s in my experience such things are only really made to fill the place of the ‘Going anywhere nice on your holidays?’ conversational starter for the month of January.

That said, I am aiming to get a painting of some kind done every week in 2012. That and to finsih some of the draft posts I have backed up from last September to fill the big posting gap. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

‘ve spent a fair bit of time waiting in various doctors and hospital waiting rooms over the past six months so it was easy to get into the mood of this new cover illustration for S. C. Lees short story ‘The Waiting Room.’

Find out more about the short story at the authors website or buy the story direct from Amazon.

The image doesn’t address the biggest scourge of these places for me personally though, which is the recent addition of televisions into them.

I think it all started with chinese take aways you know, for years these places were the only waiting areas where, in a small and cheap way, some effort was made to make your ten minutes of waiting go by that much quicker. Ten years on and banks and hospital waiting areas have followed suit. My own bank prefers News 24, and seems to think being force fed the days news, whilst overhearing everyone else’s business at the desks to the left, is an acceptable alternative to employing enough people to sit at the counters… and don’t get me started on the useless extra person they seem to employ just to walk up and down the que asking if anyone has cheques to pay in.

Hospitals seem to have a more open, and individual choice as to what can be shown. Most A&E’s seem to go for ITV, especially in the daytime – as close to my own personal fifth circle of hell as I like to get being forced to watch Jeremy Kyle in such an environment. However on one recent occasion, sat in a hospital waiting room, CBeebies kicked in and due to the more noisy nature of the programme, the nurse came over and switched us all over to something more inoffensive; BBC One’s Diagnosis Murder, that days episode it turned out featured a nurse who was murdering the patients…

Anyway, I’ve gone on a bit much here. I’m not quite sure what distractions Edward has as he waits and waits, I guess if you want to know you’ll just have to read the story…

departure from the normal kind of thing I would do – I recently speant a day painting a poitrait of a stuffed parrot.

It was completed for a friends birthday and said parrot has spent the last year travelling the world with a variety of MG owners raising some money for Weston Park Hospital along the way. I should add the idea was inspired by the lovely toy paintings of Jennifer Maher

Martina came with me to the Screamin Festival in Pineda de Mar, Spain last year, here she is in fact with myself sat in the towns main square listening to some Rock and Roll.

I still remember the sense of horror as I woke up form a particularly late and heavy night when all I could remember was leaving the towns rock bar in the early hours and an altercation with a JCB on the walk home and had no idea where she was. Luckily she had made it home with us.

I’m actually quite jealous of the life shes had and the places shes visited in the last twelve months. I wonder if I could orchestrate such a trip for myself…

pologies for the lack of recent noise on here, 2011 hasn’t been particularly kind in one way and another so far but it has brought a couple of rather nice illustration jobs. Firstly there is this recent book cover for S. C. Lee and his book Alana Rose: the Edward Francis Blogs. The author had a good idea of the overall composition required which made my job a little easier and it all turned out rather well.

The story goes something like this;

This year the geek shall inherit the Earth…literally. Edward Francis is an eighteen year old, part-time, video shop employee with far-fetched dreams of becoming a famous film director. He’s shy (especially around women) misunderstood and friendless, yep, the poor guy just can’t seem to get a break, whether he’s trying to meet his favourite actress Alana Rose (who he fantasises about dating) or attempting to get the local Goth girl to notice him. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be an easy ride for your new favourite blogger. Written in the first person in the form of an online journal, Alana Rose: the Edward Francis Blogs is the journey of a British teenager, growing up in a society that he’d rather forget.

The book is currently available to buy for the Kindle at Amazon here.

Also at the time of posting the author is looking for people to read and review the book on Amazon, if you’d like to do so please contact him via his website or via twitter.

In lieu of a new piece I’ll re use this one from 2007 and hope nobody notices. Been a hectic year with one thing and another. Aiming for more artwork related type work next year

Merry Christmas one and all.

