DVD pangs

The release date for 'Brendan and the Secret of Kells' is Oct 5th I think.  And as soon as it comes out IT WILL BE MINE.  Oh yes, it will be mine.
I mean look at it, the animation is just gorgeous, and it's nice to see a break from the ever-more realistic world of CGI films and the sub-standard animation that keeps sneaking into cartoons (not all cartoons, just an underprivelaged few) by the back door.



As will this:



I may harp on about this film, but with good reason.  Watching that little bit of animation where Hiccup shudders after eating the fish still makes me unreasonably happy.  It's just great character animation all the way through, and I love the story, especially the twist at the end.  Also, if you do happen to see it in 3D you will actually get something for your money, as this seems to be an effect that works best where you have long-distance shots, so something close against something far away.  Like, for example, a dragon flying through a vast expanse of sky. 
I still cannot find anything wrong with this movie that's really worth mentioning, and I have to say that I think those who do are just nit-picking.  I love it at age 22 (and believe me, I cannot stand a poorly constructed film, both animation, shooting and story-wise) so I don't see any reason for anyone else not to love it too.  It's my humble opinion that a good solid "children's film", or even "family film" should not be patronising to the parents.  Look at some of the greats: Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast', some of Pixar's latest -'Finding Nemo'. 'Wall-E' and especially 'Up', even the old 'Looney Toons' shorts from Warner Bros. had an adult appeal too.
Well I knocked 'How to Train Your Dragon' with the knuckle of scepticism and it seems pretty solid to me.

Words from the wiser

So I'm quickly becoming aware that getting through the degree in one piece is just the beginning.  My portfolio, which was fine for the degree show, has become woefully inadequate.  My first thought is that yes, this is all I have to get a job with right now, but also it needs to be completely overhauled.  So I've been checking out some blogs, trying to get some advice out of them, and came across Courtney Billadeau, whose work I've admired for some time.

I won't speak too much, but just hand over to her, and simply say that I found these posts very helpful.

Hullo from sweaty Kansas City

Five lessons from the academy

This is where she went, and although I'm not a huge fan of a lot of American illustration work (some of their more mainstream styles seem too photorealistic to me, or else too close to charicatures, and why is everyone always shiny?) good advice is applicable to any situation, and it seems that these guys had a lot of it to give.

Also, she has some neat process drawings up at the moment, which are always interesting.

Magic food

Discovered this little shop in Loughborough the other day, Chocolate Alchemy.  It's tucked away in the Churchgate Mews, and a friend mentioned it to me. Always a fan of chocolate, I went to have a nosy.

Oh My Gosh.

You go inside and it's your classic classy teashop, nice tables and a smiley dark-haired gentleman behind the counter.  Turns out his name is Pete Gardner, and not only does he own the place, he makes all the chocolates by hand, himself.  Anyone who's ever seen the film Chocolat will understand the appeal of this instantly.  There are variety boxes and collections arranged around the walls, alongside packs of cocoa beans and the shop smells wonderful.  Not all the flavours are things you would expect, there are some odd combinations in there including herbs and chilis for the more adventurous.  The chocolates themselves can also be bought individually from the counter and they are beautiful.  I spent 5 mins simply staring at them and I cannot fathom how one person can make such delicate objects by hand.  They are neat, professional and artistic to look at, and also wonderful to eat!

So I'll be making lots of trips to Chocolate Alchemy in the future.  I plan to road test every single one of these little gems :)

But hey, don't take me word for it  These guys will back me up:

This is Loughborough

Carla Mundy (the owner of these lovely photos)

Bendy People

I have acrobats on the brain at the moment, contortionists in particular, and I'm pretty sure I know why.  It's a combination of the following 3 things:

Nightwing comics

I only got into these pretty recently, although I've always been a bit of a Batman fan.  For those that don't know, Nightwing is the grown-up version of Dick Grayson, the first Robin.  After spending most of his childhood and teen years under the wing of the Dark Knight, he realises that he's outgrown the guise of Robin and needs to strike out on his own so he quits, moves to nearby Bludhaven, and sets himself up as Nightwing and starts taking back the city from an impressive set of bad guys, as well as popping back to Gotham to help out whenever Batman needs him, training the new Robins, and attempting to conduct a life outside of the Batcave.

