Love & Big Hot Dog

Here are a bunch of drawings. Check them out. They are all haunted, but don't worry about that.

Please look at this bunny's tongue. It's perfect. Makes me laugh. Look at that little tongue!

You might know the truth, but aliens know it better: love is real. Here is the proof. View the alien and its free and trusting spirit. Welcome the alien into your heart. Purchase my self-help book for only £2.99 and you will learn how to easily let an alien into your heart. Thank me later, with a nice rock you find (the greatest gift).

Here are some bunnies holding and looking at things:

Beautiful.

Don't get in the way of any animals or plants. Thank you.

Wow!

I have been making a whole bunch of paintings recently, thick and watery on irregular scraps of paper. A jumble of colours bleeding into each other. A big kaleidoscope of wobbly-eared animals. Sometimes it's nice to sit and paint while feeling sleepy. Watch an old tv series and make an unpleasant scratching noise with my paintbrush. Gnaw on a Babybel, maybe (maybe-bel).

Since starting to film myself painting stuff more (for speedpainting video purposes) it kinda makes it more fun to sit down and paint things and know that I have that time captured. A fun little time capsule. All the weird little movements of my hand a tumbling secret code.

Anyway, eat the moon, eat a small cheese, eat the paint, eat a day.

Cat Bag & Rose Skirt: A Kawamomo Haul

✶✵ This post contains items gifted to me. ✵✶

Recently, Kawamomo let me pick out some cute stuff from their online store, and yes, I have been thinking about pleated tennis skirts in various colours and styles continuously for a thousand years, so I got two.

Kawamomo has a generally cutesy style (momo means "peach" in Japanese, and kawamomo could mean "the skin of a peach" I believe, but I'm no expert - I mean, kawa also means "river" so it could potentially become "river peach" - regardless, the name reflects the gentle and sweet style offered). I liked a lot of stuff they had available, but first of all, I picked up a very important black pleated skirt with a little embroidered rose to one side.

I do in fact love this skirt, and fortunately both skirts I got fit me absolutely perfectly. Please note that I'm wearing a pyjama top in this image. Its huge, open sleeves are there to waft cool air all around my shoulders in these troubling summer times (and I think a grey check shirt and black skirt combo is pretty nice).

I really couldn't resist the rose... it's cute. I would like to own a wardrobe full of the same skirt but each with different embroidered flowers. A baby pink peony. Lily of the valley. Bluebells. Imagine the possibilities!

Moving on to my next pleated skirt - this one in a nice dusty pink colour - I also love this one. It's of a slightly thicker and softer material. Really I just love the colour. I really like muted, earthy pinks and don't own anything else this colour, so there's something very pleasing about it. The black double line detail is very cute, and it pairs perfectly with this owl jumper, also from Kawamomo.

The owl jumper is a unique and charming specimen. It has owls on the elbows (the natural and correct place for owls to be), two tiny pockets in the front, and light, multicoloured flecks throughout the material (you can't see them here, but they're cute!). It's a really thick jumper, too, so I guess I won't be wearing this for a while.

The final shocking items I received were two backpacks. One hefty pink boy which I think will be great for travelling (since I decided to shun suitcases), and one slightly smaller bag, which happens to be a cat.

The cat bag is honestly the greatest thing I've ever seen and I am thrilled and delighted by it. I think I might be becoming a backpack person. I was a backpack person as a teen, and then I switched to shoulder bags, but now... now the lines are blurred.

Life is truly a whirlwind... but I love my cat bag.

Shreks

Please observe my beautiful Shreks. What an inspiring man. Let us all take a moment to admire all that he has given us. I think I have captured his essence in these controversial paintings. His true self.

He is filled with passion, and onion.

Cow Enjoyer (I made some collages)

Check out my journal. It has some cows in it. Strong, kind, beautiful creatures. They are probably very good at video games. I'm sure of it.

Anyhow, I collaged some stuff into my journal here, including some cows and a drawing of Van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln's son, pouring judgement and scorn upon me from the page, as he probably should.

It feels good. It feels right. Collaging is that great thing where you can just put literally anything into your journal - a packet of ketchup, an old photo, an entire skull - and it'll look cool and interesting, somehow.

This is a little morbid [MORBID ALARM] but I've been watching some videos and TV shows about true crime lately, and I love thinking about how people's diaries and letters and messages tell a story long after a person is gone, and I love applying this to myself and imagining someone putting together the pieces of who I might be from this kind of evidence. Who am I, really? Well, this journal shows that I am the big cow enjoyer.

That sounds like a fine thing to be.

me

I made some paintings over photos recently because I was thinking about all the old fun stuff I used to do a lot when I was super into constructing books or taking a very heavy collage/junk journal kind of approach to journals. I would do so many strange little experiments with putting anything and everything together, or printing out stuff and getting it wet, or painting on it, or tearing it up in some way.

