Artful Readers Club June - The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin

It's time for another artful read - and I'm glad to be here, as I wasn't entirely sure I'd be finished in time to take part this month - but I made it by the skin of my teeth - hooray!

Part of the delay was down to reading the book late in the month .... my original planned title for June was another Robert Rankin book - the Toyminator - but when I picked it up to start it, I discovered it was actually the second book in a two-parter.

Not wanting to read part 2 before part 1, I ordered the original - the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse - online, but it didn't arrive until mid June, which put me on the back foot.

Luckily it was a fairly quick read, and I just about had time to write this review and whip up my art piece, and so here I am :)

This is, apparently, Robert Rankins's 24th book - I had no idea he had written so many! I have read and enjoyed many (but it seems, nowhere near all) of his books in the past - and particularly enjoyed what I have read from the Brentford Trilogy (which is somewhat of a misnomer as I believe there are 9 books in that particular series so far!)

Rankin is the master of humorous (bordering on downright silly), fantasy fiction, full of bad puns and running gags and surreal situations.  And this book was no different.

It had all of the classic Rankin trademarks, it was an enjoyable enough read, and I'm definitely going to read the sequel, but I have to be honest, it was not my absolute favourite of his books.

I'm putting that down to the setting - usually his books are set in a fairly realistic and recognisable urban kind of environment, populated largely by fairly realistic and recognisable human characters, even if the story itself veers far from realism.  But this book is set in Toy Town, the lead character is a talking teddy bear, and most of the other lead roles are filled by either other toys, or nursery rhyme characters.

I had a similar problem when another of my favourite authors, Jasper Fforde, set a book in a nursery rhyme environment.  Maybe I just prefer my crazy surreal fantasy stories to be a little more relatable?? (and yes, I know that makes no sense)

But, don't let me put you off, it was a funny book, well plotted, there's a serial killer on the loose in Toy Town and our heroes solve the case and save the day and have some fun adventures along the way.  I can't really fault the book other than to say that the author's other books are even better!

So - in summary - read the Brentford Trilogy instead :D

For my accompanying artwork this month, I painted one of the eponymous chocolate bunnies (he's supposed to look a bit evil, with his devil's eye, but instead he ended up looking equal parts cute and delicious, but not particularly menacing....).  And then I added one of the classic Rankin running gags ("it must be a tradition, or an old charter or something" - which appears in all his books at least once, I counted two times in this one) using hand drawn 'word art':

Next month I'll be reading Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, a total change of pace from what I've read the past few times - see you again in late July .....

Overworked, over tired and over here....

So - can you guess what kind of week I've had? :)

This is my entry in Jo's book for the 'You're Having a Laugh' art journal CJ - her theme is 'How Do You Feel Today?' .... I wonder if she is going to regret asking that question :D

I actually found it quite stress relieving painting my stressed out lady, the therapeutic powers of art strike again!

As a few peeps have said they like seeing the step by steps, here's how she came about:

Sketched onto a gelli print with a grey pitt pen, shirt, teeth and eyes coloured in with a white paint pen, skin painted with Fresco acrylic paint in Nougat

More painting - all Fresco paints - Squid Ink, Claret and Pansy on the jacket, French Roast and a touch of Hyde Park in the eyes

Very Berry and London Red on the lips and tongue, and the hair was a mix of French Roast, Chocolate Pudding and Cinnamon

After this point I finished off her hair, added the punched arrows all around the page as a frame, and wrote the page title 'Stressed!' using paint pens.

Here's hoping for a reduction in day job workload and stresses very soon and more time for arty pursuits!

It's ICAD time again!

You might remember that this time last year I took part in Daisy Yellow's Index Card A Day challenge - to make some kind of small artwork on an index card every day for 2 months.

