Taking a line for a walk

Writer's block.
I was going to end it there to be funny but realised the universe could in no way allow me to live.

Anyway I mean this blog to be a record of the various screws up, breakdowns and brickwalls I face and my clumsy attempts to climb over them. Writer's block is a bizarre one - sometimes I sit hunched up on the floor of some train station, typing frantically as I can see the last percent of my laptop battery melt away and I know that if I can't finish what I'm doing by the time the power goes, then the world will implode. Other times I've been sat in the sunlight on Hampsted heath with this kickass view in front of me and a load of cake and I've got nothing - I've reworded a few sentences I wrote a week ago, but anything I come up with reads like the obituary of Robert Gair; inventor of the precut cardboard box (researching someone boring enough to make that analogy work depressed me alot... Wikipedia has a history of the cardboard box page here. I DARE YOU.) The will to write seems to come and go in waves and I'm going to try and pay attention to it a bit more to see if I can do anything about it (science, right?) but I was reading a foreword to a book by the illustrator Shaun Tan recently and he spoke about an interesting way of facing writer's block when it comes to illustration - taking a line for a walk.

When you have a blank page and no brief, there's no limit to what you can draw and you'd think this means you could just come up with anything, you know just go nuts - but in practice it's really difficult. So Shaun suggests just drawing a shape, any shape, the first that comes into your head. From that you just let your imagination fill in the rest. You immediately get an impression of what you want this shape to become and in that instance you can suddenly visualise the rest of the image. It's a lot like how your brain constructs an image from the shape of a cloud; selecting shapes it's familiar with and piecing them together into an image it wants to see - which is something I'm going to be focusing a lot in my book The Cloud Shepherd (title drop... boom). So here's my go at taking a line for a walk:

The shape I started with was the curve along the top of the hut on the left. Then immediately it was "Oh hey that's a hut. WAIT. Moon hut." I'm calling it welcome to the neighbourhood and I'm not going to be boring and try to explain it more than that.

This one's different - I started with the curve of the beak and then the rest of the image came from something I've been wanting to draw for a long time but couldn't visualise as a scene. Anyway this is a character from the book named the Raven King or else the Collector of Things. It's very unfinished as you can see but hopefully I'll be able to layer up all the bits and pieces and finish it up. I was watching Spirited Away recently and one of the things that I love about Ghibli films are these big piles of stuff you get in the back of some scenes - so I'm aiming for something like that.

Last one I did before the line walking concept but it was similar in that I started from the idea of something having a perfectly spherical head and filled in the rest from there. Apologies for the crap quality, I don't have photoshop or a good camera or any idea what I'm doing - and not just with this. Anyway this is called the Sun Giant and my idea here is to extend the taking a line for a walk idea to writing by putting together a short story just from this image. It's not a cure for writer's block because a novel needs to have a cohesive, thought out plan if it's to be a novel. But I think it's an interesting experiment (moar science) and let's see how it goes. If you made it this far THANKS. One again I'd really appreciate some criticism.
 
Peace out.

Panic

So this is just a short one. I've got really into sketching recently. It's a combination of being super poor right now, spending a bit of time with a friend of mine, Otto, who is pretty awesome at it and, lastly, me being a naturally competitive ass.

I'm writing and illustrating a children's book called The Cloud Shepherd (because, you know, clouds look like sheep amIright?) and a lot of the sketches are me trying to work out how characters and scenes look before I try to write them. Anyway, the other day I lost one of my sketch books (I'll negate any would-be suspense right now by telling you I re-found it in my underwear drawer) and it sent me into a bit of a panic. So I decided to upload a few of the things I've been working on recently - it'd also be nice to know whether people like them and would be interested in seeing more - maybe with the accompanying text.

 Here're some designs for the main characters. The first was a quick sketch in biro based on a picture by Shaun Tan (boss) called Portrait of the Artist. I then tried to emulate it in the second picture, changing the hairline and colour, rounding the face and changing the skin tone. I also added a sky-whale because sky-whale.

This is the final design for the main character. I gave him more sticky-outy ears because I tend to draw a lot of things like that... not too sure why... and rounded the face some more. I really like the paint apron as part of his design so I'll be keeping that and I gave him a cloud-dog to play with.

