self portrait in Flash on a Thursday afternoon

I keep thinking it's Friday today. I think this reflects my slightly frazzled mental state.

more Honda

Another of the Honda ads that I've been illustrating should appear in the weekend papers at some point... Here are some details from a couple of the images:

progress

Well, progress of a sort. Sometimes you've just got to rip the crap out of a place before you can put anything back. This will be our master bedroom. Remember how it was, with the black, patterned wallpaper? Not much has been done to it since we stripped it, but on Thursday we got a chap in to rip down the walls and ceiling for replastering. Now we have a very large hole that opens up into the roof space. I call this progress.




Did you all have a lovely weekend? We went for a rainy walk to Aber Falls with some friends, ate a lot of food and tried to keep the dust at bay at home. It's a hard life...

loving

this formica top on this table. It comes with some good PEL style plywood chairs too.

Happy weekend, all!

the weekend

We had a marvellous, super-long weekend here. I really could get used to a three day working week coupled with a four day weekend. We entertained my family at our new house for the first time on Saturday - it was the most wonderful feeling having my own home again and welcoming guests to it. We spent a good portion of our time sprawled on the lawn in the sunshine and watching my Dad wreak havoc on some poor shrubs with a pair of loppers. He is incorrigible.

The picture above is of me berating the weeds (yes, I talk to plants) in front of the house (actually, I think I was murdering a very junior sycamore). Progress has been slow, given our work commitments and too much time spent in B&Q looking for bolts and screws. God, I hate that place!

On Sunday, we ventured into Manchester to rummage in Empire House Antiques, armed with measurements of every room in the house and with the intention of purchasing some wardrobes and storage. My favourite seller in there was a chap called Andy, who trades under the name of Euro Vintage Industrial (find a small selection of his things here on eBay). I wanted pretty much everything he had, and he kept on bringing out more and more things that I loved. We left, a few hours after our arrival, having bought a set of turquoise lockers, a bookcase from a university archive, two grey industrial pendant lamps, a row of old postal lockers for the kitchen, and - my absolute, absolute favourite - a vintage gymnastics horse like this, but smaller, symmetrical and without the pommels. "What are you going to do with something like that?" Andy asked. I waved my hands around vaguely. "Oh, I dunno, use it in the bedroom for draping clothes over or... just to look at". Read this post on Remodelista to see what I'm getting at. I'm mildly concerned that its base is too wide to fit through some of our doors though! The husband is hiring a van to pick up most of these items this week, so photos will definitely follow.


Image from Alex MacArthur.

If you are in the UK and a fan of Trainspotters, Andy may sell it cheaper. For example, he had some of these lights at a fraction of the price. Contact him via eBay or ask me for his e-mail address.

Two lists for today

Currently failing to:
Keep my vegetable seedlings alive
Prepare the beds for the surviving veg
Write this blog
Unpack
Make decisions about what to do with this enormous house
Do anything but work
Keep a sensible perspective on all of this!

Succeeding in:
Berating myself for these failures
Composting
Setting up the wormery
Getting worked up about my workload
Moaning a lot
Procrastinating

Hope you are doing better than me at this life business. The poor husband is racking up his brownie points, cooking and cleaning whilst I slave away at my desk. I have a short respite this afternoon and here I am wasting time writing utter drivel when I could be doing something far more useful...

hello. I'm still here...

Things are a bit out of hand at the moment - I'm working my tits off on new work for Honda whilst trying to see family at Easter and keeping our new house from descending into a wreck. Bear with me. I'll be back soon! Our internet finally started working today, so expect to hear a lot more from me from now on. Happy Easter!

Honda

You may, in the UK, have seen this ad in the weekend newspapers, for which I drew the illustrations. It was fun, trying my hand at a different style. I'm working on more this week, and will put up more images when the ad has gone to print.

Meanwhile, we don't have internet in our new house - I'm using the neighbours' wireless (with their kind permission, of course!) and I haven't had a chance to get a post together about what we've been doing. As soon as I was available for work again yesterday, the phones started ringing, so I'm a busy bee this week.

Drawn - First dates 06

One with my old friend, the Garlic Lover.

I'm away from my computer for a week or so whilst we do the big house move, so hopefully (if we can get our internet to work!), I'll see you back here soon! Have a good week, all.

currently watching on eBay

Industrial wood and metal table from the Netherlands, £599 or best offer.


Vintage German military industrial table £685 or best offer. Ouch!


Vintage painted plaster model of ear, £40 - a good buy, I think!


Another lovely Memlite lamp - Friday's current bid was £1.20. Somehow I think it won't be that cheap for long...


Vintage French school poster £27.50 or best offer - a pretty good price, given how much I've seen them sell for on eBay and in the Paris flea markets! This is the seller.

Sorry, I can't be arsed with eBay links because they expire so quickly, but if you search under the titles I've given the items, they should appear in the listings (unless you're reading this a few weeks after I've posted it, of course!).

Drawn - adulthood 20

It's Friday and I am faced with the prospect of working this weekend when I wanted to be painting the house with the husband. We move in a week today and there is a LOT to do. Eep!

Have a happy, sunny weekend, all!

life drawing

Been working on some web banner animation for the past couple of days, so it's been pretty dull here. I managed to go to life drawing for the first time in weeks on Tuesday, though. Eldyne again.

Lighting

The house is still in a state, but today I seem to be obsessing about lighting. In our old house it wasn't much of an issue because the ceilings were so low that, for the most part, only inset downlighting was possible. In our new place, there is a tall, if not terribly wide, space over the staircase and galleried study (photo above, ignore the loft ladder on the left) that is currently empty and could do with something dramatic to light it up. We also have a 12-foot-high ceiling in the black-papered master bedroom that has no light hanging from it either. Instead, in that room, there is a single, horrible wall lamp positioned in a useless spot. I have a horror of wall lamps, and of the UFO-type of lighting that fits tight against a ceiling. We have at least two of each of those in our new house and they make me feel a bit sick.


So I've been having a think about lighting, and wondering how we can have something fabulous in these spaces without bankrupting ourselves. One of my favourite lighting designers at the moment is Lindsey Adelman. I cannot get enough of these branching pendants: so simple and organic, I think they would work in almost any space. However, I would have to get another mortgage in order to be able to afford them, so I'm considering turning lighting designer and making my own. Lindsey's site has a DIY version of the branching pendant, in case you're a bit handy with electrical bits and bobs. I may rope the husband into this (PhD in electrical engineering? I think he will be useful).



I also spotted this rather delightful confection (above) by Winnie Lui at Rockett St George today. It costs a cool £13,148. I think I could make my own quite easily, don't you? A few trips to the charity shops and boot sales, a rummage in an electrical shop, some bits of fishing wire and hey presto... or maybe not.


In other news, this is the sitting room now. We are moving in next Friday. I get the feeling we will have to work our tits off to make this place even a little bit more ready to receive us!

Happy Friday

What are you up to this weekend? We have had chunks of our house hacked away this week for the damp course and tanking on the rear wall of the living room. The image above shows the old doorway that used to lead into the house that is attached to the rear of ours. It's a bit of a mess in there to say the least. Whilst the plasterers are finishing off, we will be continuing the difficult task of stripping the stairs. We are using a solvent-free, water based paint stripper that is good, but which is struggling against some paintwork that is probably more than a hundred years old, if not much older. Other than that, we'll be doing a bit of gardening and the rest of the wallpaper stripping. Hooray!