SKETCHBOOK

the scanners in this school are filthy!

i'm excited about visiting the hackney marshes. i like my tutor this year as she has lots of good excursion ideas.

EXCALIBUR ESTATE

soz if you're really not interested in estates facing imminent demolition, but the other day i visited another fascinating one - the excalibur estate of post-war prefabs in catford, SE london. the colours look a bit mental and lynchian but these photos are unedited; perhaps the ominous dark clouds represent the threat hanging over the idyll? i'll be putting up photos of individual houses on FACADE HUNTER.

BRUTALITARIANISM

these are some photos i took last winter around the aylesbury estate (the one on the channel 4 thing), which is due for demolition. i find its scale quite compelling, though as a middle class white boy art student it's too easy to romanticise these places. burgess park (first picture), with its roads to nowhere and huge expanse of nothing, is also a favourite of mine as an antidote to all the (delightful but) predictable victorian, shrubbery-laden parks in SE london. i wonder what it'll be like when boris has ejaculated his £2 million on it.

flickr architecture groups i enjoy, from srs bizness to the more ~quirky:
BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE
ARCHITECTURE + UTOPIA
ARCHITECTURAL CONTRAST
(mainly glasgow) TENEMENTS
UPVC - SATAN'S CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL OF CHOICE
STONE CLADDING

DRAWRING

that last post was quite gross so i thought i'd do a gorge ~inspiration post to cover it up:


IGNACE WOUTERS


IGNACE WOUTERS



STINE STINE


ANDREAS BANDERAS


ALBERT SJöSTAM via FINE LITTLE DAY


WOW OUTRAGEOUS

BRACE YOURSELF

at the ripe old age of 25, and for the first time in a decade, i think i might be getting BRACES. lol. thanks to youthful exuberance, my teeth have suffered a few mishaps and these have furthered my front tooth's innate desire to escape from the rest to the extent that the overall effect is (not) pretty busted, to the extent that model acquaintances from college have often insisted on my mouth being shut and a girl in a basement squat once asked how i lost my teeth, the frankly unflattering lighting throwing said front one into relief.

so i got to thinking about how i could try and pull the metal mouth look off and i seriously somehow imagined that a style blog of some description MUST have covered this area; snaps of edgy brace-faced kids in biker jackets and aa, ygm (ok whatever i've been out of london for 3 months, like i know what's hot right now. oh wait, THIS APPARENTLY LOL). but no, there's a gap in the market and instead i got tom and gwen in her nancy from hollyoaks days.



i also find the braces forum which i assumed would be some kind of braces-wearers' support group but is actually mainly populated by germans swapping brace fetishes and sexy links like the above.

PS

facade hunter is back in action!!!!

btw, my old pal steph of N.E.E.T fame (early issues featured my dreadful first attempts at illustration but she's upped its game considerably since then) has started a super blog.

SKETCHY

gently easing myself back into drawing.

sexy! no no no

here is an outfit my mum found in the loft yesterday. i believe it originally belonged to my mental older cousin graeme in the early 90s but when we inherited it as the poor relations, my bros and i lacked the necessary daring ever to wear it... until now. sadly it's come a little too late to make it happen in summer 09 but i think 2010 will be the year of neu nu new pasty-legged rave.

there were many other gems in the binbag containing this, like an oversized tee adorned with multicoloured glittery cats my mum used to wear with leggings (always with leggings. she designs knitwear and this was the era when her baggy yellow with black jumbo polkadot jumpers were her bestsellers), but that's a whole other post.