A spot of reading: The New Ghost by Robert Hunter

When I'm not drawing or at work, I read. My commute to work is also the perfect time to make my way through a few chapters. My bookshelves are lacking in free space and I always find my legs taking me to the nearest bookshop and before I realise it i'm trying to find some nonexistent room for these newbies. Book buying is incredibly addictive. It's even more addictive when they are stunning graphic novels and comics such as the one I'm featuring today, The New Ghost by Robert Hunter. 

Robert Hunter is a London based illustrator and this is his first comic printed by Nobrow Press. If this was my first comic I'd be more than chuffed because it is beautiful.

The story follows a brand new ghost on its first day and it's not too sure what it's actually meant to do.  We also meet Tom who works at an observatory, trying to work out the secrets of the stars when he spots the new ghost through his telescope. On encountering each other they learn the secrets they've been searching for in the most thought provoking and moving way which Hunter has managed to capture in a neat twenty four pages.

The colour scheme isn't the stereotypical spooky of black and white, but instead a stunning range of cool blues and greens with delicate use of more vibrant oranges and yellows expertly placed through out the pages. This also has the added pleasing aesthetic of being printed by Nobrow Press on quality matt paper. You cant beat great paper. Their 17x23 series is just the sort of thing that you'd want to start collecting if you like beautifully made comics by a wide range of talented artists, with intriguing stories to tell.

 If you want to see more of Robert Hunter's work head over to his website robertfrankhunter.com.
To see what the guys at Nobrow Press are producing next head over to http://nobrow.net

If you liked this little book feature, let me know! I'm hoping to keep keep it a regular themed post.  Also, if you have any book recommendations, send them my way. There's always room for more books...

Parcels, drawings and books

I have taken part in Oh Comely's Perfect Strangers project again.  The project is a pretty simple but fun idea where you get paired up with someone else from the project and send each other a parcel in the post. My swap partner mentioned that she liked Wes Anderson films and Amelie so I tried to create a box that sort of looked like something from them.  I've included some books, drawings, postcards, knitted and felted animals, ornaments and other nice bits and bobs.  I hope she likes it! 

I've also been spending some time looking about Broughty Ferry beach for pieces of old ceramic that's been washed up.  I'm hoping to do some paintings on some of them.  I'm not too sure what I'm doing with the pattered ones but I just like collecting them because they look nice. There's also a few interesting stones in there too that I decided to keep.

In terms of drawing I'm fitting it into my spare time as much as I can. I recently watched the film 'Her' with Joaquin Phoenix as the main character Theodore Twombly.  A film set sometime in the future but certainly not unreachable from our current advances in technology. It's story of a guy, Theodore,  who's going through a divorce, during which he gets the latest operating system.  A not so remarkable thing to do since we always seem to be updating our devices these days.  This operating system is like the next step of Siri in which you speak to it and it answers but unlike previous versions that sound quite robotic, this update is just like talking to a real person. In such a lonely period of his life it's a welcoming, if a bit strange, new relationship that evolves throughout the film. I loved the colour scheme and the whole feeling of the film which was quite melancholy, slightly detached from how we live now but also frighteningly close. So after enjoying it so much I decided to do a drawing of Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore. 

I also recently watched The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson. I found out that he was influenced by the writer Stefan Zweig and that the film was inspired by two of his books, one being 'Beware of Pity'.  I decided to give it a read and it was like reading a big collection of strong emotions.  There was no subtlety in the way the characters acted, everything was very dramatic and full of a great deal of over thinking. The story is about a young lieutenant Anton Hofmiller who is invited up to the nearby castle owned by an aristocrat Lajos Kekesfalva.  After having such an incredible evening full of drinking, eating and dancing he makes an incredibly embarrassing mistake asking the daughter of the house to dance, not knowing that she is paralysed. Consumed by his shame he experiences true pity for the first time and becomes a slave to this overwhelming pity he feels for the girl which becomes more and more suffocating as the story goes on. It doesn't read at all like a Wes Anderson film but you can see that certain characters or scenes influence The Grand Budapest Hotel.  The story itself stands on it's own as a tale of inner turmoil and despair. Now I've moved onto the newest book by Haruki Murakami, 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki' which is proving to draw me in already and I'm only on chapter two. 

I'm off on holiday soon, camping on the west coast of Scotland.  I have a brand new sketchbook ready as well as a list of books I'm planning to take.  I'll be away for two weeks and I can't wait for a break away.