stuff and nonsense

Hi peeps. How are you? I've been a bad girl, I know. But I thought I'd pop by with another update of what I've been up to.

1) Last weekend was spent at one of my dearest friends' hen do in Oxfordshire. I ate a whole, and rather large, sea bass all by myself at The Swan at Southrop. It was delicious and indulgent. We went to beautiful Burford, where we had lots of scones and pottered around the little shops. I came home with a set of vintage butter knives, I couldn't help myself. It was a wonderful, snowy, cosy weekend full of laughter and great company. It's so good for me to get out and see friends. It reminds me that I'm not just an illustrating/baby-making machine.

2) I've been considering making a necklace like this one, from old brooches and bits of jewellery. I want something kooky, blingy and totally over the top to wear to a wedding in March, because I'll probably be wearing a plain black jersey dress over my burgeoning belly that will need some serious pepping up. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm currently stalking several job lots of vintage brooches on eBay and hoping for a bargain. Image from Lovejune on Etsy.

3) I'm currently working with some nice people at Oxford University on an animation. I don't know how much I can disclose, but it's been a fun challenge so far. The hard bit starts next week, when I start animating to a tight schedule.

4) It's that time of year when I should be thinking about what I should be growing in the garden. I've been lacking energy recently, and the cold snap has made spring seem like it's ages away yet, but it will be March before I know it and little seeds will have to be started. It's so exciting. I just need the husband to do any heavy work for me this year. We may even get chickens, but I think this is a fantasy.

5) I started baby and nursery pinboards on Pinterest. But have I bought anything yet? Uh. No. I'm kind of more interested in growing vegetables. Just kidding.

Hope you are all well.
xx

Pirate's Life

Just a link today: stunning hand-drawn animation for a music video. I wish I had the skill and patience to make something as beautiful as this. Sadly, I get bored just doing a 30 second animation of cat and dog silhouettes. Sigh.


We Cut Corners "Pirate's Life" from Kijek / Adamski on Vimeo.


Have a good weekend, kids.

New work

A sneaky peek at a still from the animation I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. Flying giraffes? Oh yes.

QUIT - Loony Lungs

You poor people who have to travel to work in the mornings might have picked up a copy of the Metro newspaper today and seen a feature in it about the Loony Lungs viral ad campaign, created by Saatchi & Saatchi X for the quit-smoking charity, Quit. The full article can be read here, in D&AD Behind the Idea. I was, with the help of my lovely agents at Jelly, the designer and animator for this campaign. It was a hoot making these!



Watch Sky Dive here on YouTube (links to the other two films can be found here too). Thanks to the people at D&AD and Metro.

Friday...

Yesterday in London was a long day. The interview went OK - you know how it is when you have so much to say, and so many ideas but there just isn't time (or you end up sounding like some rambling madwoman...)? I feel like I said most of what I wanted, but maybe I didn't get across how much I care about it all. It turns out that there are twenty-five animators going for just three films, to be made next year, so it will be tough to win the job. We will just have to wait and see.

To top it off, when I got back to Flint, which is twenty-five minutes drive away from home, it was blowing a gale, which was scary enough on the big roads, but when I was just three minutes from home, we were stopped on the road by the police telling us that a tree had fallen down ahead and was blocking the road. So I had to turn round and feel my way home in the driving wind and the dark, via some tiny country lanes littered with other, rather large remnants of tree. I was glad to get through the door safely, I tell you. But then the power cut out just after I'd washed my hair - so I went to bed cold, wet-haired and unable to sleep because a) the wind was too noisy, b) I'd just had a cup of tea and c) I'd eaten too much sugar.

stuff...

I seem to have stopped writing about things other than my drawings and work. I can't seem to do a bit of both. If I've posted a drawing onto the blog I feel like my work is done and I forget to talk about the other things in my life. Not that you are interested in those other things, but I kind of think of this place as a diary, so that maybe I can look back later on and know what I was doing and thinking at different times.

Here are a few random things I've been thinking about:

A sudden and overwhelming craving for bitter melon.

Smile for London sounds like a lot of fun.

I've not been to an auction for AGES and I miss it.

Beautiful Welsh products from Damson and Slate.

This is one of the artists in my life drawing group.

How amazing is this film? I saw it at Annecy animation festival a couple of years back and it still blows me away and I don't know why.

I have also been investigating lots of very boring things like government grants for loft insulation, the efficiency of woodburning stoves, what to do with asbestos roofing... yeah. It's all fun and games here.

Yorkshire

What a marvellous few days I have just had! I feel like we kind of deserved it after the trials of house selling that we have been burdened with lately, and it was a hugely welcome break from sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, waiting for work to come in.

