Surviving the Scottish Summer

As you could have gathered from the previous couple of posts, I have mixed feelings about the Scottish summer. On the plus side its the short time of the year when the weather becomes good enough that you can spend more than ten minutes outside without suffering horribly, but on the other hand it creates this sort of obligation where everyone is expected to spend all day sitting outside, which for me feels like suffering horribly. There are also Highland Games in a different town every week, and the Festival means that Edinburgh becomes uninhabitable. Even Dundee, normally the Reliable Bastion of Scottish Grimness, is not unaffected. I drove into the city over the Tay bridge last week and it sparkled in the sunlight like Las Vegas. 

As you’ve seen, I’ve been drawing lots of the things I’ve seen this summer, and I’ve finally compiled those drawings in a print. (If you haven’t seen, then look at the previous few blog posts here).

Here it is! This is my new self-promotion mailout, which this week, along with a couple of postcards and things, will be winging its way to hundreds of art directors in the UK, North America, and as of this month, Hong Kong too. What do you think?

Incidentally, if you’re an art director and reading this and thinking, “that looks great, I want it as a poster” then fear not! Just give me a message and I will post this and other things to you too. 

I hope you all survive the rest of the Scottish Summer, and that on September the 1st it starts pouring with rain.

On the Fringes of Things

The Fringe! Everyone, it’s the Fringe! Are you at the Fringe? Have you been there? It’s the Fringe.

At the moment I spend every week yo-yo-ing between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, but even when I’m unfortunate enough be in Edinburgh all of August I tend to spend the month on the safer side of Lothian Road. Now the Edinburgh Conference Centre is a Fringe venue so I can literally see Ed Byrne’s enormous and terrifying face from my bedroom window- but such is life, and at least it keeps the tourists happy.

This is a rundown of things that I have looked at this week. As a great man once sarcastically said, “I hope you’re wearing a sturdy hat because this may blow your mind.”

On Monday I bought a new sketchbook, which is why our first page here says “James’s New Sketchbook.” This drawing shows a man sitting by himself and eating a burger so it had a lot in common with a lot of Fringe events, being both unfunny and watched by only one person.

But don’t hold it against him! I scurried down to the Book Festival one night. The Book Festival is very fun but unfortunately fulfils many of the stereotypes of a book festival: The main stereotype (apart from the large number of books present) is that most people wear glasses.

Seriously, everyone.

This guy had a mohican and dungarees too, because he was cool.

This is a picture of Joe Sacco. It’s drawn from life because I went to hear him talk, so it’s essentially a form of reportage and I think Mr. Sacco would be pretty proud. I have to be honest though, I’ve never really liked Joe Sacco; between the weight of his line and sheer number of words on each page, I find his books rather hard-going. I went to his talk in the hope that he would persuade me, but he didn’t really. I can see why people like him, but he’s not to my taste.

It also occured to me that if Joe Sacco and Guy Delisle had a fight, Delisle would win because he looks like a Guy Ritchie hero, while Joe Sacco is surprisingly tiny.

It’s worth pointing out that I only write these blog posts after I’ve drawn the pictures and I basically make them up as I go along, so I only just thought of the idea of Joe Sacco and Guy Delisle having a fight but haven’t had a chance to draw it. Therefore I propose A Competition where I encourage my readers to draw pictures of Sacco and Delisle brawling in a picturesque landscape (probably Israel/Palestine) and the best picture will win a prize.

Anyway, afterwards I went to the pub, but not before running into Chris Haughton of all people. He’s very charming and tremendously modest- so modest in fact that I had no idea who he was, and so probably said some very silly things to him without realising that he was a great illustrator.

After finally figuring out how famous he was, I went to the pub. Here are some pub-people.

When we re-emerged into the real, illiterate world, it was time to do some dancing. What else does one do in the Fringe? I went to see my friend’s band, who have a Fringe show in Henry’s Cellar Bar (like I say, the Fringe has crossed onto my side of Lothian Road!) It was great and I drank lots and didn’t draw too much, but got a bit done:

Jazz guitar!

Jazz fans too. Good, eh? There are actually many, many pages of drawing from that night, but they are all terrible. I only discovered them the next day when I woke up with sore feet and a hangover.

I recovered in a coffee shop in the hopes of avoiding anything more strenuous, much like fellow above, who was rather timidly eating his cake. I then strolled around town to look at tourists and draw pictures.

