularly like one of the maps of Venice, a surprisingly-cheerful and hand-drawn map of Manhattan, and how much Washington DC looks like a Sim City map.

I hope whoever finds them makes something interesting with them – hopefully something better than opportunists selling overpriced prints of them on Etsy, because that would make me sad. Make something cool, internet!

Twentieth century maps in high resolution

Empathy For The Grass

Timelapse of Wimbledon's Centre Court in 2021

I love watching Wimbledon – it’s full of so many weird traditions that make it pleasingly out-of-step with today’s capitalism-motivated world. There’s so much I don’t understand about it though – like why they play this competition on a surface that ends up completely wrecked by the end of the tournament, just in time for the most important matches.

I took a screenshot of the first serve of every set played on Centre Court this year, at least as best as I could manage, then used Photoshop to auto-align all the frames and export them as this gif. It’s funny to see what becomes of it each year, only to be regrown and re-manicured, ready to be wrecked again next year. Life is a funny thing!

The first and last points played on Wimbledon Centre Court in 2021

Grow Lamp

Grow Lamp story book

A year ago, I did a Risograph-printing workshop with Hato Press that resulted in a miniature story book called ‘Grow Lamp’ – it’s a simple little eight-page wordless story about a robot who learns to care for its houseplant. The story was inspired a little by me buying some grow-lamps to care for my own growing collection of houseplants over winter, when the days are terribly short here in London. I felt really awkward ordering grow-lamps off the internet – like I was the only person using them for their legitimately stated purpose!

The Riso workshop was brilliant – I found it fascinating, like a crazy halfway house between screenprinting and olschool photocopying, but with wicked colours. Here are a few images from the process, and my daily drawing featuring my instructor Rachel Davey wrangling the machine.

Riso machine drum
Gnarly book stapler
Riso prints coming out of the machine
Daily drawing of maching wrangling
Cropping my finished pages

If you’d like a copy of Grow Lamp, I’m happy to send one to you for a modest fee: they are £15 including worldwide delivery on my tiny webshop!

The Great Catsby

Art Deco Cat Flap

Another personal project I’ve worked on during the 2020 pandemic has been an entirely useless Art Deco cat flap! It’s useless on two levels: firstly because I don’t have a cat to flap through it, and secondly because I don’t think it would hold up to a cat’s claws or the elements here in Blighty.

I’ve made another nice video about it, featuring the entire making process. It’s really real stained glass! It was a total push out of my making comfort zone, and I feel quite rewarded for it.

My Solar Robot

My solar robot, sitting on the windowsill, harvesting sunlite

If anybody else is still out there blogging in 2020, I’m sure the last thing anyone needs is a post about the impact of Coronavirus and the public lockdowns that have ensued. I have to acknowledge it though, and stress that I’m trying to not take for granted the fact that I’ve been doing quite well under the circumstances.

I told my dad on a phone call earlier this summer that it’s the introvert’s time to shine: working from home is how I’ve always done it, and doing things like trying to work out cycle routes where I would encounter as few other people as possible is exactly my kind of task.

I haven’t let my foot off the creative accelerator either. It’s physically small, but my biggest personal project this summer has been a robot I have made out of some tiny solar panels I ordered from China, a can of chickpeas, and a tiny little computer.

All he does is rotate his arms to collect power, so he can use that power to rotate his arms again the next day: a perfectly useless little machine!

The project took a couple of months of simmering, and I made a nice little video of the project. A few recent experiences have encouraged me to get over the hump of the sound of my own voice, so I have narrated this video, and I think I’ve done a nice job! I’m proud of the little robot, and proud of the video I’ve made, so I’d love for you to give a couple of minutes to watch it.

Lo; post-it note book number five!

It’s the customary ‘I’ve filled up another post-it book!’ post!

Book number five spans from late 2018 to summer 2019 – about a year and a half. Across that time, I put 720 notes into my book, at a rate of at least one a day, as one gets put on the social medias every day too.

Every page from my fifth sketchbook full of illustrated post-it notes

It’s not just the dailies though – I use post-it notes to sketch out other things too. In this looping, blink-of-the-eye video, I’ve tried to highlight some of the notes that have already become other things.

These books are such a valuable trove of ideas for me, I’m sure more is going to come of them over time!

Waschmann spins again

My new attempt at an old painting of a spaceman-washing-machine

It feels a little silly to paint a picture I already painted a few years ago, but the Waschmann caught my attention again recently. I was thinking about how my attempt at contrasting a matte space sky with a glossy robot body didn’t really work on the canvas surface. I decided I’d give it another go on a harder surface, and it would be a good excuse to have another go with Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0 paint (and by funny coincidence I then heard it featured on 99 Percent Invisible recently too). I’ve got to say – the Black 2.0 paint is super disappointing. The best thing about it is how it photographs, as it’s very easy to blow it out to 100% black when post-processing, but in person it’s laughably not-black. Even regular old System 3 process black is dramatically darker to the human eye, even with a gloss glaze over it. I hope Semple’s Black 3.0 paint is an improvement, but I’m less inclined to try it considering how disappointed I am by the 2.0.

My old attempt at painting the Waschmann

My painting is a little better anyway – it’s a lot more subtle without the thick black outlines.

 
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