We went to Yorkshire on a whim, after hearing that my parents and sister had booked a hotel there for a couple of nights. They, of course (!), were very pleased when the husband and I decided to join them and, because he is a Yorkshireman, the husband could therefore act as an unofficial tour guide to the holiday places of his childhood.

We stayed, as I told you last week, in a railway carriage hotel called The Sidings, near York. I've written about railway carriage living before (and here too), so it was a chance to see what it is like. It was fun and quirky, but not the best place to stay if you like things a bit more luxurious than what was on offer. The decor was a bit tired, it was rather cold at night even in summer, and unless you are an extraordinarily sound sleeper, the violent rattling and vibrations from the freight trains passing by at night could be seriously disturbing! I would only recommend it as one of those experiences that you'll never forget :-) Nevertheless, the hotel retained a faded beauty and I was delighted by the little details to be found on the train carriages.



That last photo is of the four-poster room, which costs £10 more per night than a standard room. Needless to say, miser that I am, we stayed in a regular room :-)

Where did we visit? Knaresborough, Whitby (AMAZING fish and chips at The Magpie), Scarborough (gorgeous banana milkshake at the famous Harbour Bar), the North York Moors, Yorkshire Wolds and the Yorkshire Dales. All in roughly two days. Holidays with my family are always conducted at breakneck speed. There were waterfalls, walks, beaches and picnics. Crazy but fun!


Knaresborough.


The Harbour Bar in Scarborough.



Evening view from the Yorkshire Wolds.


Gordale Scar, Yorkshire Dales.

We had a house-fixing day on Saturday involving handing over fat cheques to plumbers :-(, followed by a rummage at a car boot sale and Toy Story 3 on Sunday. The film was exceptional, a constant delight - it left us quite speechless.

I hope you all had a good weekend too!

tired

I know you probably have worked this out already but I am having a tough time at the moment. There are so many things going on in my life and consequently my head, that sometimes I feel like I'm going to burst and collapse into a big, weepy pile. The combination of work and house-selling/renting is driving me to the brink of my already limited sanity. I just wish I could escape it all for just a little while.


If I could, right now I would like to:
1. Eat pierogi and borscht at Veselka, New York.
2. Play on the beach. Any beach.
3. Make silly stop-frame animations with my teddies. Pure idiocy.
4. Go swimming somewhere hot, or in the lake at Annecy.
5. Go hiking in Scotland.
6. Gorge myself on panzanella and trippa alla Fiorentina (that's tripe, oh yes) at the amazing diner in the Mercato Centrale in Florence.
7. Go home and get my Dad to teach me all, like, EVERYTHING, he knows about Chinese cooking because he is so talented and I want to cook like him.
8. Go somewhere out of my comfort zone (and no, that doesn't include moving house to somewhere 250 miles away): Indonesia, South America, India. Somewhere fabulous. But armed with insect repellent.

The husband and I will be away on Thursday and Friday, looking for a hovel to rent up north. Have a good couple of days, and enjoy the weekend! Wish me luck.

Avis

Here's a sneak peek at some illustration work I recently completed for an Avis promotion. It will be animated by my friends at Jelly.

Yuri Norstein

Yesterday I was frantically trying to come up with ideas and a treatment for a new animation job I've just received, and I went off on some over-ambitious plan to make the film using a combination of Flash, Photoshop and After Effects. I wanted it to look a bit hand-made, like traditional paper cut-out animation, or the silhouette animation of the incredible Lotte Reiniger (here's Hansel and Gretel). I also referenced the sweet end credits of the Lemony Snicket film, 'A Series of Unfortunate Events'. I've not seen the film itself, but the credits are great fun.


So I was scrabbling around for examples to send to the client, and remembered one of my very favourite animators, Yuri Norstein. He worked using paper cut-outs under a traditional rostrum camera, moving each element with painstaking attention to detail, creating the film frame by frame. I admire such dedication and patience since I lack so much of it myself! His chef d'oeuvre, his masterpiece, will always be the gorgeous and melancholy 'Tale of Tales' (watch part 1 here), but a lot of people find it weird, over-long and a bit tedious despite its luminous beauty. When you consider that he created everything using bits of film and paper (as well as some clever lighting - that fire in the early scenes was created from reflections of a real fire!), rather than fancy computer effects, it is truly breathtaking. His skill and vision still make me dizzy with wonder and envy.


One of his other, much shorter and funnier films is 'The Hedgehog in the Fog'. So if you're feeling like something a bit lighter, this is the one for you. It is a delight.



