Paul's journal

X-posted to http://paulcarneyillustrationz.blogspot.com/

Hm.  Haven't been doing the blog thing in a while.  This feels strange.  But nice to be back.  Lately I have been so caught up in doing my MA, but 'tis done now and I passed! :)

Been meaning to write some sort of summarized explanation of what I have been up to, and it occurred to me that I could do worse than simply to post the final essay that we had to write at the end of the course.  Now, that was fun!  On an arts MA you are required to do some pretty strange things, like hanging pictures on walls(?) and talking about your work (Ack!), but every now and then, sweetest of joys, you get to write...
So here in its entirety, should anyone wish to read it, is my ( Reflective Essay )

Birthdays and other occasions seem to be coming thick 'n' fast at the moment.  Which provides Paul with the opportunity to have lots of fun making cards!  Yay!

First up, here's one for my lovely friend and former fellow student Carly Greene, whose unofficial birthday was last night although the real one is tomorrow.  Muchos fun was had by all at the Comedy Carnival in Clapham.  The card is a not-in-the-least subtle reference to Carly's fondness for Pino Grigio.  


And here's one for Mummy, last Sunday having been Mothers' Day (at least here in Britland).  The allusion is to two of the strongest features of home life at Carney Towers; Mother's addiction to "cream horns" (why do they always make me think of Peter Cook..?) and the daily ritual of watching Bargain Hunt, with the one and only Tim Wonnacott.  Honestly, if you haven't been compelled to watch the show as I have to on a daily basis as part of Quality-Time-with-the-Folks, you're missing out on a truly surreal experience.  The contestants invariably have some dark secret, like belly-dancing, female impersonations or writing appallingly bad poetry, and demonstrate their skills whilst the delightfully OTT Mr W fixes the camera with his desperate "for God's sake get me OUT of here!" grin.  Neither Mummy nor I has the slightest interest in antiques, but we hoot with laughter as the hapless contestants buy a load of rusty old tat from the market stalls and go on to make humungous losses at auction, while Mr W rolls his eyes in despair.  Though he always rallies by the end of the show and exhorts us, with an impressive high kick that will one day land him flat on his arse, to "join us again soon for some more Bargain Hunting, yes?  YES!!!" 


And here's one for my adorable friend Emma, who was most unusually in the country for her birthday a couple of weeks back.  The reference here is to an incident last year when I was due to go out on a "dating" situation at an Indian restaurant in the baddest and most inadequately lit part of Peckham.  Getting hopelessly lost and/or injured would have made a poor impression on my "date" (who was already noticeably underwhelmed by my endearing habit of colliding with lampposts and other lurking obstacles), so lovely Emma came to the rescue and offered to take me there on a practice run a couple of days in advance.  Now usually Emma can make herself virtually invisible at will, which was sort of what I had in mind, as I was due to reappear there two nights later with a different woman.  Sooo, imagine my alarm when she showed up in a radioactive hat and engaged the staff in a half-hour conversation about Indian cooking.  Sure enough, on the Big Night, I was getting some odd looks from one of the waitresses, who asked my "date" "do you know about Indian cooking too?" which I assume is girl-code for "he's two-timing you, the bastard!"  Actually it was a really nice restaurant, but there's no way I would ever have found my way to it through the Wasteland without Emma's uncanny route-finding skills.

It has been brought to my notice that at the beginning of next month, the college I attend is holding a Disability Week!

God help us all...

It seems there will be "drop in" sessions for staff and students to discuss the issues involved, because, get this; "Making the arts truly inclusive is central to the mission of the University..."   It actually says that.

Back in the real world, my experience of the situation regarding disability issues at college has been pretty much what you would expect, really.  On an unofficial footing, individual members of academic staff and fellow students, particularly my Subject Leader, have been extraordinarily kind and considerate, and a huge amount of goodwill has made it possible for me to function, up to a point, in an extremely difficult environment.  

