Sour Grapes (properly this time)

Just a quick post: I got my hands on a camera today and took a proper picture of the Sour Grapes illustration. It has now been sent off to the Adrian Henri poetry prize (so that should immediately lead to my becoming terribly rich and famous) but I submitted a version without text, it looks like this:

Ungaretti

Next year the Italian Institute is putting out a book of poetry by a man called Giuseppe Ungaretti, and I made the cover and some internal illustrations for it. This is what they look like.

 

Update: When I uploaded the cover yesterday it came out in the most bizarre neon colours, because computers work in mysterious ways. This is what it’s actually supposed to look like.

To Belgium

I just entered a bookplate and small print competition in Belgium. I made a bookplate for myself, and also an illustration for Senex by John Betjeman. Somehow my work has become a lot sexier in the last two days.

This is the poem:

Oh would I could subdue the flesh
Which sadly troubles me!
And then perhaps could view the flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.

To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis-playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.

At sundown on my tricycle
I tour the Boroughs edge,
And icy as an icicle
See bicycle by bicycle
Stacked waiting in the hedge.

Get down from me! I thunder there,
You spaniels! Shut your jaws!
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear,
Suspenders torn asunder there
And buttocks in your paws!

Oh whip the dogs away my Lord,
They make me ill with lust.
Bend bare knees down to pray, my Lord,
Teach sulky lips to say, my Lord,
That flaxen hair is dust.

Which is by John Betjeman.

An Unromantic Valentine’s

Happy Valentines day everyone… haha, only joking, all those couples are smug enough already. Here’s a picture I drew, and a limerick to accompany it.

A young poet wrote “Roses are red…”
For a girl he intended to wed,
But much later in life,
He grew bored of his wife,
And became a transvestite instead.

Some very quick nonsense

Here is a silly little project that I made this evening. It is a very short poem accompanied by some short silly illustrations. You may well ask, “what’s happened James? Get back into the print workshop and do some of that proper illustration work that you usually do!”. I ask myself the same every night.

Incidentally, the poem reads:

When we came to assemble our table,
We found out it arrived one leg short,
So it fell to our daughter, young Mabel,
To provide us with extra support.

Based on an unfortunate mix-up surrounding an Ikea purchase. No joke.

Limericks

Here are some pictures. Click on them to read the poems too.