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Thursday 22 October 2009

SKETCHBOOK







the scanners in this school are filthy!

Monday 12 October 2009

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.

Friday 25 September 2009

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

Wednesday 23 September 2009

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



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.

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 lads 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.

Wednesday 9 September 2009

SKETCHY




gently easing myself back into drawing.

Wednesday 2 September 2009

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 for 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.

Monday 31 August 2009

(not) changing (that much) rooms




last year i moved into a grubby magnolia box room that was unfurnished apart from a divan, two drawing pins and a few stray pubes. my lack of initiative meant that i lived in squalor for the earlier part of my stay above foneworld, which culminated in the sub-how clean is your house scenes (what's more embarrassing, my discarded scants or that libertines single?) pictured above. anyway, then i decided to paint the walls white, set up an old decorating table my housemate had left over from an exhibition, put my clothes in a cupboard on the landing instead of the floor, realised that i could improve the layout by putting the bed next to the window and that the increase in noise from one of South London’s noisiest junctions, full of winos, drugs and weapons (lol lol lol) was marginal. sadly i didn't take any nicely staged photos of the stunning end result (i even had a petunia in there at one point) without a DELL on show for starters but still, l@@k, it's not as gross!



Sunday 30 August 2009

FLICKR FAVES II


In England's green and pleasant land by 2 live & draw in coventry

one of the flats down the road from my old old house in camberwell has window boxes painted in green and white hoops and says celtic park above the door on a floral plaque.


omg rabbits by sarah-wynne

who knew that black and white rabbits run wild in canada?? this rabbit reminds me of my first boyhood rabbit, jumper. later we had a dwarf lop-eared rabbit named bun that vanished from our back garden at around the same time stories were circulating locally of an animal fighting ring hungry for new blood. obv my mum and dad didn't tell me this til i was 20.


Liverpool Home Kit circa '89 by daniel has potential

so so so so so good i really should draw something soon


bungalow bliss by Totalitaria

the bit about changing the face of rural ireland is very ominous. this bungalow looks EXACTLY like a hornby model i built circa 1994. i only had a train set so i could have the accompanying houses. my favourites were the red brick victorian semis with sash-effect windows.


by s manara

wot u like peckham

ps - is this the real jay rayner?

Thursday 13 August 2009

fit





work from the end of second year. hiya!

Monday 16 March 2009

a single, definite thing

hiya. i have a drawing in this, so you should go.

Monday 5 January 2009

09 all whine

it's a new year and time to clear something up once and for all.



in may 2005, sara wrote this after we'd had a seminal msn conversation:

"phases of internet talking:
C says: so 1 is 'r u going out 2nite? u fancy her lol'

C says: 2. I really hate it when people use bad grammar. Heh. They're losers.

C says: 3. omgzz!!!!1111111one!111 STFU lolzzzzzzz

C says: 4. yeah hes a dick lol

4 is the most advanced phase of internet writing but you have to go through the other 3 first well i never did the first tbh but at least two.

whatever. I inspired this conversation colin was basically recycling what i said the night before. yeah, and it's so true. so for anyone stuck in the 'Heh, why can't you retards spell' phase GOD SO FIRST LIVEJOURNAL KILL YOURSELF NOW. haha i no. and for people needing to justify their lol and omg with extra digits after the exclamation mark..i understand...but soon you'll just have exclamation marks or none at all and not care about adding anything on to it. because you don't care lol. i think i've reached a higher spiritual level. lol
"

i'd like to think things have moved on since then and it's likely i've been hanging out in morally dubious internet forums lately, but the number of "I am a grammar Nazi" (often followed by a comma splice before the nazi elaborates, incidentally) types about is still alarming. i'm not actually saying this because i'm unable to write a grammatically correct sentence (guess what i think it might be time to bring up the fact that i was 2nd in higher english at the top state school in scotland again!!!!!!! until recently i was labouring under the illusion that i was first but over christmas my friend adam brought out a copy of our 2002 school magazine which confirmed that a smug boy whose mother's apples i distinctly recall refusing to eat (such a brat) in the early 90s because they were organic held that title).

a lot of the time the internet seems to demand a more ~casual~, conversational approach to grammar and conventional rules just get in the way (lol). i'm not proposing a quirky, unique new style, although natch i did go through a brief sub-ee cummings &mpersand phase. when you're writing something spontaneous on someone's facebook wall, say, the aforementioned comma splices and even NO PUNCTUATION WHATSOEVER between independent clauses are not only acceptable but desirable - it helps the flow, and feels right. in a way it's like writing naturalistic dialogue in a story, except it becomes completely un-self-conscious.

re the lol issue - GOD. people actually say "you're not actually laughing out loud when you write lol" after the age of 16? OH REALLY OH OK THANKS BABES. imo being a ~grammar nazi~ is something you should grow out of as a precocious adolescent, along with hating pop music and thinking all tv is for retards.

one thing i do worry about for the future is whether or not there's a cut off age for typing all in lowercase. it's another thing that i think suits a lot of internet interaction, but when you reach a certain level of maturity is it the communication equivalent of an elderly man in a babygro? idk.