Of course I'm not about to make something as beautiful as any of the things I've shown you, nor am I intending for my film to be close in style to them. I just thought you might like to look. Plus I'm quite convinced that the client will hate what I've done and ask for something else :-)

Some links for the weekend - old friends and old soap

I used to work for the lovely people at 12foot6 and still get their newsletter with updates on their recent work. Yesterday they sent me a link to some ads they have done for the new Puma Phone. I thought it was pretty cool - having worked there for more than two years I can spot who did each ad - it's great to be able to see the hallmarks of each particular artist. I'm almost certain whose hands those are, and that weird chap at the end... well... I won't say who that is.


And the other day I randomly came across this site, Carbolic Soap, which sells exactly that - carbolic soap in all sorts of different forms and formulae. Now I don't have any memories of this stuff, being a child of the 80s when things were changing, and also being Chinese with no family history in England. But I know the smell and I love it. The site probably needs some work to make it more attractive, but if you're looking for traditional household products that are hard to source, or old-fashioned soap for sensitive skin, then this is your place. They sell stuff like Mitchell's shaving soap and a repro dish for it, reproduction washboards, all sorts of interestingly wrapped soaps and lots of household cleaning products. Weird and wonderful. I would certainly have some of these floating around my house just for the pretty packaging.

I'll post up my next drawing later today. Have a great weekend, kids. I am trying to find something interesting to do with the husband in the godforsaken part of the country that we live in (East Anglia) that doesn't involve stately homes, garden tours or activities for Mother's Day. Aaargh!

happy Friday!

for most of you anyway. I have barely started the weekend's work. I need SERIOUS pressure and horrifying time limits in order to get into gear. So far I have taken some screen grabs, saved some reference pictures of tractors, wheelbarrows and honeybees, watched some old television adverts on Youtube, puttered around looking at inappropriate footwear on eBay, eaten a chocolate bar, made coffee... and I'm going out to dinner tonight so NOW I'm wondering what to wear. You see, it's a big thing for someone who doesn't leave the house a lot - it's a chance to wear something proper and for someone other than myself to SEE it. Poor me, I know.


If I had the money and were feeling brave, how about these fabulous Luxury Trousers from Nadinoo?! A real statement. Take a look at all the other Liberty-print clothing that they make.

I also posted up the soup recipe that I mentioned yesterday. It was amazing. You should try it although you might need a strong constitution to survive the corrosive stench that your body might make afterwards. Have a good weekend!

One Hundred Days - no.36 and an exciting job

I'm now up to my eyeballs in work and my weekend is going to be non-existent. But for an animation job that relates, albeit rather tenuously, to one of my food heroes, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, I will gladly work my arse off. Bet you're curious now!

Here's a drawing for today. I will try to pop by tomorrow, but I'm not lying - I'm going to be busy!

new work

Some of my most recent work for Skoda has just come online here(EDIT: sorry, the ad isn't up in this space any more!). It's meant to be a bit like a children's pop-up book, so when you activate the pull tab on the right hand side, it all pops out. Sorry about my awful screen grabs.

What happens is the banner appears at the top of the screen like this:


It animates a bit if you just mouseover it, but on the right hand side there is a pull tab, which you drag down and it all pops out to look like this:


There's more to come later, but this is the first. Click on the link to have a play - it's quite fun. I'm glad I didn't have to do any of the coding for it, though! eek!

EDIT: Boohoo! the banner isn't appearing on the site all the time - I'm getting a vauxhall banner right now, so if it's not working, don't blame me! I'll see if I can get them up somewhere more permanent on my website or something when all three pieces are finished!

the weekend

was smug-making - we were in a local junk shop and they had not one, but TWO pieces of wonderful 1970s G-Plan furniture in GREAT condition. I feel kind of bad, I hate spending money, but I couldn't resist getting the little chest of drawers that were from the Fresco range, first manufactured in 1966. It is just such good quality stuff. Just to make me feel more smug I found this chest on eBay selling for five times what I paid for it. Unfortunately, the other piece was a Fresco sideboard and we most certainly don't have room for that in the house. The chest is now the proud container for my piles of A3 paper, printer paper and junky bits of card, and it looks great next to my mid-century desk. I think one can have too much teak in the house - it's quite orange, but I like to mix things up and a bit of modern is kind of cool, I think, next to 17th century wooden beams. I would take a picture, only the weather is so grim here that the room is depressingly gloomy. Maybe some other time. G-Plan still make the Fresco range today, but it looks different from how it used to. Read a little more about vintage G-Plan here.