My kids joined in too, and even my other half did a couple, and we ended up with this fantastic wall of creativity:

I did all 61 cards last year over June and July, and I wish I was in a position to do so this year, but work is crazy busy :(

So instead this year I have set myself the task of still doing 61 index cards, but over as much time as it takes (ie not within the 2 months)

And rather than doing all sorts of different styles and subjects like I did last year, I'm going to use this as an exercise to improve my portraits - and paint 61 faces, men, women, children, maybe even animals, with different facial expressions.  It's all good practice.

So here is the start of this year's ICAD wall:

I found the child's face particularly hard - he was supposed to look cheeky and adorable, not evil :)

And the profile pic top right is based on an old photo of my school friend Jo, and I struggled to capture her likeness to my liking, 

but I am pleased with the two on the left.

A 50:50 success rate on my first 4 cards isn't too shabby I guess? :)  i hope I can keep that up over the remaining 57!

Artful Readers Club May - Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

It's reading club time again, and I have a glowing review for you this time around as I loved this month's book!

I've actually had this one - and its sequel Moon Over Soho - on my bedside table for well over a year, waiting to be read.  I'm glad I finally got around to it :)

The blurb on the cover would have you believe that this is a kind of "Harry Potter for grown ups", but it really isn't.  Yes, there's a trainee wizard in the mix, but other than that, there's very little similarity.

It's much funnier, for a start, and much more gritty and real - which is impressive for a book chock full of magical creatures and gods.  Sometimes you almost forget about all the spooks and spells as you enjoy the solid police procedural elements of the story.

The characters are likeable, the intertwining stories are entertaining, it's very well written, and it really is just plain fun.  What more could you ask for?

And one of the things I loved most about the book is that it feels almost like a love letter to London in parts, and I love London too, it's where I grew up, and even though I have now moved away, we go back to visit often.  So I enjoyed reading such fond words about my old stomping grounds :)

For my artwork, I have chosen to illustrate my favourite minor character from the books, Molly, the maid servant of indeterminate age and species......  here's her introduction from the opening stages of the story:

"How many people live here?" I asked.
"Just the two of us.  And Molly" said Nightingale.
Toby suddenly crouched down at my feet and growled, a proper rat-in-the-kitchen growl that was all business.  I looked over and saw a woman gliding towards us across the polished marble.  She was slender and dressed like an Edwardian maid, complete with a starched white bib apron over a full black skirt and white cotton blouse.  Her face didn't fit her outfit, being too long and sharp-boned with black, almond-shaped eyes.
Despite her mob cap she wore her hair loose, a black curtain that fell to her waist.  She instantly gave me the creeps, and not just because I've seen too many Japanese horror films.
"This is Molly," said Nightingale.  "She does for us".
"Does what?"
"Whatever needs doing" said Nightingale.
Molly lowered her eyes and did an awkward little dip that might have been a curtsey or a bow.  When Toby growled again Molly snarled back, showing disturbingly sharp teeth.
"Molly" said Nightingale sharply.
Molly demurely covered her mouth with her hand, turned and went gliding back the way she came.  Toby gave a little self-satisfied snort that didn't fool anyone but himself.
"And she is....?" I asked.
"Indispensable" said Nightingale.

And here's my painting of her:

Everything on here is acrylic paints - the background and the city skyline were monoprinted using a gelli-plate, the Thames was drawn on with a Molotow paint pen, and Miss Molly from the Folly was painted freehand, loosely based on that spooky girl from the Ring movie....

I've just realised she was supposed to be wearing a white blouse.  Oh well, close enough :)

Next month I will be reading The Toyminator by Robert Rankin, which I have just realised is a sequel and I haven't read the first book yet.  Oops.  Maybe I should get the first book and read that instead.....would that be allowed in the rules, Darcy?

Spacey-wacey Timey-wimey

Well, OK, not so much on the timey-wimey.  But recently I have re-discovered the fun of making space art with spray paints.