Planning to fail or…

Or How I travelled to the Dirty Bristow Summer Fête and never quite arrived.

should add in my defense of the following, much of the past week has either been spent either being at, or traveling to or from Hospitals. Or else trying to de virus and eventually wipe my laptop, Oh yeah, while still trying to stay on top of a 9 to 5 job. In short I have become accustomed to running around like a headless chicken on not enough sleep, food nor alcohol…

So I set out for the Dirty Bristow Summer Fête safe in the assumption I knew where it was, in my head it was the same place we saw Suspira at the opening of last years Supersonic festival, this turned out to be, well, wrong.

Things started quite badly when the bus driver of my local First Midlands bus service decided not to stop to pick up any passengers at my stop, this does seems to happen occasionally, the last time it did we were left stranded in Selly Oak but at least there was a pub next to us to kill some time in. Anyway, consulting the timetable it seems that thanks to the non stopping First Midland bus, in combination with their customer friendly timetable, I now had just over an hour to wait until the next one. Incensed by this, the fact the git hadn’t stopped and the fact I hoped to be home early-ish I decided to forsake alcohol and drive. What I should have done is gone home, looked up where the venue was and put my feet up for half an hour but thats hindsight for you.

All went well on the drive in, seems they’ve even resurfaced the dodgy road through Longbridge at long last. I got into Birmingham, parked up and set off towards where I thought ‘the Edge’ was. It took me a missed road to find the place and when I did it turned out that what I had in my head as the Edge was in fact Vivid. I’m not sure why I was sure this was the Edge, tumblers had dropped in place when I saw the name and even looking at the map I recognised a few landmarks and thought, yep, thats the place.

At this point I realised that I didn’t even know what street the Edge was on, but I figured if I went up and down the vague grid system of Digbeth I’d come to it eventually. I was supposedly a few minutes from the city centre and from its name I’d guess it would be on the outer fringes. After about an hour I’d certainly arrived at various Edges of the city however no luck on the venue finding front. At one point I saw a couple of people outside somewhere taking artistic style photos ‘aha!’ I thought but no, it transpired that they we’re just taking photos of the graffiti and posters on display. I realised after a while I was quite enjoying my little jaunt around Digbeth and, it having been such a manic week, a little peace and quiet and some walking was quite therapeutic.

As the sun began to set however I started to have doubts that I would ever find the place. Expanding my search to the other side of the High Street a little, though I was sure from past experience that this side was even more industrial and empty than the other. I walked down Warwick Street and then back over for one more sweep of Digbeth nearer the town, There was a band on at the Waggon and Horses who sounded rather good, if I’d not been driving I might have called it a day and gone in for a couple of pints and some noisy music, as it was I wandered onward. A couple of streets on I saw what I thought might just be the Mayor of Dirty Bristows car, however this was not a help, I even started following likely hip looking punters towards places in the hope someone would lead me there, you know you have little hope when this happens. A brief bit of guitar based indie noise on a an empty street bought a comfortable image of standing in a warm small space, beer in one hand, watching a band, was this it? no, turned out to be a recording studio.

As darkness fell I found I’d taken an increasing desperate circuitous route and ended up coming back into the town via Millennium Point and Curzon Street Station. By this stage my enjoyment in walking was on the wain, did I mention I needed the loo earlier? well I did, in fact I had ventured into the new Coach Station, nice as it is in there, they now want 30p for you to have a pee, thats ten pence over the odds, even the famous talking toilets of Much Wentlock are not that expensive. So…

While walking round the only things I could think of to help my situation were to find a computer with internet access [my phone is an antique and doesn’t ‘do’ the internet or else to ask someone, I had no luck in the first and a couple of blank looks in the second.
It probably shows how badly my brain has been working that it didn’t occur to me to phone up someone with a computer and get them to look it up for me.

So I took myself and my home grown tomato back home, I’m not sure how much beer two hours walking takes up but when I got back and offloaded the car I did my best to equal things out.

It looks like the launch was a whole lot of, slightly unusual, fun. I’m gutted I missed it but theres no one to blame but myself for that. I did enjoy my walk around though and hope the magazine breaks even or then some, then maybe there can be an issue 2 launch night at some future point.

If you’d like to make that possible, why not get yourself over to dirtybristow.co.uk and buy yourself a copy, its only 4 quid and its sure to be great given some of the very talented people involved.