I find Nightwing's story just as intriguing as Bruce Wayne's.  Everyone knows that story, the man that turned himself into a crimefighting symbol and rules his city through fear, but this is the story of the kid who was adopted into this lifestyle and never inherited that darkness.  He was the light, optimistic side of Batman, he added the humanity.  He's not the Bat, and so to see him fighting to win the approval of his mentor is an interesting thing, and the acrobatics don't hurt either.

Dick's backstory is that he grew up in the circus, joining his parents in the trapeze act, and after their murder he keeps up his heritage, so he has MAD SKILLS, and seeing them drawn well, like in the fantastic sequence on the left by Scott McDaniel makes my illustration brain very happy.

 

Acrobats
I ran across this webcomic a week or two ago, and although it's still in it's early stages and I don't know where it's going to go yet but the drawings are well seen and it's just fun to see a story built around such... bendy people :)

Cirque de Soleil

I've seen Quidam and Varekai after getting a ticket for the last two Christmases, and each time the level of performance has blown me away.  The professionalism is amazing, and my favourite thing to see by far are the aerial acts.  There is something about seeing a twisting figure suspended twenty feet above the floor, hanging on by a single hand, that just defies belief.  The skill and ability of human beings to contort themselves into those kinds of positions always astounds me.  The 'Flight of Icarus' performance in Varekai blew me away, it's such a beautiful thing to watch, especially live, that I was speechless.

Finance-shminance

I was going to write about something else today, but events have changed my mind and I think this needs recording before anything else I'd like to talk about.  Those things can wait, but this is feels more important right now.

I'm in a position of being totally in charge of my own upkeep for the first time.  My parents, who are amazing and very genorous, supported me through uni, and are keen to see me stay out of debt.  For this I am so grateful, because I know that it's more than what some people have.  But they have three other kids and a wedding to plan, so I need to be earning my own money now, being independant, taking care of myself.
Or so I believe sometimes.

I spoke to God about this a while back, telling him that I wanted to stay in Loughborough, and if he was on board with that then he would need to supply me with a house to live in, and a job to pay for my upkeep.  I left it at that and shortly afterwards my current housemate came across the place we are now living.  It's a great house, the rent is pretty low (it doesn't include bills but it's still a good deal), and I have an awesome room.
I love my room.  After living on the ground floor for two years in my last place I now have the largest bedroom in the house, it's upstairs, it has bookshelves and lots of storage, a window I can leave open at night without fear of people climbing in through it, I get the sun in the afternoons, and the street outside is a quiet one.  The sofas in the living room and big and comfy, and although we don't have a dining table we do have a coffee table which allows us to eat in the same room rather than taking food back to our desks, the bathroom is clean and feels larger than it is, and there is no lawn to mow!  And above all I've been getting on really well with the second housemate, who I hadn't known before we moved in.  I think we're going to be great friends, which is fantastic.  All in all, this house is a real blessing and I'm really happy to be living here.

So, one down.

Jobs.  I don't have one yet.  I'm on Jobseekers Allowance while I'm looking, which will just about cover the rent but not food.  I wouldn't mind taking part time work except it only makes sense to do so if there are enough hours to make it worth my while.  Obviously any income is good, but if a job pays only slightly more per week than JSA, it makes more sense for me to use my time doing things that will benefit me in the long run.  Two friends of mine are currently doing part time and temp work, so I know that's an option but again the hours have to be there or it makes no sense.  I'm currently working out a budget so I can see exactly where my money goes, how much I can get by on and how much I have to play with, and of course I still want to pursue illustration as a long term goal, so I need to leave time for that.  Life is also in the mix of course, throwing in friends, birthdays, trips, coffee meets, things that break without warning, not having a bath mat, and so on.  I want to be generous with the money I have, but also I know I have to be careful with it and use the gift I've been given responsibly.