It's a slightly different story, however, when you come to admin and technical staff, and official college policy.  Just after enrolment last year, we were inducted into the alchemic mysteries of the college's print studio facilities. Rooms full of toxic chemicals and man-eating machines.  Definitely pretty high on the list of most terrifying experiences of my life.  I timorously asked whether there was any provision in place for the needs of visually impaired students, and the head technician just snarled back at me that his staff didn't have the TIIIME!!!!  Which seemed a little odd in view of the fact that his colleagues in admin had had all the time in the world to take my life's savings off me the day before.  Never been back to the print rooms, but last year I was so naive that I thought the course would actually be structured, and that compulsory screenprinting might be a part of it.  I can't forget how worried I was at that time.  It was horrible.  I got me an appointment with the head of student welfare or whatever the hell she was, to see if something could be worked out.  Let it not be said I didn't try to meet 'em halfway!  But she just cooked up some laughable scheme whereby I could be accompanied by other students on a voluntary basis.  Like I would  ever be prepared to put that responsibility onto another student!  

Sooo, as things stand, having paid as much as anybody else, I find I am attending an establishment that, so far as I am concerned, offers access to no resources whatsoever.  3/4 of the way through the course, and so scared of the building in which this year's degree show is to be held that I will probably just drop out before graduation.  And now they want to have a "Disability Week".  Too little.  And way too fucking late.  Should I actually "drop in" and try to reason with these people?  I even thought about it, but I'm so tired now... 

Some more very-rough stuff from a recent bout of storyboarding.
Civilization has had to start over (the only remnants of the past being a few fragments of the works of Desmond Morris) and is still at a pre-industrial level of technology.  So if you need to make a long trip, animal-drawn transport is the only way.  But with horses long-extinct (or are they...?) what kind of beastie are you going to use?
Okay, so the choice was influenced by recent total immersion in the work of genius illustrator Mauricio Anton in  The Big Cats & Their Fossil Relatives which I got for Christmas (Yay!)  Carnivorous mammals have been used to pull things before, of course.  And not just sledges.  My dad has researched the history of milk floats (God help us all...) and apparently, although horses were the norm, some were drawn by teams of dogs.  I bullshit thee not, for I have seen the photos...
So... a cat big enough to pull a carriage, with an appropriately docile and compliant temperament.  Why the hell not?  Well, it seems there are good reasons why in the real world dogs pull things and cats don't.  Cats, large and small, are essentially sprinters and pouncers.  Long distance trotting is not their thing.  So it was fun to do a little delving and find out why.  It turns out that the all-important differences lie in the relative proportions of the limbs and, crucially, the length and flexibility of the vertebral column.  It is the relatively short, rigid back that allows a dog or wolf to lope for miles without wasting energy or getting tired.  Therefore a cat that can pull a carriage will need to be rather un-moggylike in its proportions, though there's no reason why the old sabre-teeth condition shouldn't re-evolve for old times' sake.
See, I don't just get pissed and draw whatever comes into my head, you know.  I think about this stuff.  Wonder if anybody ever notices...     

I love organic shapes!  But the moment it comes to drawing any manmade object, be it a vehicle, a building or whatevr, I start to fall asleep.  I was quite chuffed with this carriage thing, though.

Oh, now I get the hyperlink thing!  Actually I don't think it's changed.  I've just been away so long I forgot.

My tutor thought these creatures were having sex.  (Rolls eyes)  What's really going on here, as I thought was perfectly bloomin' obvious, is a symbiotic arrangement between two species that allows them to function on land, in water or in the air.  The fish can't walk so he hitches a ride on the frog, who in turn cannot fly, so the fish carries him through the air. 
I was trying to be imaginative here, but what was striking was just how little I had to adapt the fish, who is of course based on the West African Butterfly Fish; a species that really does possess the capacity for true flight as opposed to passive gliding (the fins are powered by large pectoral muscles) and really does have the fins on its underside modified into fingerlike projections, which in real life are used by the male to grasp the female during courtship.

What is going ON with LJ at the moment????  I miss my hyperlinks!  And now it takes about half an hour to post anything because the page keeps crashing.  Bah!  

