I was interviewed over at The Tools Artists Use. It’s a great site for finding out what different artists and illustrators have in their pencil boxes, how they like to work and what techniques they use.

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Next Thursday I’ll be doing some live painting at the Everyman Theatre as part of State of Wonder’s production ‘The Almond Tree’. The play is a beautiful and darkly atmospheric reworking of a Brother’s Grimm fairytale. My paintings will be projected to form a kind of live backdrop for the play. There will also be live music by Hannah Peel.

Some of my pre-production sketches for the show…

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I recently took part in Shakespeare in the Street’s ‘Sonnet Walk’ for a second year. To quote the website… “Small groups follow a guided route…taking in some hidden gems of Liverpool’s history alongside more contemporary secrets. You’ll encounter performers along the way and you’ll never know what to expect.”

For our bit, Hannah and Cata sung Sonnet 113 whilst I picked someone in the audience to draw as though they were my one true love! The sonnet only lasts about two and a half minutes so I have to be pretty quick!

You can hear Hannah sing the sonnet on the Shakespeare in the Street’s website.

I also designed the logo for the event…

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Hannah, Sam and myself had a lot of fun drawing and playing music in town last Saturday. You can see a great film of it by documentary film-maker Tim Brunsden here.

Unfortunately, Hannah had lost her voice on Saturday, but you can hear the beautiful music she composed and see the little music box she plays in the film. Check out the punch paper she feeds through the music box – each hole punched by hand! To hear Hannah sing as well as play, visit her MySpace page…

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Liverpool’s first AudioVision festival kicked off today. Over the next five nights the art-deco hulk of the Queensway Tunnel ventilation tower at the Pier Head will be the canvas for New York art group NOMO and Jacqueline Passmore.

On Wednesday The Smith Quartet will be performing at The Bluecoat, with specially commissioned cinematic visuals from local artists.

On Saturday night there’ll be a FREE gig at the tower, with projections and music from AddictiveTV, Kinetic Fallacy and Ultre. And I’ll be doing some live drawing that’ll be projected onto the building. Festival gates open at 7pm and the performances start at 8.

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I’m going to be doing some work at this year’s Creamfields as part of Paint Jam, a live illustration/graffiti/graphic arts event devised by Sam Skinner of Liverpool’s View Two Gallery.

Not sure what I’m drawing yet, so in the meantime, here’s a dancing Sasquatch…

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This Wednesday myself and Hannah Peel will be doing some live music/drawing at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool as part of a performance staged by the Nabokov theatre company. For ‘Present:Tense’ a group of playwrights, directors, film-makers, poets, artists and musicians are asked to select the most momentous story on the news agenda, and then come up with a responding piece of work within just seven days. Last Wednesday we decided that the media’s main focus here in the UK right now was on how to tackle knife crime…with all kinds of craziness like curfews for kids and suchlike being bandied about.

Some of us have decided to try and hook our stuff together somehow, so we’ll be collaborating with the poet Nathan Jones and AV fellas Sam Meech and Tim Brunsden.

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Under the Bandstand will be a performance of songs by NILA music accompanied by live illustrations, puppetry and animated projections. The jumping off point for this project was the Under the Bandstand illustration, posted here a little while ago.

The show’s going to be a lot of fun and another by-the-seat-of-our-pants experiment in the different ways illustration can be presented as performance, and integrated with live music. There’ll also be another raffle, this may or may not include black pudding.

The event is sponsored by the AudioVision Festival 2008.

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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…

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