What else? We went to see Up by Pixar - what a delightful, sad, funny, imaginative film. I loved it for its beautiful animation, character design and storytelling. And the talking dog, Dug. OMG, I wish I could have him for real! (Image from collider.com)

Chris Ware

The work of Chris Ware has been blogged about to death, but I thought it at least deserves a mention here. In particular I wanted to talk about storytelling in comic books. Admittedly I've read precious few of these, usually finding them difficult or being uninterested in their content. However, a few years ago a friend gave me Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth, which turned out to be one of the most incredible books I have ever read. I could write about it for pages but I'll try to keep this short. Firstly, the story is unusual for a comic book - it tells the story of three generations of Corrigan men, centering on the story of Jimmy Corrigan's first meeting with his estranged father. It is a careful study of loneliness and crushing social awkwardness on the one hand, and on the other hand it explores ideas of paternal neglect and desertion, and the repercussions these can have down the generations of a family.

It's certainly not the easiest of reads, but I have always believed that a book isn't really worth reading unless it challenges you in some way. It should make you think, make you bang your head against a wall trying to figure out what it's about; it should make you angry, elated, amused, any or all of these things. The book has plenty of critics who find it dull, ugly or impossible to read. It is sometimes a bit self-conscious in its sidelong superhero references, or in its use of classic comic book devices to tell the story, but I think that the overall work is extraordinarily beautiful. Its very self-consciousness adds another layer of meaning to the story - at the very heart of it is Ware's inquisitiveness with regard to storytelling structures.


Great storytelling is about narrative and sequence. So firstly there must be good content but more importantly it is about the way in which the narrative is presented in time. Storytelling is made great through the thoughtful pacing of a story and the ways of telling it with imagination and dynamism. I think Jimmy Corrigan is an almost perfect exposition of these ideas - it is meticulously planned but playful and very often surprising or even baffling. There are straightforward pages laid out in a classic style, interspersed with beautiful, serene images that allow the narrative to breathe, as it were. And sprinkled throughout are these curious diversions: cut-out-and-stick houses, collectors' cards of views in Waukosha, and even a mid-way summary page (below). All of these are interwoven with occasional flashbacks, dream sequences and grotesque fantasies. There is a palpable sense of loneliness - created through the sombre colour palette and the hiccupping pacing that flows and ebbs throughout, enveloping moments of desperate quietness or crippling anxiety. I am sounding properly pretentious now, so I'll shut up. I can only recommend reading it to see what I'm harping on about.



All images from Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware.


Oh, and if you want to see some wonderful animations by Chris Ware and John Kuramoto, check out the This American Life animations here and here on YouTube. They are stunning and funny all at the same time, and demonstrate the translation of these storytelling ideas into moving image.

annecy animation festival

Image from 'Yulia' by Antoine Arditti

Every year since 2005 I've been attending the big animation festival in Annecy, France. This year, like damn fools, we decided not to go. When I received the newsletter a couple of weeks ago it made me feel quite sad that I wasn't going to be there trying to crash parties that I'm not cool enough to attend, or eating delicious apricot pastries for breakfast. I have great memories of swimming, walking, eating out and, of course, sitting in that magnificent Grande Salle watching films. Last year we stayed in a stunning 17th century loft apartment with beams and a view across the rooftops of the old town. I bet the weather will be great this year too - we froze our arses off in the lake last year :-/ I'm not bitter or anything, not me.




Image from 'Spãrni un Airi' by Vladimir Leschiov

It starts this Monday and I've been looking around the short film selection to see what looks interesting. Only two out of forty films are British this year - pretty poor, really! One is the latest Wallace and Gromit film and the other is this colourful one below, by the Brothers McLeod and titled 'Codswallop':


I have to say very few of the short films have impressed me in the last couple of years. I recall a discussion with one of my tutors at university about the quality of the short films at the big festivals and how he thought that a lot of them were chosen for their style over substance. For him, the key to a short film should always, always be the story. Whether it's serious, funny, factual or whatever, inspirational content and good storytelling should always be at its heart. Last year's winner of the Annecy Cristal (and an Oscar too!) was a Japanese film, 'The House of Small Cubes' by Kunio Katō. It was both beautiful to look at and carried by a very sweet story that was just on the right side of sentimental. Click here to watch it (image below).


Of course, the graduation films are usually a better prospect - I think students haven't had the time to disappear up their own arses about their 'art' yet and often make refreshing use of an old medium. The commercial films (TV ads, music videos) are a lot of fun too.

In fact, whilst putting this post together, I discovered that my supertalented, lovely friend Mia Nilsson and Linda Kalcov made a music video for One Eskimo, and it will be screened at Annecy this year. Well done ladies - I'm so jealous! Click here to watch a clip from this lovely, whimsical video.


Image from 'One Eskimo - Kandi' by Linda Kalcov and Mia Nilsson.

Phew, that was a long post! I'm off for a couple of days in the Cotswolds (in the rain :-/). See you after the weekend!

animation

Here are a couple of ideas for this animation job that I've just sent over. I bet they'll hate it and ask me to use brighter colours and draw some really cheesy characters. It's always the case with me... We'll see, eh?