Progress report on "The Unearthing"

I've had a piece, "The Unearthing", in the works for ages now. I started it over a year ago, but then got distracted by Coggingtons cards and work and life and the like and it was shelved with the aim of me picjking it up to finish sometime.
Well, that time is now so I'm soldiering on with it now.

Check back soon to see how it looks.

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www.curtisallen.co.uk

New Valentines Card!

Well I have been massively neglecting this blog as of late so I need to show it some love.
What better way than by telling you about my new Coggingtons Valentines Day card, "Clanking in Sync" - which I think would not be too amiss on an Anniversary either.

Available here! - £2.65 + p&p

(Use voucher code CRIPESBLOG for a 1% discount on all purchases until Valentines Day.

Inside it reads "Like perfectly paired cogs".

It's been a year since I produced my first greetings card - my first Coggingtons Valentines card so I'm very excited to bring you my newest one!

Please note that this item is a printed card design incorporating my original hand-drawn digital artwork, and original photographs I've taken, manipulated together.

If you want me to handwrite a message inside the card and post it directly to the recipient, write this in the notes when you checkout.

Dimensions: 105mm x 148mm (4.13" x 5.82")

The card is a thick 350gsm, FSC credited paper stock. With a light satin coating on the outside, the inside is left uncoated, making it easier for you to write your own message. Each card is individually scored, ensuring a clean fold.

Each card comes with a thick, crisp white envelope with a bright splash of pink hidden inside!

Check out my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/curtisallenillustrator

And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

What is life?!

I have just spent the last couple of hours trying to sleep, all to no avail. Which is ironic because I spent the few hours immediately previous to that trying to stay awake. It's like my body knows which I want to be doing and decides to mess with me. My head was cloudy and fuzzy and I was blinking a lot and getting up and down a lot to stay awake for the last hour of work. Literally, at 17:06 (that is actually when I finish work) I felt grogginess and sleepiness lift almost in an instant.

I probably need to make some changes.

I have a 9-5 job (well, 8:42 - 17:06) and that is good. It's steady work. It pays regularly. There is no need for me to take it home. It does, however take up most of my day. From when I wake at about 7:30, until I get home about 17:35 is given over to work. Then I get in and have to do the essentials: y'know, eating, washing up, taking the rubbish out, ringing the insurance company, and so on.

Then, because in any given week I am usually DJing at least one night, there's that to think about. I normally decide the setlist on the fly but having a 9-5 with less time spent at home and less time on public transport, and less opportunity to sit up late listening to music makes it harder to keep up with new music so I have to make more of a concious effort to get new music and get it into sets. IT's getting harder. But I try when I can. And if I'm doing a special event with a genre or mood I'm not so familiar with, like a fetish night, or a speakeasy night, or a wedding with specific song requests that I may never have heard of, then I will plan out the setlist beforehand. That's time-consuming. I need to get hold of the music, listen to it, and figure out the best way to play it. Then there's the late nights DJing involves. I try, like tonight, to sleep beforehand but spending the only free bit of the day asleep feels like a waste. IF I can sleep. So tonight I will get to bed about 4am and be up again about 7:30am which will leave me painfully tired at work tomorrow. Then I'm Djing Subside from 8:30.

I also have my greetings cards business. I need to research and create new designs for that when I can. I also need to keep promoting my Etsy shop which currently, mostly sells steampunk and dieselpunk cards - https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred. It's plugging it on social media - on my pages, finding groups and joining them and interacting and trying to get my name and products out there. It's drawing little things that are relevant to make sure I have content to post. It's repinning things that may encourage people to browse my Pinterest and find my cards. It's blogging like this. It's reblogging the tumblr posts of people who may be inclined to check out my stuff. It's commenting on Etsy's forum posts and getting involved in the community. I enjoy it and there's a lot to learn and I am enjoying learning. Then when sales come, I have to get them posted.

I find it hard to say no to new jobs. DJing new events that may be fun, or a new genre that I could have fun with. New drawing commissions that push me to improve or just feel nice to do.

I resent this sometimes and make myself put a film on to chill, but normally end up tweaking my Etsy shop listings while I do.

The thing with music and drawing and self-promotion is there's no end point. There is ALWAYS more that could be done. Which means whenever I get some free time, it is very easy to almost accidentally keep doing these things. Suddenly, it's 2:00am and I have work in the morning but a drawing that's nearly done, or a load of ideas for content to post, or just half an hour of a setlist to fill with a tricky transition from black metal to RnB. When I'm not doing anything actively, I feel like I'm wasting time. So I rarely chill. Jess has been great for me. We do things together often (we're doing a craft fair up in Bridgnorth on Saturday which I am really looking forward to but for which I will have had very little sleep on account of all of the above), but we also chill sometimes and I need that. She's let me rant at her about this and she's tolerant of how bad I am at making future plans. I worry about the fact I'm always tired and broke for her though. I don't like that.

All of this is compounded by the fact that no matter how long I work a regular job with regular daytime hours, my body clock still defaults to going to bed at 4am and waking around midday. It makes it hard and feel unnatural to go to bed at an appropriate time for work. 11pm would be a good time. 12 wouldn't be too bad. 2am is usual for me and it's just not enough! And 7:30 really doesn't feel like a time people should be up at all. My body clock wants me to get the recommended 8hrs sleep... it's just the wrong 8hrs for sensible civilised jobs.

