Big Doodle Bang

A Recipe

For the accompanying article head over to Green to the Last Bite.

Coraline

You know a film is going to be good, when they have this among their promotion material.

For more: http://coraline.com/

Nicholas Nickleby

Watched the film version of it yesterday. Very Grand Guignol, great fun.

For Opera lovers and trekkies?

This is too curious not to embed.

Why I wasn't here in November

I've been very busy sitting in trains, planes and some automobiles with B. the very dear author of the Ecometro blog I illustrate.
We saw Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bruges and Gnome land in Exloo (alas only from outside, it was closed).
Pictures are forthcoming. Right now I'm busy as a dung beetle in a shit storm.
But recent things I've been liking?
John Irving's The Cider House Rules.
Randall C,'s Slaapkoppen
The delightful Philip Glassian banjo filled, retro electro weirdness of Le Loup
Alela Diane's new project

And I'm very much looking forward to this:

who needs Sinterklaas

When you can go to this?

I'll be there, selling pictures and maybe some other things.
For more information visit my agency's site and the gallery's.
So if you're in Rotterdam and have money to spare, I hope to see you soon!

things in frames and something else

I sold this old drawing last week. It was just languishing somewhere online , when suddenly I got a call that someone had bought it. So it was duly packed and taken away in a van.
So, maybe what I should be doing is drawing more monsters and silly creatures.
If that is apparently what people want?

Here are two things for a birthday and a wedding.

you know what it's for

Well, you can guess, I think.

Richard Dawkins and Harry Potter

Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, celebrity-atheist, oxonian and wife of Timelady Romana, has never read Harry Potter, yet he wants to write a book about the 'pernicious' effects of the Potter books on children. Although he doesn't know if there are any.

'Looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.'

He calls bringing children up to believe in spells and magic anti-scientific and in his book wants to compare mythical/magical thinking with scientific/rational thinking. Comparing myths with factual events and such. The intent of the book is going to be to encourage children to always think for themselves and look for the eveidence of things.

Well whoopteedoo, as though fairytales are supposed to be taken literally. As though children think Harry Potter is real. Like those prudish shrieking crusaders who want to remove Harry Potter from library shelves he seems to vastly underestimate children. It may be fun to make believe that Harry Potter is real, that you can do spells, but I think that most children can differentiate between fact and fiction very well.

I suspect that what mr. Dawkins is afraid of is not that children might believe in Harry Potter, but that it will somehow make them more susceptible to believe in god.

In the end he should look at his own words again I think. 'Looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure.'
Well it hasn't affected him much, has it?

Anyway he should save himself the trouble and just recommend Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books, which through the use of mythical storytelling manages to promote thinking for yourself and developing a rational mind.

Lastly, he has trouble with children reading fantasy, but not apparently with them watching it on tv.

Daikon maru

Inspired by some pictures of japanese children growing radishes (daikon).

More Tanukis

I made one from rubber cement, paper and paint. And yes, that is a scrotum.
I think I've been modest in fact.


I mean look at these chaps!

't is autumn

In case you had't noticed

tantastic tanuki

Croptastic

Html is hard, I know. You could even call it labyrinthine,
but anyway to get to the point. I made this drawing recently for the ecometro blog of B., and it's been accidentally cropped.
So I'm posting it here, so you can see what it's supposed to look like.
And of course to tell you to head over to Green to the last bite and read some of B.'informative pieces about seasonal fruits and vegetables and her excellent recipes.

Gormenghast and inspirations

The above image is a sketch for the production of the bbc miniseries of the Gormenghast books. I came across it yesterday online, when looking for a link to Gormenghast. When I first saw the series and read the books in 2000 I was in my last year in highschool and didn't know yet what I wanted to do. Well I wanted to draw and such, but specific ideas, no.
Gormenghast kind of changed that. Suddenly I had found something entirely great.
And its writer was also an illustrator.
Now I knew what I wanted to be!


Well, Peake was only one of a few chief inspirations in those days. Tim Burton was important to me as well, both his films and his Quentin Blake like drawings



And definitely still my favourite filmmaker: Terry Gilliam. One of my earliest memories of a film is Baron Munchausen on his horse charging through a high window and landing safely on the ground. That image stayed with me for years and when I was 17 I discovered his other films and my imagination was, simply put, blown into a larger perspective.


Later my choice was cemented upon discovering Maurice Sendak's work,
and after that there've been other explosions of wonderfullness, but none on the scale as these first few.

A look at the artistic process

Two illustrations for the book I illustrated a while ago.
It'll be available in a while from here: www.degestreepteboekjes.nl

pictures from far away

Guess where these are from.














Mars!

revamp

I'm toying with the layout a bit. Things will look decent again soon.

The rest of them

Diaghilev's grave! Kind of dissapointing isn't it?

And he loses the popularity contest to Stravinsky.

Though both are outdone in terms of grandeur.

Actually, italians being prissy as they are, taking pictures was forbidden.
And anyone caught doing so would be handed over to the 'competent' authorities.
Which is probably the most intimidating thing I've read on a sign ever.


Venice reminded me of Gormenghast here and there.










I love medieval capitals, so often they're like little picturebooks. The Doge's palace has some great ones. The twisting branches here are great.




Apparently Venice had one of the biggest Armenian communities in Europe.









And of course....