Here he is again, with another of him jumping for a cloud and wearing an overcoat, I'm not the best at legs so I'm trying to work on those a bit more - I'll let you be the judge over whether I manage to pull it off or not.

Here are the first sketches of the titular character, the Cloud Shepherd. He's a completely original design  but I wanted to give him a monk type feel and I quite like the belt made of rope that you get in a lot of monks and priests (think friar Tuck in the disney version of Robin Hood). In the book his beard is quite cloud-like and tends to float off on its own a lot so he has to keep tucking it into his belt.

In the end I quite liked the fatter, squatter version. I played around with a few more ideas in a notepad before I went  with the one below, giving him bigger ears, a darker skin tone and eyebrows to match the beard.

Here's a sketch with the final two character designs. I've played around with a lot of different versions. I didn't want to upload those because a lot of them are unfinished and messy. But anyway Yash and the Cloud Shepherd:

This one I did a while ago on the tube which explains the really crap shading in the sky. I was just playing with different cloud shapes and quite liked the idea that above the clouds you'd have a cool looking flip with the bright white below.

This one weirdly enough started out as a quick sketch of a house in between Westminster and Victoria (the one on the right). But I thought it'd look cooler as an underwater scene. (Yasmin if you're reading this there's a you-know-what on the left so you might want to skip this one - though you can only see half of it). The idea is that the world has flooded and a couple have come back as explorers hundreds of years later to try and learn about what life was like. I also have a life-long dream of becoming an underwater detective and this is what I imagine it to be like.

 This one's super old. I did it... in India maybe? Anyway it was in a work text book and it's a sub-story in the main book. I'm not the best at shading and you can see how not a lot of the shadows make a lot of sense in it, but I've think I've made a lot of progression with some of the more recent ones. It's the castle of the raven king wooOOOoo. (By the way, Ravens and Crows are jerks - see blog post 1).

 Lastly here're some random ones. The eyes and lips are ones I saw Otto doing a few weeks ago and thought I'd have a go at. Hers are better. Also more dinosaur detective sketches - GET HYPED.

If you've made it this far, thanks a lot! I'd appreciate the feedback, especially negative - I know I've got a long way to go so anything people can suggest would be awesome, even if it's just "dinosaurs are lame" (though, if so, you're only hurting yourself). But yeah.. George out.

A Civil Service Love Story part 2: They see me trollin'

Last time in the Civil Service...

The war was harsh, milk was spilled, tears were shed, our parents told us there was no point in crying over it, but they didn't know man, they weren't there. Then something incredible happened. We put down our weapons and in the heart of no man's land we made something incredible - a Civil Service Love Story. And now for it's conclusion, but I must warn you dear reader, not all things can end in sugar-ponies and rainbow-hearts. Sometimes the milk can... curdle.

At last I left you, there was at least three participants; a battle-worn Policy Advisor with a heart full of hope (me), A white-card guy (or girl?) with the ability to pun so well that I'm convinced that he(she?) is channeling the ghost of Bob Monkhouse (let's call them Bob(ette)) and a yellow post-it note girl (or guy?) who gets easily confused and likes to represent Israel. I'd deduced that Bob(ette) liked to take what I'd done and add to in a slightly flirty fashion - think:

"Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you."

"No you can't "

"Yes I can"

"No you can't Bob(ette)..." 

"...Yes I can."

Damn! Bob(ette) had made a model of the friend-ship. Needless to say I was furious; (S)he'd made the leap from 2D goodwill to 3D. But for all my jealousy I couldn't help but appreciate the gravity of this gesture, the good intentions were literally (figuratively.. shut up) leaping from the page. But this lasted maybe five seconds before I decided to get childish:

The crane... Japanese symbol of naval warfare

Maybe it was the fact that I'd violated the spirit of friendship, maybe it was a cruel reminder that the universe is a cold and uncaring place or maybe someone out there thinks a fridge should just be a fridge, but the worst happened:

Horrific, I know

Someone destroyed the notes! I couldn't believe it... who was this hateful individual and what was their purpose?

It was at this point something in me changed. Up until now, whenever I've been threatened I try to play dead or like, that lizard that can snap off its own tail to distract predators, I try to rip off my arm (which If you've seen you can't help but deny is very distracting). But now I'd found something worth fighting for, so I decided to go revolutionary:

 Oppa Gaelic style

It didn't take long to receive a response. No one likes to take a tea break only to see William Wallace screaming at them:

God... is that you?

