A. M. Homes: This Book Will Save Your Life
A really good read, a page turning novel that leaves you with some hope for the human spirit. A great book for the beach too. N.B. This is the American cover, the UK edition is covered with doughnuts - now you know the book I'm talking about. (*****)
Mitch Albom: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
This is the first Mitch Albom book I read. It's an enchanting tale about one man's journey into the afterlife. Along the way, he understands what impact we all have on each others lives from the most fleeting contact to the deepest relationships. A beautiful read. (*****)
Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie
An American journalist goes back to visit his dying professor. Through conversation and caring for Morrie, Mitch Albom understands what really matters in life - which is not his hectic western schedule. It's a lot better than it sounds and should be read as a platonic love letter to late professor. (****)
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
One of those books everyone should read whether they believe in God or not. Personally, I'm reading it so I can win when I have an arguement with born again Christians. Seriously - a stimulating, intelligent, inpiring read. (*****)
Douglas Coupland: JPod: A Novel
Great fun. He can be a bit hit and miss - but after my initial scepticism this one takes off. Brilliant and daft all at the same time. (****)
Andy Law: Creative Company: How St. Luke's Became "the Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies"
Half way through this and loving it. Although very readable, it's also very dense and packed with ideas so you need to read a bit, digest and come back to it. (*****)
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner : Freakonomics Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
I love books like this - they take the 'perceived wisdom' and turn it on its head. Brilliant. (****)
Pat Barker: The Regeneration Trilogy
Moving, gripping and insightful. Goes to show that the excuse of war has always been used to crush free speech and basic freedoms. (*****)
« December 2006 | Main | February 2007 »
I'm looking for an Art Director to work with me on Audi and some other big accounts over here at GT. I'm after someone with good experience, loads of enthusiasm and some big ideas. We work primarily in Digital, so even if you haven't worked in digital much, you're gonna have to love the web and all it's random possibilities. I want someone who can come up with big ideas and then polish them to make them beautiful. If you're interested, drop me a mail and pop in for a chat.
Yes, it's my fourth post of the day - but the builders are in and my big TV is in storage so blogging to Bach is what passes for entertainment around here. I had a quick look through my stats and visitors and if you don't know how this kind of thing works, you can click on the search or link that the visitor came from.
So I clicked on a google search visit and this is what someone had typed in "what make are maximillion coopers sunglasses." Deep stuff indeed. I'm sure they were thrilled with my musings on life drawing - although it looks like they got dropped into my half-formed theory of "VIP brands." I don't think Max will be inviting me to many more Gumball parties if half the time someone searches for him they land on my disparaging remarks about his brand and its spinoffs. Nevermind, eh!
I got three hits today from Mark Earls blog. For some delightful reason he wrote a nice little profile of me on his blog, although when I went back for the permalink, I'd just fallen off the bottom, having been knocked off by a couple of old rockers putting on a show in Camden - that Herd keeps growing!
Anyway, judging by the Maximillion Cooper hits, I'm going to start randomly name dropping in my posts just to see what kind of traffic I can generate. Although I did see Simon Pegg in Crouch End yesterday and Simon Amstell in Harringay Sainsburys cereal aisle at the bottom of my road on Friday evening - good to see he's no more rock & roll than me! I like the idea of a celebrity in each aisle and the staff could give directions, "Branston pickle? Turn left at Brad Pitt, go straight past Catherine Zeta Jones and it's on the bottom shelf just above Tom Cruise." There we are, that's not a bad start is it?
Jim's blog is taking shape and when he's not talking about balancing rocks, he's posting lovely reflections on design - a dark art to us copywriters. From what I can see it's a bit like approaching an advertising problem, but with the the sideways knowing and postmodern detachment you'd expect from one of his lot.
We got a man this time - quite literally a hairy arsed bloke with muscle tone and straight lines interupted by a pot belly. That was the first challenge - making him look like a man. The first few sketches produced soft womanly shaped transexuals made of curves and smooth lines until eventually I got the angles and the sharp points and it started to take shape.
This week was all about tone - light and dark, images built from light, figures emerging through contrast. It was tough, having only just learnt to draw a basic figure and now being asked to build an image from light and dark. But once it clicked, it really clicked and the absence of line really freed me up to put an image of this man on the page. So much so, I forgot about any background and instead of lying down, he now looks like he's floating - but you can't have everything can you?
It's a week late going up, but I've been putting together my first big client presentation at my new agency GT (which has a spangly new website.)
Week 2 was about building images, rather than line making, with small simple marks, rather than continuous lines. We were encouraged to dot around, make a mark where we saw a significant point, then move on - rather than get hung up and draw what we thought was there. So we were building images rather than drawing people. I'm sure there's a wider lesson here, but I likened it to writing - working on a sentence at a time, a word at a time until the whole thing comes together to make something worth reading.
The first image is another two minute sketch. The second is a longer pose and my first attempt at foreshortening. For the lesson this was a great pose because I was forced to draw what was there - a giant hand in the foreground, a tiny body as it disappeared into the distance and this strange foot hanging there on the horizon.
I've started life drawing with Eli on Saturday afternoons. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time as a complement to my core skill set as a copywriter, but my memories of art lessons are dominated by grumpy beardy art teachers drilling every ounce of enthusiasm and originality out of me and the rest of the class. I dropped art at 14. There is also a part of me that avoids trying things I suspect I won't be good at more or less straightaway - I had to overcome that. The teacher Andy is really cool and got straight in there - my drawing changed dramatically within the first two hour class. Hopefully, as the 10 week course goes by, you can witness some progress in the category 'Life Drawing'.
The first blue drawing is a 2 minute sketch using an old brush. The second is a 20 minute pencil sketch (I've cut the head off because I really can't do faces yet, so it looks much better without it.)
A couple of fine submissions from Jim (who also has a new blog.) These were spotted near Spitafields. The mangled heap looks like it started with a stolen wheel and then spiralled out of control from there. As for the stripped frame, it's anyone's guess. Was it just a simple puncture followed by a week of rain which meant the owner left it there a bit too long - and before they knew it, someone had stripped it clean. Keep them coming into the Bike Graveyard.
I was walking down Oxford Street this morning looking at the Christmas decorations thinking how bleak they looked now we're in the new year. I was trying to think what else goes from being a symbol of celebration to an empty irrelevent gesture quite so quickly. One that came to mind was how St. Georges flags look even more rubbish the day after England are knocked out of a football tournament. Hale has started cataloguing abandoned Christmas trees on this puntastic blog There can probably be no greater sign that Christmas is over than a tree lying on a pavement.