But there's one source of income I hadn't counted on to be reliable -God.
You hear all the time about God coming through when money is tight, but it's one of those things where it's easy to believe in theory that God can and will provide, but maybe not in practise, or maybe for other people but not for you.  So it's important for me to remember what happened about a week ago.
I was feeling the pinch.  I'd just checked my bank account to see what I had left, and was working out how long it would last me, and it looked like it would take me up until the end of August, maybe mid-September if I was stringent.  Suddenly it felt like a very short amount of time, and although I knew better than to worry it was still hovering in the back of my mind and causing me a niggling of stress.  I prayed about it and left it at that, but it still preyed on my thoughts a bit.
A day or two later I got a call from a girl on my course, saying that after I'd noticed my email address spelt wrong on the Elements website that had been made to show off all our final degree work, they had found it was printed incorrectly in the catalogue too.  Of course this meant it didn't match our business cards and could make things a bit awkward for people trying to contact us, so the course was going to compensate us.  Now I had only spent £5 on my business cards, getting them printed locally and cutting them out myself, but some people had ordered really expensive ones on line, spending around £100 on them, so the course had picked a middle figure.
"We'll give you £40 compensation," I was told.
"But that's more than I spent," I protested.  "My cards only cost a fiver."
"It doesn't matter," she replied.  "The figure's fixed, because everyone spent different amounts they've set this as an average.  Don't argue about it, just take the money."
So I did.  Rent for the week, paid.
A few days later I found out that the degree show team had actually underspent on their expected budget, so we would all be getting another £20-25 back. 
Food for the week, paid.

The last one surprised me the most.  I was out with the Street Pastors that Saturday, and it was a pretty quiet night.  Before we went out we prayed for each other, and I brought up how I was feeling nervous about the money situation so the others prayed about that, and we went out arounf 11.  Most of the students had gone home for the summer, so there wasn't a lost of trouble about and we were just walking and talking.  I stopped to throw some bottles and cans into a bin and a man sitting next to the bin with his friend asked me what I was doing.  I told him and we got into a bit conversation about it, because he simply could not believe that I was out here on the streets, a 22 year old female, engaging with drunks and clubbers voluntarily.  I explained the reason I was did it, that God showing his caring in my life inspires me to want to look out for other people, and he just looked more surprised.  Suddenly he pulled out his wallet.
"Look," he said, "me and my friend have been to the races, we put money aside to make a day of it but we've still got a lot left from the beer fund."  He displayed a fan of ten and twenty pound notes, then pulled out one of the tenners and offered it to me.  "Here, I want you to take this."
"I can't possibly take that from you," I told him, "We're not paid, we just do this because we love it."  But he kept insisting.  Mike, the leader for the night, suggested that we could put it into the Street Pastor funds, but the man was insistant.
"No!  No, I want you to have this.  Go and get yourself something nice with it.  If you don't I'll be offended."  At that Mike nodded at me from behind the man's shoulder, so I took the note and thanked him. 
When we got back to the HQ I told everyone else what had happened and asked what I should do with it, thinking that since it was mine I could put it in with the funds, but the others insisted that since we'd agreed I would spend it on myself we had to keep our word.
So I took home £10 from Street Pastors.
Bills for the week, paid.
And that's everything.

The strange this is that after all my worries and efforts, after feeling that I needed to do it all myself, I didn't do a single thing in any of these instances.  I was just there, carrying on with life, and money just fell out of the sky on top of my head.
If one of these things had happened alone I might have passed it off as nice but meaningless, but to have all three come up in the same week, the week that I had brought that problem to God, and to cover my expenses exactly...  Some things you can't explain in terms of math and chance, and you know no one else will believe you if they're unwilling to, but this just felt like it all clicked in.  I wonder if this is not just God providing for me, since I did still have money at this point, but also him giving me hints.  Look, see?  I can do this.  You can trust me with this.  I know what you need, PRECISELY what you need.  You just have to tell me, and then be brave and give me a chance to look after you.
Not to say that I don't have to work for it, of course I do, but I need to realise that I CAN expect more from God, that I CAN ask him about very specific things, and that he IS capable of work that fine and precise.  It would be insulting for me to expect anything less of him.

And did we die?

No we did not!  I'm speaking, of course, about my own cooking :)

I'd say I'm not a great cook, but I do like good food and I'm finding it's cheaper to make it than to buy it.  Last week I bought some mince, and spent the week figuring out new things to do with it.  I subscribe to the 'Approximate School of Cooking', but the best recipe by a mile was

CUMIN!BURGERS
(Normal burgers with cumin in them, since I love cumin)

Ingredients to serve 2:
100g of mince  (get the decent stuff, you can always freeze the rest to use some other time)
1 handfull of rolled oats/breadcrumbs
1 egg
1 small brown onion
Mixed herbs
Salt and pepper
CUMIN!!