Where better than the museum? As you’ve gathered, I draw a lot of cafés and pubs, and they only rarely have racing cars mounted on the walls.

It’s also one of the best places to draw because a) it’s out of the rain b) there are loads of people milling around c) they are all relatively sedentary. I used to take students here too, but I kept losing them.

After that it was time to get some lunch. I went to Brew Lab with my friends. Have you seen that place? It’s so hipster-y. I drew a couple of people and a man with thick-rimmed glasses told my girlfriend not to put milk or sugar in her coffee. She said “You’re not the boss of me!”, which I think is a perfectly reasonable response to people telling you how you ought to like your coffee.

Then I went down to Bristo Square, which is now called the Underbelly and has a tremendous purple cow. Strangely, I had no compulsion to draw the cow itself, and thinking back to it I’m not really sure why I missed out such an obvious bit of subject matter. I just drew people instead.

Everything there is cow themed and the tables are set in little enclosures, which may or may not be there to make the place look more like a livestock market.

It did start raining though, and drawing is obviously disrupted by even the slightest bit of rain, so I had a lovely hangover pint in the livestock enclosures instead.

By that point it was getting late! My Fringe-drawing tolerance was getting worn down, as was my tolerance for getting hassled by people giving out flyers. I left without drawing the incredibly obvious giant purple cow and headed for the Royal Mile. For those who don’t know it, it’s the very epicentre of the Fringe and is the top spot for getting hassled by people giving out flyers.

It’s funny, some people leap at you with great excitement, but my favourites are the ones who are clearly only doing it as a favour for a friend and just stare dead-eyed as they prop up a sandwich board. But such is the way of the Fringe. The Fringe is so open-ended that you get some pretty mixed things. My favourite flyer was from someone urging me to see a “Horror version of Pinocchio set in the 1950’s”. If anyone gets the chance to see that show, please let me know how it was.

The other great thing on the Royal Mile are the buskers, which by and large are much better than the sword-jugglers and things. So I’ll leave you here with this picture of some beardy Spanish Flamenco players. Happy Fringing!

p.s. I’m serious about the Joe-Sacco-fighting-Guy-Delisle Competition idea. If anyone sends me a really great drawing of it I’ll send you a proper prize.

Highland Games

For those who only know me as a distant presence on the internet, you will probably not know that I grew up in a small town in the North East of Scotland called Aboyne. I am here in the summer and like many small towns in the north of Scotland we have our own highland games. Highland Games are traditional events in Scotland where they have strange sports, dancing, bagpipes, food, drink, sometimes livestock, that sort of thing. I was there with my grandparents and I drew and drew and drew until I ran out of pages in my sketchbook- indeed, this is far from a comprehensive survey of the games because there is a long list of things I didn’t draw, but at least it gives up a flavour of an event centred around large men in kilts. There are fewer silly things to write about an event like this because highland games are fundamentally silly things.

I will show you the drawings and describe what actually happens. First off there are sports, divided into light events (running, jumping, boring sorts of things) and heavy events (throwing rocks and trees and other forest objects). I didn’t really draw the light events because you all know what men running in a circle looks like. The men above are at the heavy events, watching or judging or something.

This is the hammer throw. It involves large men throwing  an iron ball on a chain as far as they possibly can.

This is the really famous highland games event, tossing the caber. The caber is a big treetrunk and you have to run with it vertically and then throw it end over end. Contrary to popular belief the aim is not to throw it as far as possible, but to have it land pointing as straight as possible. But I swear seeing it in real life is so impressive because it just looks impossible.

The events also feature the number-one-Scottish-tourist-baffler, the bagpipes. You have bagpipe competitions where people have to play a tune and march around in front of a judge, and you also have a lot of people practising their bagpipes in the carpark, which I always think is quite funny.

This is the actual competition: he is standing on a little stage.

But the most impressive bagpipe events in the marching bands. They get the pipe bands from a couple of local towns and they all march in together in a sort of military parades, all in full costume. There are several hundred people playing, which is more than I could draw quickly. But this is what they looked like at the start of the procession:

It reminds me of a Nicholas Bentley cartoon where some tourists are looking at a piper in his big hat and there is a grouse sitting on top of the hat. One of the tourists is saying to another “Is that part of it, or do you think we should tell him?”