And for all of it, I'm broke. I spent a lot of today at work researching the Aztecs and Maya for our presentations. I was using Google Earth to check out their historical sites - temples and the like and desperately, painfully wishing I could go there! But I consider a month where I finish the month without having gone over my overdraft limit a success and one where I finish with a few bob to spare makes me nervous that there is a bill around the corner I forgot about. Being able to drive down to Bournemouth and stop in a B&B for a friend's wedding was a decision I had to weigh carefully and figure out a contingency plan for how that would leave me short for the rest of the month.

I'm always working. I'm always broke. Because I'm always broke, I feel like I can't be turning down work when it comes so I'm always too tired and too busy to take stock of the situation and change it or at least organise it to be manageable.

Writing this has helped. Now, feeling like I could finally sleep again (like I could at work earlier) I have to get up and go to work.

I'm such a Photoshop n00b!

I still feel pretty new to Photoshop and Digital drawing and painting.

I have always drawn since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I had a fixation with drawing things "broke" when I was little. From "draw car broke" to the slightly more worrying "draw man broke", I always wanted things opened up. I think I just had the same curiosity I still do for the inner workings of things.
It progressed to copying pictures of Superman out of the comics my mum used to buy me, to developing my own stories for Superman to be involved with.
I did some oil paintings are a pre-teen and moved on to watercolours as a teenager.
I doodled through boring lessons at school and had exercise books and exams returned with scores of red pen telling me that these were not the appropriate places for my drawings.
At uni, I doodled some more, and did drawings for some of my friends as they asked for them.
When I left uni, and got a job in Theatre in Education, I produced more drawings for my friends while I was sat backstage waiting to go on.
While in Thailand in 2006, I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS3 because I thought it would be useful and it was cheaper over there. My laptop was in no way up to running it though so it lay dormant until 2008 when I coloured an old drawing I'd done about 4 years prior.

Click here to see it full-sized

At this point, I didn't have a drawing tablet so was colouring entirely using a mouse which wasn't ideal. Doing the hair in the above picture was a pain. A couple of colouring jobs done with a mouse led to me getting a Wacom drawing tablet and working with this since.
Since then, everything I've learnt to do has been self-taught. I've read bits of books on using Photoshop, and when I know there's something specific I want to do, I turn to the internet and helpful tutorials. I have a Pinterest board of tutorials that I want to started incorporating bits of into my future work.
I do, however, still work in quite a traditional way. I hand draw my drawings, either with pencils on paper and scanning them to Photoshop, or drawing them directly into Photoshop. Then I physically or digitally ink it as appropriate, apply colours, usually as flat washes then building up details to a finished piece.

I'm getting better at this and I've recently started using more and more photomanipulation to drop objects into pieces, and to create textures from photos. With the new steampunk Christmas card I've just completed, I decided to take the photo elements from being small items in the background or used as an ethereal overlay, to very much an essential part of the main picture.

Click here to see it full-sized

I still often struggle to get my pieces to look the way I want them to. I think I'm still a little locked into using traditional media and not thinking Photoshop enough. I also think I need to be more imaginative and more abstract with my concepts. I don't think I'm thinking of interesting enough concepts to need half the stuff Photoshop can do for me.

Firstly, I still haven't quite figured out Brushes. While I know the basics of how to create and use them, I haven't quite figured out the why. I tried using a brush I'd created from a photo of a fir branch little bit on the new Coggingtons card, to turn areas of black shadow on the Christmas tree into areas of textured green fir branches. You'll have to tell me how successful I was. Again though, this is very much using the brush as a peripheral feature whereas I know they can be used very much to create essential parts of a piece.

I keep seeing mention of using custom brushes, and I spoke briefly to my friend Adam Ford who extolled their virtues.

So, the next time I get time to do a bit of experimenting on a project, that's what I shall be doing.

-Curt-

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Productive in the Sun!

Gurch, at The Cornershop in Stratford asked me to draw him a picture of Shakespeare holding a jar of sweets for his sweet jar labels.
The Cornershop is where I used to get changed into the Grim Reaper when I worked for Grimm's Ghostly Tours when I was 14... 14 years ago! Gurch remembered me, we got to chatting and he asked for a toon. I've been stupidly busy with DJing Subculture, Subside, and Velvet, doing Mad Science, and Mad Museum as well as peripheral stuff like networking so it took a coupla weeks from starting it, showing him prelims, acting on feedback, and getting him the final copy but he seems happy with it as I sent it off last night.

I also spent a lot of yesterday designing business cards with moo.com and VistaPrint. The Moo ones allow more creative control so I imagine they'll be for business or guaranteed clients. I've done 3 of those - one for Illustrating, one for DJing, and one for Performance (Stilts, Grinding etc).
The VistaPrint ones, will just be for handing out generally willy nilly and they're a combination of my skills on one card. I'm waiting for payments to start rolling in (end of the month!) before I order them, but they're all saved in my Carts!

And I designed, finally, some flyers/posters on Photoshop. These are for putting up, leaving in shops, posting through doors.
Two slightly different ones. One a general illustration one, one more skewed towards caricatures. Again, I'm waiting for the dollar to come through before actually ordering them.

It's been nice learning and applying some design techniques. It's the first time I've seriously designed anything like this. Maybe this learning will come in useful again soon.

All is well. MAD Museum are keen to get me in over the Jubilee, and I think Area 51 may have some work for me too. I've got a few after school classes with Mad Science this week, then half-term next week. I've done a bit of gardening, so the garden is now inhabitable to sit in and read which has been nice! I've finished my "Perdido Street Station", review here. I'm now reading "I, Partridge", Alan Partridge's autobiography - very funny! And dipping into a book of essays about the morality, legality, artistic merits, psychology and more of pornography - interesting!
All's good.

Right! Now to make sure I know all the stuff for my lesson today and get showered etc!