It really is super easy, and quick, and almost magical in the way it works

^ That one up there was my very first attempt last year after watching some "how to" videos on You Tube.  The kids made their own too and got equally ace results, you can't mess it up even if you try.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I made a CJ page based on Shakespeare's Sister's "Stay" - such a great song and brilliant video too - which was positively crying out for a space art background

Here's the end result:

(blogged in full at Collabor-ART here: http://collabor-art.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/time-for-another-round-of-desert-island.html)

And then today I was working on another CJ page - this one had movie/TV show quotes as its theme, and I happen to know that the journal's originator is a big fan of Star Trek, especially the original series - so I couldn't resist attempting a portrait of Mr Spock:






























And of course he absolutely NEEDED a space background:

So here's how it works.....

First of all you spray a colour, then black then white spray paints in quick succession (without letting the paint dry) roughly where you want your planets to be.

Then you take a slightly crumpled bit of thin paper (a magazine page works well), and put it down over the paint then peel it straight back off.  This is what leaves that fantastic "planet surface" texture:











Spray in a little shadow with black paint on the "dark side of the moon" and then pop round objects (that you don't mind ruining!) in place to make the planets.

Spray all over with black, then add a little bright blue and yellow space dust, and white stars (shaking the can about while only partially depressing the nozzle will give that nice splattery effect)













When the paint is dry, lift off your round thingamajigs, and ta-da:

It's as easy as that!

If you have spray paints handy (the graffiti-style paints in aerosol cans, not spray inks) then I totally urge you to have a go at this, it really is so much fun!


Live Long and Prosper, guys....

My first attempt at Steampunk

I'm always late to the party, me, in fact sometimes the party is almost over by the time I get there!

And so here I am, having a go at Steampunk for the first time, when for everyone else I think it's pretty much yesterday's news... :)

The reason?  This month's "Having A Laugh" CJ has the theme of Steampunk/Ladies/Grunge

Now, I was tempted to go with Grunge and do a page on Pearl Jam and another on Nirvana, but I didn't think this was quite what the book's owner had in mind, so I went with Steampunk and Ladies:

First of all, we were asked to make an ATC as our sign in ..... mine is above.  The little propeller spins :)  Trouble is I wonder if it still actually looks much like an eye .... I think I preferred it before I added the hardware:

Ah well, never mind.

Next up, we could do either one or two 7"x5" pages for the book,  I'm greedy so of course I took two!

First up, my steampunk girlie.

I cheated a little with this one, and used an online doll dress-up programme to design my lady - it's a lot of fun if you want to try it yourself: http://www.dolldivine.com/mega-steampunk-dress-up.php

(NB when you first go in it loads up an advert, you have to click the "play game" button in the bottom right hand corner which activates after the ad has been running for a few seconds)

<----
This is the "doll" I ended up with

I printed her out and traced her onto some watercolour paper, and then coloured her in with watercolours, in a slightly more subdued palette than the original

Half coloured in:

Fully coloured in and cut out with my trusty X-Acto:














And here is the finished page - I used a gelli print for the background, with stencilled cogs - and typed up the wording on Erika, my beloved 1980s typewriter:

For my second page, I dropped the steampunk angle and just went with "ladies" - well, one lady anyway:

That's another metallic gelli-plate background, with a face painted with acrylics straight onto the page this time rather than cut out and stuck on

I took some step by step photos as I was painting the face, so I could refer back to them to remember how I had tackled the shading in the underpainting, here they are in case they are of any use to anyone else wanting to try the same technique:

Face sketched straight onto the page, firstly in pencil then with a black POSCA paint pen

Colour in the whole face apart from the hair with a very pale skintone colour - then referring to the reference photo, use a white paint pen to shade the areas with the lightest highlights (side and tip of nose, above top lip, whites of eyes....)