I'm not sure who this new addition was... he(she) seemed somewhat fatalistic but they were willing to do what's right in the face of injustice so we struck an uneasy truce (in retrospect, their tone seems as if it's The Voice of the Civil Service speaking to me). Horribly, that had this effect on Bob(ette):

Having only just negotiated a truce with the Civil Service, I was naturally feeling a bit worn down. So I freaked out emotionally:

Being a little more level headed than me, s(he) suggested something more reasonable:

But then caved:

It was a good effort, but I'll be damned if I'm being outshone in the last round:

Dinosaur Detective... coming September 2013... get hyped.

But in all my competitive fervor, I missed a very important detail on Bob(ette)'s last note:

Now I'd joked that what s(he) was doing was a bit flirty but this was something else...

I had no idea whether Bob(ette) was a Bob or an Ette, a ghost of a well-loved comedian, a manifestation of people's love for their milk or the fridge come to life. What was I to do, should I call?

Find out in Part 3....

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..

..

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Oh sod it, I'll tell you now, here's the transcript:

*Ring ring*

Bob(ette):

 Hello? (Man's voice)

George:

 Hey, is this the guy from the fridge?

Bob (definitely Bob now):

 ...

George:

 Fridge guy?

Bob:

 Uh... yes, that's me

George: 

Ha! I hope you weren't expecting a beautiful woman to be calling...

Bob:

 Haha... uh..

George:

Uh, wow, yeah, well that was fun... are you still working here?

Bob:
No, No, I've left.

George:

That's a shame, hey this was -

*HANGS UP*

George:

...Whuuuuut

I sat there in shock. Bob had thought I was a woman this whole time. How could he think that? I draw the most manly.. wait. Pikachu, yeah that's pretty cute... a love heart with "I choose you too", yeah that's pretty girly... a friend-ship with a smily face, yeah that's not exactly something a lumberjack would draw... my handwriting isn't particularly masculine either. This whole time I was just trying to savor friendship against the backdrop of war, but in actual fact I was leading Bob on. I'd become... a real life internet troll. Like those guys who pretend to be 16 year old girls on chat sites... but in a fridge.

Well I told you that not all love stories can end well. Sometimes you think that special person you've made a connection with, despite all odds, is actually just me - drawing dragons and pirate ships on milk cartons. But there was still a lot left to figure out. Bob might have fled the scene but who was yellow post-it girl(guy?), had I really been contacted by the Voice of the Civil Service? Which tyrant had disposed of all our notes? Had any of this actually prevented my milk from being stolen? Tune in next time, for more tales from the civil service.

Edit: If Bob can see this: I'm super sorry and your death star is awesome.

A Civil Service Love Story part 1: I'm not fridgid

I take pride in the fact that no one knows what I really do. It's not that my job is particularly secret, just that it's extremely difficult to convince anyone that you're tall dark and mysterious when you're none of the three. However, three things are common knowledge: I work for the civil service, I'm a policy advisor (which is perfectly vague) and my job seems to involve a lot of milk.

shark milk.

It's a cliche, but one based entirely in fact: British institutions function exclusively on tea. But whilst this is the key to their power, it's also bred a sick underworld of tea-drenched civil-servants where the difference between a tea with milk and one without is usually a knife in a colleague's back. We exist in a world of austerity where resources are short, and it seems the only way to safeguard your dairy is with a sufficiently violent threat:

May be susceptible to hobbits.

But living in such an environment, where all you love can disappear in a moment, will harden a man's heart. This isn't the sort of place you expect to find genuine human sentiment... but one day something incredible happened. I'd decided to arm my milk with a picture of Pikachu, mid thunderbolt, when this happened:

What was this? A trick... an attempt to lower my defenses? Or a genuine olive branch? I couldn't be sure. All I knew was that I was feeling things, things that I thought were long sing lost. So I did what came naturally and acted like a school girl.

Too forward? You're damn right. But in a war zone you have to grab whatever makes you feel alive with both hands. Or you know... hitchhike on someone else's...

