Material of Shoreditch, London, recently began selling a range of my little screenprints. The prints feature monkeys and blackbirds – some based on the same drawings as previous monkeys and some I was trying as prints for the first time.
The monkeys come in various colour combination
s and think about various things.
Last year my friends at Velopresso asked me to draw them a horde of cycling animals, people and beasties-in-general to decorate one of their beautiful pedal-powered coffee trikes. Trike 001 was recently launched during Bespoked in Bristol, where Velopresso also won the Constructors’ Challenge prize – HURROO!
I haven’t seen it with my own eyes YET but I love the photos (more on Velopresso’s facebook page). The designer did a brilliant job arranging the crowd.
Bicycles are quite hard things to draw – not so bad as horses maybe (so many knees! On backwards!), but getting all the legs on the pedals? When the legs may be very short and belonging to pigs or sheep? Ach! I was afraid Velopresso, who clearly have an exemplary understanding of bicycle construction, would want drawings in better working order than I’d be able to muster – but luckily they were very supportive of skrunkiness and wrongness. I don’t know that my bike-drawing skills are much improved, but my repertoire of cyclists has certainly grown. Bring on the unicycling horse.
I must have drawn over 100 beasties or groups as I submitted about 70; I keep losing count, but I think there are 31 drawings on the final trike. Here are a few constituent beasts:
If you’d like to meet a Velopresso in real life it’s probably best to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
I can add the rest of these monkey screenprints now as the AMAZING new human they were made for is born and in possession of her monkeys (and an oddish long-nose bear which really taxed my sewing skills).
In other news, I have an EVENTS PAGE and some events (more to add shortly). Hope to see you soon!
I am having a gap. In a gap it is best to do THINGS. THINGS can include working on stories that nobody wants yet (maybe they are too weird or long, maybe nobody has seen them), and drawing, and seeing how monkeys work as screenprints.
By which means I learn the shocking truth that better-drawn monkeys make better screenprints. So the one with the umbrella stays insipid.
I have known for a long time that it would definitely be good for me, in all manner of ways, to do concerted doodling every day. But there are always MANY THINGS to do – and they often wear more important-looking hats. However, this seems to be mostly where stories come from. So, despite all the THINGS, this year I am really trying to do it every day. Here are some of the llamas and monkeys that happened so far.
