You’ve got to roll with the punches just to get to what’s real
Into the classic rock room and magically we can recognise what they’re playing.
Monthly archives: July 2009
C’etait un Rendezvous
I was reminded of this film by a post on Jalopnik today. It’s been a while since I last watched it, and I’ve visited Paris in the mean time. So I kept spotting parts of the city I’ve walked through, in particular the Champs Elysee all the way from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre and the alleys around Montmartre. A little searching found this overlay of the route on a satellite photo.
Of course, the joy of watching something so audacious and exhilirating is tempered by the knowledge that there are too many people out there who think they can drive like this all the time and get away with it. Not everyone is Claude Lelouch and too many pedestrians die as a result.
Enjoy this on your computer, go play a racing game, then get on your bike and go around town at sensible speeds.
Shall We Take A Trip? is now available
This is the revised cover for Shall We Take A Trip?, now available in 6 by 9 inch format at a sensible price. You can buy a printed version or a downloadable one from the Mary Tales shop at Lulu.
Be warned, this new comic, and everything else in that shop is sexually explicit. I call it erotica, you may think of it as porn. It’s one of those judgement calls where two people can look at the same thing and have completely different reactions. I may redesign the cover again for distribution through Amazon and others, but for now I’m going to go and work on a comic more suited to all ages.
Shall We Take A Trip? covered and uploading
Shall We Tak A Trip? is uploading to Lulu right now,despite a number of false starts getting a pdf together. After the contents are properly transferred it shall be time to send the covers. This is the front cover-
It’s a variation on one of the original ideas for the cover, with just a tape instead of the other music formats. This is a tweaked photo. Probably the main problem with it is that it doesn’t give any hint of what sort of story is inside.
This is the back cover. I’s more obvious from this what the story is about. I may yet flip the covers so this is the front.
Update I had planned to sell this book through Lulu as an A5 size publication. However, I’ve just discovered the cost for printing that size is exorbitant, so I’m going to resize everything to 6″ by 9″. So that’s another few days work. I may do another cover as well whilst I’m about it.
And it’s raining.
And my ulcer’s been playing up for the last few days.
Excuse me whilst I go away and swear a bit.
Shall We Take A Trip? by Ian Pattinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
I’ve kissed mermaids, rode the el nino
cease to resist, giving my goodbye
drive my car into the ocean
you’ll think i’m dead, but i sail away
on a wave of mutilation
a wave
wave
I’ve kissed mermaids, rode the el nino
walked the sand with the crustaceans
could find my way to mariana
on a wave of mutilation,
wave of mutilation
wave of mutilation
wave
wave of mutilation
wave
JOE135
@Spinneyhead bot joe135 at abercrome house with the @MedievalSiege on the Isle of Wight.
In memory of Andy McCruden. To find out more about Andy read the obituaries on Spinneyhead and UK-Rag. To make a donation please go to the justgiving page set up to remember him.
Work in progress- some early design work for my next comic project
The front cover and page layout of Shall We Take A Trip? haven’t been completed yet, but I’ve decided what I want my next comic project to be. It doesn’t have a title yet, I’m just calling it my Space Comic. But it has a premise and a few key scenes.
After being attacked by pirates a space transporter, and most of its cargo, crash lands on Earth. The ship accidentally swallows a farmhouse before recovering and the crew recruits the humans in the house- father, mother, early twenties son, teenage daughter and two of the son’s friends- to help them recover the cargo and convince the world’s governments to work together before the pirates get turned around and come back to lay waste to the planet and steal whatever they can. The battle with the space pirates will be book one, with enough left open for possible future tales.
After doing an adults only comic this one’s intended for most ages. In film rating terms it should fall somewhere between a 12A and a 15- some violence, a little strong language and a bit of innuendo.
I did a few sketchy bits of very early design over the weekend. Final versions will probably be completely different to what’s below. (I’m selling some of the pages from my sketchbook as I go. If you’d like the navigator or the space ship below they’re £5.)