Picture 'enhanced' because I'm bad at cameras

Now there was a third involved, a needy third, but a third nonetheless. This was all starting to feel like that Christmas football game in the trenches where the British, German and French soldiers all put down their weapons, walked out into no-man's land and started leaving each other messages in the fridge. So I decided
take down my own barbed wire, and swapped pikachu for this guy:

 Excitingly this happened:

I started trying to see what I could decipher about these two kindred spirits, adrift in a warzone like twinkling lights in the dark. Apparently white-card guy (girl?) likes to take my ideas and add to them (was this flirting?) and yellow post-it lady (man?) gets easily confused:

and is Jewish...?

Then I discovered that white-card guy/girl is actually the ghost of Bob Monkhouse:

Naturally I was annoyed by the quality of Bob Monkhouse's puns so I decided to draw better waves than he could but hide my jealousy in an expression of friendship:

That's all for now, but there are still so many questions without answers; who are my note writers? Was I sure this wasn't a trick?... I definitely haven't being paying attention  to the milk levels throughout this saga..., was Bob Monkhouse's spirit really haunting the fridge's ventilation system? Is this love? Is this love? Is this love? Is this love, that I'm feelin'? Stay tuned for part 2...

The Sycophantic Fox

So blogging. I've been relatively self-conscious about the idea; I tried it once before when I first moved to Japan in a blog called 'desu desu' and it lasted for precisely two posts in which I spent the first complaining about a certain way of talking about Japan and then the second completely contradicting everything I'd just said. In a way, if a blog is an accurate reflection of a person's thought process then it was a complete success. I suppose it's because by writing a blog you're presuming that you have an audience of people who are happy to hear about your thoughts and opinions. Christopher Hitchens once told a class of eager students that if you want to be a writer, you shouldn't feel like you want to write, you should feel like you have to.He went on to say; "If you can talk, you can write..." and noted how happy they all seemed to get before delivering the final blow; "...and how many of you like to hear each other talk?" 

But I do feel like I have to write, or rather, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that if I tried to write something ever again, they'd kill me - I'm not sure I could go on living. That sounds super melodramatic but writing's a refuge and it's a lot like someone saying "You can never have nesquik again" sure, you could find something else to drink, but could you exist knowing it was somewhere out there? So, who wants to hear me talk? Well, tell you what, here's what I have to offer: I'll be using this blog mainly to track harebrained schemes, flimflams and distractions of which there are many - these include various blanket fort designs (currently I'm working on a pulley system that involves only minor burning); my ongoing quest to find the not-quite-so-perfect-burger (this has nothing to do with any of that 'best burger in London' nonsense you occasionally read about in Time Out, and everything to do with finding an exact replica of the Big Kahuna burger in Pulp Fiction); My ongoing love affair with two civil servants in a fridge in the Department of Important Things (which will be code for the place I work and should cover my ass when I reveal Government secrets – haha of course I won’t. No. Please, I don’t want to live in a Russian airport); bits and pieces from the children’s book I’m writing, The Cloud Shepherd; reviews of J-Pop girl bands and dinosaur detective-fiction. The last one’s not true…

...yet.

I realise that I’ve spent my first blog post just talking about blogging which both makes me wonderfully meta and an ass. I'm okay with both of these. The title of the blog comes from a long and pointless poem called The Sycophantic Fox which is itself based on Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow. The story talks about how a fox encounters a crow with a piece of brie in its beak and charms it into singing a song. When the crow sings it drops the brie which the fox eats and wins the fable (that’s how fables work). I picked this for two reasons: 1) The poem is great and is almost a nonsense poem. Learning nonsense poems is a statement of political intent to waste yours and everybody’s time and it should be your civic duty to do so. 2) A few days ago I was eating a sandwich in the park. A crow came very close to my bag, pecked at my shoe and squawked at me. I kicked at it then threw a bottle top, which it stole. During all the commotion I almost missed the two other crows approaching from my 4 and 6 o’clock’s and it was then I realised I was being hunted. This is exactly the sort of thing the raptors pull in almost every Jurassic Park film and crows are essentially their evolutionary cousins. I sort of tried to be like Red Typhoon in Pacific Rim (no one saw that film) and attack with two arms and a leg in each direction. The crows seemed embarrassed and decided to leave and I’m sure if it wasn't for my extensive knowledge of dinosaur hunting patterns and robot movies I’d probably be dead - or sandwichless. Anyway, long story short, no there’s no profound reason why I choose the title and no deep emotional connection to the poem. I just like the fact that the crow got screwed over. Crows are jerks.

Jerks.