Block in the hair with a mid-brown paint, and then with the same brown paint mixed 50:50 with glazing medium,  shade in the parts of the face that are mid toned in the reference photo

With a darker shade of brown, start adding some texture into the hair , and  also block in the darkest shadows (top of the nose, under her chin etc) - don't panic that all the shading looks really harsh at the moment

Add some pinky red to her cheeks and  lips

And this is where all that work with the shading starts to pay off -  you need to mix up a semi-opaque skin toned glaze (I use a touch of the brown I used for her facial shading, a tiny touch of white, a touch of red and a fair bit of glazing medium -  you can see the resulting glaze in the tub at the top of the picture), and paint over everything except the whites of her eyes and her hair - there, that looks better doesn't it :)

All that's left to do are the finishing touches - some colour in her eye and on her lips, some wisps of hair around the hairline (and some little highlights in the hair too), add her eyelashes and darken her brows.  Plus I added a little more glaze under the chin as I thought the shadow there was still a tad too dark.  And I defined her outline with a watersoluble graphite pencil to make her "pop" a tad more against the background

Th-th-th-that's all folks!

Until my next blog post anyway (which really ought to be a Rocking Your World Monthly post as I haven't done one since March!)

Please avert your eyes if bad language might offend....

I've just realised that I blogged this CJ entry over at Collabor-ART but not on here....

So it's Desert Island Discs time again and this month I have Sian's CJ to work in.

Right from the very beginning when Sian first published her list of songs, I was hoping that one particular song would still be available when the CJ reached me - and it was - woohoo!

Like Sian, I have certain songs that I love to play at volume when I am in a baaaaaaad mood, my angry songs, and this track by Korn is very much one of them.  In particular, shouting along to the chorus is a great stress reliever!

Trouble is, there's a rather rude word in there, but I checked on the Collabor-ART Facebook group to see if anyone would be offended by me posting it uncensored, and nobody said not to, so here goes, brace yourselves :) :

The main image on this page was a real labour of love - it's a hand cut, 4 layer stencil of the band's lead singer, Jonathan Davis.  I am beyond chuffed at how well it turned out and how much it looks like him.

(original photo by user Cliseu on deviantART)

For comparison, as I expect that most of you probably wouldn't know him from Adam, here's the reference photo I used:

Now I am trying to think what else I can use that stencil for as it was a lot of work for a single use!  I thoroughly enjoyed making it though.

On the reverse side of the flappy bit is an image from one of the band's live album covers that fit the space rather nicely:

It wasn't until I'd finished all this bit that I realised I was supposed to use that area for my sign in and thoughts about why I had picked this song etc, oops!  So instead I wrote all that stuff on the reverse of a tag decorated to match everything else, and I tucked it in behind my main page:

So that's my own page done, I hope Sian likes it as much as I enjoyed making it

Next stop - tweaking the previous entries

I didn't do something to all of the previous pages this time, only the ones where I had an immediate idea of what I wanted to add

To Pat's entry - the Wonder of You by Elvis - I added a quick sketch of a someone extending a helping hand, inspired by the lyrics "you touch my hand and I'm a king":

On Sian's own entry for the love song Butterfly by Lenny Kravitz, I gave her girl a heart.  Well for a love song she needs one, right?

And to Virginia's entry, for Snow White Queen by Evanescence, I added a coat of arms to her warrior queen's shield:

Roll on next month, I am enjoying this CJ so much!

Artful Readers Club April - Pursuit of Liberty by Glenn R Petrucci

My book for this month is Pursuit of Liberty by Glenn R Petrucci, the sequel to Timecachers which I read, enjoyed and reviewed back in 2011

As with the first book, the author was kind enough to send me a copy, and it arrived just as I was putting my reading list together for the Artful Readers' Club, so it just had to go on the list

Those of you who know me well will know that geocaching is one of my hobbies - and that's what attracted me to these self-published books in the first place, as the heroes of the stories are fellow geocachers - that and the cool mix of two of my favourite genres - sci fi and historical fiction.

In a nutshell, the stories centre around the invention of a device called a LANav - which is just like a normal handheld GPS but with one rather useful additional feature - time travel!

The first book saw the four lead characters - male and female boffins, a historian (handy), and a wide boy who brings the funny - very unexpectedly transported back to 1830 and witnessing / taking part in the Cherokee Trail of Tears.  A lot of the dramatic tension in the first book was based around the fact that the four had no idea the LANav was a time travel device and therefore were entirely unprepared in every way for suddenly finding themselves in the past.