After the pipe band marches in the Clan Chieftain comes in and gives a little speech. He may be a Earl of Aboyne or the Marquis of Huntly or some similarly Scottish noble, but his accent suggests he was educated at Eton. He made a very nice speech about the importance of tradition and how good it was that his grandson will one day be presiding over an event indistinguishable from this one. And it’s true, it is authentically timeless and traditional and you can tell because everyone has flags and coats-of-arms, everything is measured in feet rather than metres, the heavy events are still men-only and the after-games disco still exclusively plays Queen, Abba and Van Morrison. I didn’t get to draw the Chieftain but his wife walked around with a little dog.

After all that had subsided we went back to  the regular events, more sports and competitions and things. There is also highland dancing.

I was at the opposite end of the arena from the dancing stage so I didn’t really see any of it, but these are some dancers relaxing and warming up, which I think is quite nice to draw; there’s always something nice about drawing people standing around.

That’s actually my favourite thing about these sorts of events: as well as showing everyone running around doing serious things it’s quite nice to show people relaxing. As well as a lot of men formally dressed in kilts there are hundreds  and hundreds of locals in jeans, drinking Tennants and eating burgers and spilling ketchup down their shirts. There are chip vans and ice cream vans and there’s a fun fair where threatening looking men watch over children on dodgems and all that sort of thing. For proper traditional Scots wearing a kilt is similar to wearing a suit for the rest of the world, so a lot of people with no specific role wore their kilts and just mingled because that’s what you do on a day out like this.

But as I say, I ran out of sketchbook pages so you’ll just have to imagine that all and cope with all the pictures from the regular events. And men in kilts standing around. One of my favourite scenes. I might even develop it for a mailout or something, watch this space. Until next year!

Hot Jazz!

Hot jazz time. It’s been a jazzy week, and by that I mean I went to one jazz gig and listened to about three quarters of a Fats Waller album. But nonetheless, let me tell you all about it:

We start with me going to hear a jazz pianist called Huw Warren play in the Aboyne Festival, my hometown’s  very own art and culture event. Huw Warren is really tremendously talented. A terrific pianist. Very, very impressive. The only thing though, is that he suffers horribly from Weird-Musician’s-Expression-Syndrome. That is to say, he starts a song looking like this:

And by the time he reaches the first crescendo just after the introduction, he looks like this:

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly it was dark in the theatre, so I couldn’t draw too much. But suffice to say he spent most of the gig looking like a character from a Sylvain Chomet film.

I feel it’s okay for me to comment on this because I also suffer from “bass-face” when I play, as anyone who’s seen my band can testify. I once lost control of my face so badly that I drooled down my shirt.

Anyway, Huw Warren plays very impressively so if you didn’t see him you should look out for him, etc, and he may well come back to Aboyne because there was a good turnout too.

On a slightly-related note, it’s worth mentioning that Aboyne Festival’s branding is so desperately unexciting that it looks like a run-down caravan park in the mid-90’s. In fact, Aboyne’s dentist has a more exciting logo. If anyone in Aboyne Festival is reading this I would urge you to hire someone more exciting me to redesign your posters.

I say this because of the other jazzy outing of the week, which was designing a poster for my good friend John Youngs’ band: The Gramophone Jass Band, who have a festival show on in Henry’s Cellar Bar on Morrison Street throughout August.

This is a bit of a departure for me, because I’ve spent most of the summer telling my pupils to experiment with new techniques despite never doing it myself. So I tried it as a papercut. Above you can see all the different elements, which then all got photoshopped together to look like this:

My favourite thing about this design is the pattern of gramophones in the background. Anyway, as I say this about everyone, you definitely should check out the Gramophone Jass Band in the festival. The details are all on the poster, and what a poster! What are you waiting for?

Two last things to say too. One is an announcement: One of my other secret plans (apart from the secret project which I’m mentioning occasionally) is that I’m going to spent a few months in Hong Kong at the end of the year on a reportage project, similar to the one in Ethiopia last year.

This is the first announcement so HELL YEAH HONG KONG!

The other thing is that my best buddy the illustrator Oliver Ninnis  has done a Don’t Panic brief, and has made by far the best entry there. Unfortunately the evils of democracy dictate that we can’t just take an educated opinion as a judge of its quality, instead everyone gets a say. So do a friend-of-a-friend a favour, click on this link and then you just have to like it on facebook or twitter and he gets your support. If he wins he’s promised to give everyone who voted for him a thigh massage.

So that’s all my news for now. What do you think?

Edit: as someone rather smugly pointed out, the above picture is of Khartoum airport. It is not Hong Kong, because I haven’t been there yet. It is just a vaguely related travel-themed drawing.