How to make them:
- Finely chop up your onion, and when I say fine I mean FINE.  I'm actually considering grating mine next time because I spent ages chopping and there were still some chunks in there
-Put the onion, oats and egg in a bowl with your mince and mix them well.  The key here is to get the consistency right.  If it's too stiff and dry then your burgers wont hold together, but if it's too mushy it's just splat everywhere
-Add your herbs, salt and pepper, and if you're me this is the time to put in as much cumin as you want.
-Mix it all in, then use your hands to form burger shapes.  Just roll a ball and flatten it until it's about 1.5 cm thick (half an inch)  You should get at least 2 good sized burgers out of your mix
-Now simply grill them for 15-20 mins, flipping them half way through, until they are cooked through.  Slap betwee some bread or a bun, some salad on the side.
- EAT THEM!!

I loved these, and I am totally making them again.  It's nice to have control over the kind of meat you're eating, plus the satisfaction of making the things yourself, plus the amazing taste.  They tasted way better than supermarket burgers, probably because they'd not been frozen in a tiny cardboard box for hours on end.  Plus, where else are you gonna get burgers full of tasty cumin!

What no Hat?!

Today I had my graduation ceremony, BA Hons in Illustration.  I got up the earliest I have in ages, dressed up to the nines (a smart shirt, and a skirt, and 2 inch heels no less!  What is the world coming to) and, looking like a rather professional young lady, if I may say so, trudged up to the hall to pick up my tickets and academic gown.  No mortarboard though, although we did get one for the official photo, was the only thing that puzzled us.  Why no hat?  What do you throw if you don't have a hat?  We made up for it by whooping far louder than was really appropriate for the occasion!

Now I don't know what the general opinion on gowns is.  Maybe you think they're a bit posh (probably true), over-priced (most likely) and deucedly difficult to put on, never mind keep in place (absolutely true!) but I have to say, once you have the thing safely attached, your hood clipped on and your huge flowing sleeves wafting around you like a rather villainous cloak or a set of vampire wings, you do feel a bit fantastic.  I don't know what I'd expected but they were layered and weighty, made by Ede and Ravenscroft of Cambridge, a city I'm still very attached too since I did my Foundation year there so I was unreasonably proud of that!  When I told my dad where the'd come from he casually mentioned, as he usually does "Oh, my company did some work for them a few years back".  I think he's done work for just about every firm in the country by this point!

Anyway, yes, proper robes by the Ede and Ravenscroft people, who even help you put them on, because like all academic things, there are far too many extra buttons and doo-dads on them than could ever be necessary.  Look!  I'm an important robe!  See how many buttons I have! 

The School of Arts isn't the most formal place to learn, a lot of the work is practical, there is paint everywhere most of the time, and we are supposed to be expressing ourselves so the dress code is pretty loose.  Which is great, but it does lull you into the mistaken belief that there is some kind of tension between the scientist and the artist, the writer and the performer.  That somehow your degree is a 'doss', not a 'proper' degree.  And now I'm in the job market I'm very aware of this as I try to phrase exactly why someone should hire me, and what skills does my obscure choice of degree give me exactly.

Well our speaker summed it up rather well.  Sir Christopher Frayling was being made a Doctor of Letters at our ceremony and addressed the congregation afterwards.  He seems to be one of those men that are a bit like Unilever -they've secretly been involved in so many things that you were never really aware that they were there- but when he opened his speech by cramming Doctors Hyde, Frankenstein, Cyclops, Mabusa, No, Strangelove and Who respectively into his opening two sentences and making a Dalek joke I decided immediately that I liked him!  Not to go on first impressions, but you can't really take a disliking to a man whose personal motto is "Perge scelus mihi diem perficias" (translation: Proceed varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit) (translation:  Go ahead, punk, make my day!)  *

His view on the subject was that the percieved tension doesn't really exist, or at least it shouldn't.  The arts, for all their hoighty-toighty reputation, do something that not all degrees do -teach you to think for yourself.  Anyone can learn facts given enough time, anyone can parrot information, and these things are good.  But being an art student means having a different challenge thrown at you every week.  It means learning to be comfortable with instability, thinking your way around problems for yourself.  Taking the initiative, organising the world around you, and making things.  Creating.  Bringing things into existance that weren't there before, arguing and holding debate, and questioning the world around you.  It's not just about learning, it's about learning how to do.