 

Possible panel for my MA graphic novel project.  The idea here is that the larval form of the strange insect-creature that my hero has been sent to study is infested by  internal parasitoids that slowly drain its bodily reserves.  Their feeding on its brain tissues alters its behaviour so that when it is close to death it climbs into the higher branches of a tree and spins itself a sort of resting-place of solk where it lies down and dies, while the parasites complete their development.  After which they burrow out through the host's head and fly away like lost memories.

This is meant to work on a number of levels which won't necessarily be apparent.  but obviously a lot of recollection from childhood when I used to breed moths and other insects.  When you're keeping caterpillars collected from the wild, sooner or later you find those that have been parasitized by those tiny black wasps that eat them from the inside.  Never forgotten how horrible that was.

I thought that  these parasitoids should look as simple as possible.  One pair of legs, one pair of wings, a pointy ovipositor and one big eye.  But they just didn't look right until I made them hairy (which doesn't show up particularly well at this resolution).  Wonder what Desmond Morris would say, bearing in mind his wonderful theory of why girls don't like spiders.  The world would be a duller place without Desmond, which is why in my future world he has been elevated to the status of a deity.

It's also a nice instance of Paul dodging the issue.  Originally the creature was going to meet its end on the ground.  Climbing to a high place as its final act seemed rather more evocative, but it had more to do with the fact that it was the only way I could find to put the scene together.  This way there doesn't have to be any marriage between foreground and background.  I had an idea that the MA course would lead me to some mystical means of getting around the pinhole vision and creating whole scenes.  I now believe this is impossible, but that's okay if there are clever ways around it.  Feels like cheating, though.  Like Lowry, who apparently couldn't draw horses' legs and so, er... didn't.

Must admit I'm having some trouble pulling together pieces like this and the storyboard roughs I'm working on.  Thematically they're from the same source, but I'm still troubled about the look of the thing.  Whether I could put this much work into every panel and ever get the project to any kind of conclusion is highly doubtful.  I can see why so many graphic novels are drawn and coloured in quite a simplistic way, which is probably not the best of what the artist could do, given unlimited time.  Some would argue that any finished product is better than an interminable work-in-progress, but I'm profoundly repelled by the thought of going around forever afterward explaining that I could have made it look really cool if only... blah blah.
In my very limited experience of the genre, it does seem that part of the graphic novel's "coming of age" is that people seem to be taking more care over making them look really great.  Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls is a case in point, though the look they've gone for is not to my taste.  I think I have no choice but to throw everything I've got into every panel.  Apparently I don't need a full set of finished spreads in order to graduate at least, which is just as well.  This piece brought on a recurrence of the headaches that crippled me throughout the bee book, although nothing like as bad, now that I know I need to keep one eye covered at all times when I'm working.   

BTW, why won't LJ let me do "hyperlinks" anymore?

Hello all!  I have been truly abysmal at posting and commenting for sooo long.  So sorry about that!  Stuff was going on, but Paul is determined to make some sort of comeback...

Well, then, here's just a wee samplette from a batch of storyboard roughs I was working on over Christmas.  Having lost all critical faculty by now, I had no sense whatsoever of whether there was any merit in the work, but I've just had a tutorial with best-art-tutor-of-all-time-EVER  Janet Woolley (http://www.arenaworks.com/artists/janetwoolley.html) and it seems things are going rather well after all.  Apparently I can get away with my own short-attention-span approach to narrative and pacing, and even my inevitably minimalist approach to backgrounds.  Yeeha!  Not that there isn't room for improvement of course, and I now have a batch of genuinely exciting suggestions to work with, particularly in the areas that were giving me problems like use of colour and more interesting ways of juxtaposing text with images.  The future's bright...

 
I'm slightly miffed that I have allowed standards to get the better of me and spent well over a week on a piece that ran to about 40 Photoshop layers and several bouts of fairly acute eye and neck strain, for which I will not retain copyright.  Bah!
I've checked my terms and conditions, and I am definitely okay to post this on a blog or website, but please be mindful that anyone caught nicking and re-publishing this will be hunted down and exterminated by a certain publishing house.