I did wonder how this new book would generate the same kind of suspense etc now that the story has moved on a year, and the characters now understand full well what the device can do.  But this was cleverly resolved by having the story open on the theft of one of the LANav units, the thief subsequently being unsuspectedly thrown back through time, and our four heroes having to chase him throughout colonial Boston, attempting to recover their property and apprehend the criminal before he does too much damage to the timeline.

Along the way they find themselves directly involved in many key events in American history including the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the first battle of the American Revolution at Lexington

Like the first Timecachers novel, I enjoyed this book - it's written in a style that I respond well to, with plenty of historical and scientific detail, although that does occasionally get in the way of character development a little, even after two books I don't feel that I really know all of these characters well.  It was a great history lesson too - the author is American as are the majority of the intended audience for this book - so I got the impression that he did expect at least a basic knowledge of the events and historical figures mentioned, but it wasn't all lost on me - and I now know a lot more about the American Revolution than I did before.

All in all a good balance of entertainment and education - even if we Brits were the bad guys :) I look forward to book three!

And now onto this month's artwork - I'll admit that I was a bit stumped with what to do for this one, I was thinking along the lines of illustrating one of the big events described in the book - like the Boston Tea Party or Paul Revere's ride... but there is already so much great art old and new dedicated to these historical landmarks, that I didn't think I could compete!

So in the end I went with the time travel thing instead - not exactly true to the book as there is no vortex or anything when you travel back via the LANav - neither did anyone actually make the jump on horseback - but let's call it artistic licence :)

Next month I'll be reading and arting up "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch - I've already started it and am thoroughly enjoying it so far - so I'll see you in the merry merry month of May

Artful Readers Club March - Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

It's the last Friday of the month again - and that means it's book club time :)

This month I read Heart Shaped Box by Stephen King's son (although I didn't know that when I bought it), Joe Hill:

I'll start my review with a question - if a horror book doesn't leave you utterly terrified, has it failed?

Because if so, then I'm afraid this book didn't quite hit the mark.

It started off deliciously creepy - to the extent that I couldn't read it in bed at night just before sleep for fear of nightmares - but then there came a point, less than half way in to the story, where it just stopped being scary.

It was still an entertaining read though, and I really enjoyed it, but was just a teensy bit disappointed it didn't leave me a gibbering wreck :)

Author Joe Hill

So - what's it about?  It's a good old fashioned ghost story - revolving around Ozzy-style ageing rock star Judas Coyne, and the spirit of an old man that he bought on an internet auction site.

The bulk of the story sees Coyne, his young goth girlfriend, and his two dogs fleeing across country from the vengeful spook, who has some personal scores to settle from beyond the grave.

That just about sums it up really - it's nothing ground breaking or complex - but it's an enjoyable romp of a read and despite being over 400 pages long (and me being scared to read it in bed at first :) which is where I generally do 99% of my reading ...) I got through it in no time.

And it really does remind me of early Stephen King, it took me right back to my teenage years when his books were all I read, I guess the writing style must be hereditary!

My journal page this month is based on the ghost of the old man in the book - he is described as having black scribbles dancing in front of his eyes, like someone was crossing them out with a Sharpie ..... spooooooky....

(tintype image by Michael Shindler)

In the book, the lead character first finds the ghost sitting quietly in a chair on the landing outside his bedroom.  This bit of the book really did give me the shivers, and for a few days I was scared every time I emerged from my bedroom in case I found him sat there, with his scribbles for eyes.

Shudder :)

I'll hopefully see you back here next month, when I'll be reviewing and "arting up" Pursuit of Liberty by Glenn Petrucci


PS I actually scheduled this post yonks ago, and in the meantime Rhomany, a fellow ARC-er, has read and reviewed the same book, so for an another opinion on it - see here