The spaceship’s navigator/pilot. I’m working on the idea of the ship being flown by what looks like a box of worms. When they’re in close contact the creatures that make up the intelligence communicate very quickly. Different coloured worms would have different functions and they’d rearrange themselves depending upon what they’re calculating.
An early space ship design. It’s pretty, but not really what I want.
The humans- the younger ones at least- get power suits. The alien technology adapts to suit each individual wearer and evolves over time based upon how they pilot it and what it’s used for. These feel a bit generic, I’ll come back to them when I’ve done some character design.
I’m going to try to document the creation of this comic from beginning to end. It’ll be like a “making of” book about it.
Crabs should be the only animals to wear hats!
My contribution to the Drink and Draw comic jam.
Doesn’t contain real Brownies
May contain traces of girl guide.
Buy Spinneyhead!
Wel, buy Spinneyhead creations, anyway.
I’ve been selling stuff on the Spinneyworld site for a while now, but the Drupal plugin to do ecommerce never really worked that well. Yesterday I tried PayPal’s own shopping cart and it was far easier to use. So I’ll be going across to that and rebuilding Spinneyworld in the near future.
In the meantime, if you click on the Direct from Spinneyhead link at the top right of the page you’ll find a list of items you can buy direct from me. There’s not a lot there yet, but I’ll add stuff as soon as possible. If you click the All Products link you’ll see the stuff that’s available through third parties as well.
Help me edit my novella, Sounds of Soldiers
I finished the first draft of Sounds of Soldiers a couple of days ago. Now I’d like to ask your help in getting it ready for publication. I have uploaded the editors’ draft of Sounds of Soldiers as a zip file (or you can find it on Scribd). Please download it, read it and tell me how you think it could be improved. Together we can make it a better novella.
The first draft of the completed story includes at least one chapter that has not been published in the serialisation on Spinneyhead, and several that have been rewritten. If you’ve been following the story, this is the best way for you to find out how the story ends. It’s in rtf format, so any text editor should be able to read it.
As a thank you I’ll find a way for everyone who sends a suggestion to get a discounted or special edition of the final book.
If you’d like to support me as I take Sounds of Soldiers to final draft please use the Donate button below.
Learn something new every day
In early 1977, Joost Swarte defines what is probably the most important comics art style to have come out of Europe. No-one had a name for it before: the ligne claire. The Clear Line. The style of Herge, of Tintin. I’m sure you can picture it. The style where all extraneous lines are eliminated, and only the lines that do work remain. A single line of exquisite clarity and control, producing deceptively simple and open figures in a method that is in fact extremely hard to do. You can’t hide anything, in the Clear Line. Every shape must be rendered in the minimal amount of ink, but not at the expense of detail. There’s little or no weighting on the line – making the line thicker or thinner to create spatial bias in the panels – no crosshatch, no shading, and no skimping on the realism of backgrounds. The characters, especially in Herge, tend to be a little cartoony: in combination with the detailed background work, the effect defined by Scott McCloud as “masking” comes into play.
I knew what ligne claire is, I’m trying to take my art in that direction a bit. I didn’t know who named it.
Get your own tiny Obama
Top German modelmakers Preiser now do a 1:87th scale Barack and Michelle Obama for your railway layout.
Technorati tag: Scale Models
The 1:72nd and 1:76th scale model armoured fighting vehicle museum
I thought I’d already blogged this, but it appears not. The curator of this virtual museum is endeavouring to collect and build models of all the world’s military vehicles in “braille scale”.
Technorati tag: Scale Models
The Japanese Model Museum
Based in San Francisco. The Japanese Model Museum only displays models which can be bought. The site is too wide fvor the screen on my laptop. Larger monitors needed.
Technorati tag: Scale Models
All new homes to be “zero carbon” by 2016 1
The Government has released a white paper that calls for all domestic buildings to be zero carbon by 2016. There isn’t a definition for “zero carbon”, however, though it’s likely to mean buildings which are net-zero carbon over a year. New public buildings will be held to similar standards within a few years.
Technorati tag: EcoHouse
How to crowd fund your film
The producers of The Age of Stupid explain how they corralled multiple small investors to fund their film.