The Sketchy Shop is open for business!

I’m selling limited print runs of three of my illustrations. Every print comes with a Sketchybeast original. Check out the shop page for more details.

These illustrations were part of the set design for a performance project called Be My Guest, produced by Encounters, describing the history of the Garston area of Liverpool. The brief called for the style as well as the content of the drawings to evoke 1950’s children’s book illustration.

Logo and EP artwork for electronica record label ‘Spitting Bits’. Check out the music here.

This weekend is Shakespeare’s birthday and myself, Hannah Peel and Kate Geraghty will be performing one of his sonnets as part of Liverpool’s Sonnet Walk. Hannah and Kate will be providing the music and I’ll be doing some live drawing. The drawings I produce will be given away to folks taking part in the walk.

There’ll be lots of other performances along the route, featuring all manner of actors, musicians and artists. Details of how to get hold of tickets can be found here.

This is a picture of Pinocchio saying goodbye to the cricket, after becoming a real boy. In the original story the talking cricket is the ghost of an insect killed by Pinocchio after it tried to give him some advice. Blake’s ‘Ghost of a Flea‘ is pretty big, so maybe I can get away with a five foot cricket!

A big thank you to everyone who came out for the Drawing Music performance at the Bluecoat in Liverpool this Sunday.

It was a real privilege, and loads of fun to be able to collaborate with Hannah Peel and Kinetic Fallacy. We’re going to be giving another performance at the Bluecoat on the 27th of June, incorporating work developed for the Nila project.

I’d especially like to thank Hannah and Sam, whose idea it was in the first place. I also want to thank John for his technical know-how and Tim and Ste for recording the performance. Tim’s put up a video of the live drawing portion of the event on his Liverpool Stories site, which you can check out here. I’m also going to put together a Flash version of the Tiger slideshow to post up on Sketchybeast in the near future…

Myself and Hannah Peel (Kinetic Fallacy) will be performing together on Sunday 16th of March at the opening of The Bluecoat arts center in Liverpool. I’ll be showing a slideshow about a boy’s journey into the mouth of a tiger whilst Hannah provides live loops and melodies in accompaniment, before drawing live and large to a new song by Kinetic Fallacy. There’ll be 10p raffle tickets to win some black pudding, a set of signed Sketchybeast postcards and the drawing produced on the day. Come along if you’re anywhere near these misty isles! Cheers to messrs Meech and O’Shea for their creative and technical know-how.

…is through the alleyways.

The landscape we inhabit as kids is completely different to the one we live in as adults, even if - as is the case with me - it’s exactly the same place.

That’s me, being attacked by one of my own drawings at Sketch City

Nila is a collection of three songs by Hannah Peel, with production and design by Nils Wingerei.

This is the only surviving portrait of the notorious poisoner Temperance Thompson, painted during her tenure as governess to the three youngest daughters of the Duke of Rutford. The wives of Temperance’s four previous employers had all died in mysterious circumstances. Unfortunately, the suspicion of foul play came too late to save the Duchess. Her body was discovered in the ice house in the grounds of Rutford castle two weeks after she disappeared en route to the Derby. Temperance was hanged in 1887.