This is the "waggle dance" performed by a worker honeybee if she knows the whereabouts of some particularly juicy flowers and wants to tell her fellow colony members where to find them.  The intensity of the waggling tells them how far to travel, and the direction of the dance indicates which way to go, with the present position of the sun as a point of reference.  Some brave souls working with the Asian Giant Honeybee (a species that was never domesticated because they have an annoying habit of defending their nest and are fully capable of killing a man) have recently discovered that this species sometimes forages at night but still communicates in exactly the same way, with reference to the sun, being somehow aware of its precise position on the other side of the world.

Ideally I wanted the dotted line to be a series of elongated dashes, but every single dash would have had to be rotated to exactly the right angle according to its position on the curve, and it would probably have taken about a month. 

I am under tutor's orders to take the whole process of drawing "less seriously".    

Here's a card I made for my friend, fellow student and genius illustrator, Carly Greene, who reached the grand old age of 26 on Sunday.  Amongst her many other contributions to making Camberwell College of Arts a fantastic place to be, Carly has singlehandedly organized our forthcoming class exhibition at the Waterloo Gallery.  She is SO cool!  Yay Carly!!! 

This attempt at a third Staff-led Project didn't progress beyond the initial sketch phase because of the time factor.  The theme was "Little-known facts" and there were some pretty cool ones.  Did you know, for instance, that the United States has never lost a war in which mules were used?  And apparently a duck's quack has no echo, and "no one knows why..."  Well, I don't understand how, but why seems fairly self-explanatory. It stands to reason that when danger threatens, a mother duck (and it is only females who quack) would find it very useful to call her young to her with a sound whose direction they could easily pinpoint.  If it was echoing all over the place, the ducklings would have a hard time knowing where to go.  But I digress.
Right in the middle of this list of weird facts was the above information regarding what happens to cats when dropped from different heights.  Surely the point that needs to be grasped here is that somebody actually saw fit to "research" the consequences of throwing live animals from high buildings.  I mean, WTF...?

I promise, I will actually get around to posting some finished artworks soon...   

 
I have very little grounds for complaints, since the whole ethos of art school seems to be "do whatever the hell you want", but from time to time we are required to complete "staff led projects", basically fulfilling one of a range of briefs that one or other of our tutors has worked on in real life.
It only seems onerous because because as usual I have left it to the last possible moment (the end of Unit 1 being tomorrow.  Oops!) to discover that we are required to complete not one (which I did months ago) but three of the bloody things.  In somewhat of a hurry I picked out the magazine article about Prozac.  

I'm sure there should be more to life than this, but I cannot imagine what...

 Sort of developed this bird character quite some time ago, but there was something not quite right before.  Then I figured his beak was just too thin and pointy.  I think he has lots more character with a very deep bill like an Abyssinian raven.  
The idea here is that Abyssinian ravens have for a million years or so been subjected to the same forces of natural selection that turned a green fruit-pigeon into a dodo, except that they've retained their high brain/body-mass ratio and even increased it, developing an advanced culture and... well, you can't expect me to give away the whole plot, now, can you? ;)

Today (well, yesterday, as it looks like it will be after midnight by the time I post this) is the 80th birthday of Desmond Morris!

    
These abysmal doodles are by far the most important work I have done since starting college, and probably since long before then.
After getting accepted to college, I started training myself to go out, with the ultimate objective of being able to draw whilst out and about again, like the old days.  You have to understand, this has been a lost skill because ever since getting my diagnosis it has been one of the activities that is strictly taboo.  Sketching, reading or any activity that gives away the fact that one is not completely blind will very, very often provoke anger in others.  If they've just given up their seat for you on the bus or something, this is kind of understandable.  But keeping up the "act" is a big part of making one's way in the world, even though it often means being unable to make full use of the sight that one has.  It's remarkable how even in South London you can bumble along like a little clownfish among anemones if you play by the rules, but even so much as inadvertently making eye-contact can expose you as a fraud and might easily lead to trouble.  It is an extraordinary and counter-intuitive thing; everyone knows someone who is hard of hearing, but there appears to be no concept of hard-of-seeing.  Sight is apparently perceived as like a light bulb, that either works on full power or doesn't work at all.  Strange, but there it is. 