Looking back on the last three years at first I was a little surprised to find it was all suddenly over, and you don't think of it as an achievement immediately because it was just something you did at the time, but now I think about it he's right.  We have worked damn hard, all of us.  We've pulled all-nighters, cried and partied together, collected a vast array of injuries and proved ourselves intrepid.  We deserve this.

*If, for some bizarre reason, you want to watch that ceremony in full, it will be available here for two of weeks following this post.  I make my brief appearance around 32 mins in, and Christopher Frayling's spot starts at 43 mins, beginning with him being presented for Doctor of Letters.

Future Bard

I've been reading Shakespeare lately.  He's one of those authors that we're told are amazing, but few people I've met have actually decided to read his work for their own enjoyment instead of for schoolwork -I had to study Macbeth and Tweltfth Night- so I decided a while back that I'd try and read some more.  I went through Hamlet (not bad but some peculiar pacing), Othello (my favourite), King Lear (which I did not get at all), and a couple of others, and I've just finished The Sonnets and Narrative Poems, which I really loved.
Everyone knows the two most famous sonnets "Let me not..." and "Shall I compare thee", but having finished the book I don't thing these two made my top ten list.  All of them are good, some of them are truly excellent, and the later sonnets are very emotionally interesting, dealing with the troubles of loving someone cruel.

The best one for me is 14, which struck me as lovely:

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy,

But not to tell of good or evil luck,

Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;

Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,

Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,

Or say with princes if it shall go well,

By oft predict that I in heaven find:

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,

And, constant stars, in them I read such art

As truth and beauty shall together thrive,

If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;

Or else of thee this I prognosticate:

Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a romantic, but if someone spoke to me like that I think I might melt.

No doodle badger

Well it would seem sensible to start this blog off with some drawing, but honestly I've not done much of late. I've been moving into my new house, setting everything up, sorting out Jobseekers and so on, so there hasn't been much time for it.

The most time I spent on a drawing was fifteen minutes at the local pub's Thursday night Pub Quiz. I sat in The Phantom (Loughborough's most brightly decorated pub) with group of friends filling in 'The Badger Round'. Basically you have to do a drawing on the theme of their choice, which will always include a badger. This week was 'Batman Badger', and here is my not-particularly-impressive offering

That said, I did come second and won a tub of marshmallows for my efforts!  The winning team?  Well they may not have had a better drawing, but they bought their own glitter.  How appropriate for Batman and Robin! (cue music #The Ambiguously Gay Duooooo#)

Yup, their own glitter. 
To a pub quiz.

I don't care how good your drawing is, you can't beat that.

Impending Ponder

So here we are, graduated. A 2.1 in BA Hons Illustration with Animation from the rather excellent Loughborough University. A nice solid grade. A grade that says “yes I am clever, yes I am good at what I do” but also “however I do have a life outside of the lecture theatre”. After three years I get a couple of digits stamped on a form, and that's it. We're done, we're out, we're free.


But now we have our degrees, what do we do next? After twenty years in the education system I've decided to stop in Loughborough for a while, so I find myself, along with thousands of other ex-students, off the train of higher education and now we are all somewhere we've never been before: The Real World.
How does it work? What are the rules? And, more importantly, can you break them and get away with it?
My degree isn't like some, where you can go straight into a “career” (that mythical creature that gives you security and job fulfilment all that the same time). No no, this course doesn't work like that. I have a friend in Accounting who is going straight into a London-based accountancy firm because... well that's just how Accounting works; you train in accounting and you become an accountant. My course, not so much.
The obvious route seems to be freelance illustration, in it's many forms, but the more I hear from other freelancers, the more I think that going straight into freelancing isn't going to work. I'm intending to live on my own now, not to go back to the little town I came from if I can help it, but to do such things requires a regular income, not the dips and climbs of a new freelancer's earnings. I don't have the knowledge base yet, nor the contacts to try this right off the bat and make a success of it, but the fact of the matter is I'll draw forever.

So this is me, staying in this new town and trying to find a place for myself. I've been blessed with a reasonably priced house, and now we're trusting God for the rest of it and waiting on the job. This is me, learning to take care of myself. How to pay bills, how to keep a budget, how to make my own food, how to get hold of enough money to do all of the above.

And this is me quietly suspecting that being “successful” and “capable” might not be as important as I sometimes think it is.