sun studio

a versatile actor

christmas toys past #1

After a rather lengthy lay-off, TPS returns with some more scratchy drawings and a few ill-conceived notes about what I am thinking with my MIND. What with Christmas just around the corner, it's the time to start getting nostalgic about the toys of our youth. And what better way to kick off proceedings than by taking a look at the The Six Million Dollar Man action figure.

As well as a bionic eye in the form of a magnifying glass in the back of his head you could look through, he had a latex rubber-johnny-style covering on one of his arms that you could roll up with some difficulty to reveal bionic PARTS. I think he had bionic parts elsewhere on his person but I'm not sure where they were located and I can't be bothered to look this up on the web as it's really not that important. Did he also have a mechanism in his arm to help pick up heavy things? I think he did and in order to demonstrate how powerful this red-tracksuited cyborg was, the toymakers supplied him with a little plastic car engine that he could get all bionic with.

I also had a space capsule type thing that the figure could go in. If memory serves correctly, it was some kind of BIONIC chamber into which he could recharge his PARTS after a hard day's work lifting up car engines and so on. It was the worst toy EVER. Boys want their action figures in imagined scenes of explosive adventure, discovery and fighting NOT recovering from their labours in a recumbant electro-digital snooze. Bah!

italian sketchbook

And here's a couple more...

italian sketchbook

'Didn't get the chance to do much drawing on a recent trip to Italy (too busy attending weddings, climbing mountains, wandering around canals and eating gelati – you know how these Italian holidays are) but here are one or two things from the sketchbook I kept while I was there...

watercolour experiments

Some time back in February of this year, pen-enthusiast, crossword-solver, compulsive sketchbook-keeper, cartoon-pedlar extraodinaire and general, all-round balding polymath Dave Shelton put me on to Carbon Platinum Ink in response to my request for a genuinely waterproof ink that could be used in a fountain pen without gumming up the works. With lightning-quick reaction time, I ordered some at the end of last week and it arrived the following day. I dutifully filled a pen with said ink and created some ART which I'm posting here.

I'm really pleased with the results. The ink itself is fantastic – providing it's left to dry completely, it doesn't bleed at all with the application of watercolour – and the drawings, though nothing out of this world, have a freshness and a charm to them that I don't think they would have if I'd coloured them with my digital crayons as per usual.

I'll try and do some more in the days ahead and will the post any results. Well, I say any results, but truth be told, the material that makes it on to the TPS blog goes through a rigorous selection process in order to maintain the illusion that there is some level of consistency to my work. You should see the crap that doesn't make it. Sheesh...

P.S. Credit must also be given to the very wonderful Elwood H. Smith who discusses the merits of Platinum Carbon Ink on his Drawger blog which you can read here.

building

Beautiful Victorian red-brick building on the corner of Lansdowne Road and York Avenue. The perspective on the left hand side is dodgy and it took me ages to finish it and I feel as though I've been looking at it forever so I'm no position to say whether it's any good or whether I like it or hate it. So there. I'll shut up now.

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