That's pretty much why I have a huge mental block on that most artistic of pursuits; sketching in cafes.  It's just not allowed.   Not for me.  I've been working on this ever since passing the college interview.  Part of the strategy involved going to the same cafe as often as possible, and getting accustomed to the people (that bit wasn't hard, 'cause they're lovely) and the physical layout (which was hard, but not impossible due to the much better than average lighting).  After umpteen visits, occasional crude scratchings were made on tiny pocket-sized sketchbooks while no one was looking, but actual observational drawing was still out of the question.  It's hard to explain when you know no one is going to attack you or call the police, it is still very difficult to overcome the conditioning.

This is why today represents a significant leap forward.  Feels like I have begun to break through the "permission barrier".  Small beginnings, of course.  The first sketch is of a friend and fellow student who was busily sketching me at the time.  The others were two women at the next table, which was really too far away to see clearly except they had pale faces and dark hair which was kind of nice.  It felt okay today, but there is safety in numbers.  The real challenge of doing this kind of thing when alone may take a little longer.  I'm really pleased with myself, though.

On a less chipper note, I went blithely buzzin' to the local high street printers today to get something done for college, and... it had GONE!!!  The place is now an African Takeaway.
 

 
For what it's worth, here's my finished piece for the staff-led project "How to Boil an Egg".   A valuable exercise, although some of the lessons learned were somewhat negative ones about what to avoid in the future.
One thing that I've definitely established is that I never want to work in ink again.  It takes too long, hurts too much and just never looks right.  Fortunately I'm discovering alternatives about which I'm really quite excited.

Another lesson is that my concentration span seems to have diminished to an all-time low, from which I must conclude I will never be any kind of editorial illustrator.  I just didn't have any belief in this idea beyond the sketchbook stage where it should have remained.  Presumably hence the extreme sloppiness of the last couple of panels.  If the spirit isn't interested, the flesh cannot be arsed.

On a brighter note, Paul's quest for graphic novels that might provide some sort of inspiration continues apace, and a sumptuous and hefty package showed up at the door on Saturday.  Turned out to be the three-book set of Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, which I ordered so long ago that I'd forgotten all about it.  Nice when that happens.  Content-wise it looks like being a bit of a smutfest, but the presentation is SO classy, with all the lovely soft-focus artwork.  A nice reminder that a book can still be a really gorgeous object...

 
A propos of nothing, and in the spirit of showing more rough sketchwork that might have been better left unrevealed, here's a bit of very basic storyboarding I found in a sketchbook the other day.

On the course I'm studying, we get to pursue mostly our own projects, but we have been given a few "staff led projects" too.  The theory is that they will provide some diversion for anyone in the grip of illustrators' block, as well as offering some insights into the nature of commissioned work, since they are all based on briefs that members of the teaching staff have had to fulfil in real life.  Some of them sound deadly tedious at first, but for the purposes of the exercise you are supposed to assume that you'v been selected for the brief precisely because of your quirky originality, and therefore you have licence to do pretty much anything you want.

"How to Boil an Egg" was one of the briefs, and it occurred to me that the only way anyone would ever get me topay attention to that would be if it were in the form of a training video presented by world's-greatest-actress-EVER Amanda Plummer.  Since Ms Plummer is known for the intensity with which she throws herself into any role that she accepts, a comic strip on this theme seemed replete with possibilities.  Trouble was, apparently no one at art college has ever seen an Amanda Plummer movie or has any idea who she is.  If that ain't the 7th Sign of the Apocalypse, I don't know what is...  

In the end I went with a completely different storyline involving Cherie Blair clad only in a pinny, getting the most out of dropping the egg into boiling water by pretending it was Gordon Brown.  Bit o' politics there! Oo-er!  Oo-er!  (And a bit of an eighties reference there!  Sometimes I wonder why I bother...)  It wasn't too bad, but I rediscovered this rough-as-rough draft of my original idea the other day and it seemed potentially so much funnier.