Sometimes I really miss that stuff, all that messy and thick and weird journaling stuff. Things that feel so tactile and things that don't work and that are rough and hanging, torn apart. It's that kind of chaotic, and hurried, and collected creativity, where I'd make these dense and nonsensical things. I guess I've done so many straightforward drawings lately and used so much clean and inviting paper, separate sheets that invite a certain kind of neatness and cheerful mode of drawing, that I've sort of forgotten about this kind of stuff.

I also was thinking a bit about author photos and things like that. I've been editing a portfolio site that I made a while ago and left to sit lonely and incomplete, and I thought about making a painting over a photo that could work as a nice introductory self-portrait for that. A nice combination of some kind of art feeling (a satisfying painty texture, perhaps) and my actual face.

I really like the way this one turned out. An old picture of me in the woods turned into a strange, dark, fairytale space. And of course, a bunny is here (to judge).

I haven't really done anything art portfolio-like since my art school days, but there's something really satisfying about having some place to sum up some part of you. I guess that's what people like about using listography as a sort of digital business card. It's nice to have one place to point to to say "this is me and my things", and it's really easy on social media to just sort of not to do that, and have a jumble of links. So I thought, maybe I should focus on having a portfolio again, at this point. And looking at my old portfolio(s) made me remember more of all the old fun, experimental stuff I used to make, and I want to try and make more of this very particular, very scribbly, very swirling, and very "me" stuff more.

I also want to do some kind of very singular thing there. A page of just horses. Just a lot of horse drawings. Something like that. You go there and you know. About the horses.

There's something so satisfying about painting on photos, too. I was thinking while painting some of these that it would be so great to make a hand tinted film with some black and white footage - or maybe I could collage over the frames to make some strange collaged film. Just one little idea splintering off from this (and that's a reason I miss this sort of experimentation - it feeds a million little ideas). I can film a rose fluttering slightly in the breeze, me emerging from the bathtub, shots of pouring water. It'll be an art film, it'll say "fin" at the end in a serif font and everything. But I'll need some more printer ink first.

The Glory of Ugly Shoes

It's getting towards Real Summer Time again so of course I'm noticing the way my jeans cling and the way my shoes rub more than usual as I'm looking through the big magnifying glass of steadily increasing temperature, but also I just went on holiday too, so I'm naturally thinking a lot about the endless wrestling match between style and comfort. I'm pleased to announce that I love ugly shoe.

These are my Skechers. My ugly beautiful children.

There's just something good about wearing the mildly ugly but intensely comfortable shoe of choice at any time while going outside. Shoes, after all, are the item of clothing most likely to become ugly spontaneously while being worn. Maybe this is partly because I wear work brogues to the woods at an alarming frequency because I am the fool who was transported directly from a Tumblr 2012 forest photoshoot of a girl carrying a satchel and wearing brogues, and inexplicably, cream (dangerous yet so cute) [editing note: I am talking about the colour cream, not the substance, to clarify]. Except really I'm a more gremlin-like and gurning version of that sweet, innocent, " maybe I'll make a lookbook.nu account" relic, but the point stands.

These brogues? Only Tesco's finest.

To be clear, I love my brogues - they're a soft and comfy shoe choice that works in the most professional and most casual situations, and the forest debris does clean off just fine, but there is the matter of having to constantly tie and untie your shoelaces. This is usually okay with me (I know, I'm so brave, so resilient), but it does get a bit old when you have to awkwardly do this at the door of your airbnb every day while your host presumably silently constructs a list of your hideous faults and one of those faults is probably your lack of swift shoe conjugation.

These are my spicy Primark boots - the most exuberant of all my shoes - and only a small section of the little metal studs have fallen off so far after a good year of use!

Moreover, being on holiday always makes this thing happen to my brain. Always the same smart thoughts, which are either "why did I bother trying to look nice when tbh I could've just worn Big Legging?" or "wow why didn't I at least make slightly more effort to look nice when tbh I could've Brushed My Hair?" The constant dilemma. Actually, I think I did pretty okay on this holiday, but this post is really much more about the aftermath a week later, when I found myself wearing a long, pleated navy skirt and some Skechers.

This is the kind of clear and beautiful image you can expect on this - my photography blog. My Skechers look really good here because you basically can't see them. Mmm, cute!

It's kind of a weird combo - the neat and cute but loose and unassuming skirt, and these cute little honkers on my feet - but listen, I have never been more comfortable in my life. I just live for these Skechers. They are sort of ugly in a cute way. There's something satisfying about them. This is the same way I feel about a lot of the sorts of outdoorsy outerwear gear that every single member of my family wears. Little comfy fleeces from some kind of camping shop. The ubiquitous walking shoes. And that's how I know that my love for the ugly cute comfy stuff must be genetic.

But also, y'know, it's just a sweater thing. Seeing all your friends in big comfy jumper? In a jumper with a hole in it? In a jumper that is clearly borrowed from someone, a little out of shape? Sometimes those things that are a little bit broken or dirty or ugly are just better, or they have their own beauty to them, or they're just comfy as hell. And that's why I respect the power of ugly shoes. Sort of.

I know that you come to this blog to enjoy multiple pictures of me holding shoes, so here you go. You're welcome.

I don't know, okay, just look at my Skechers and love them as I do. Thank you.