Dot And Tot Of Merryland: A Working Sketch.

This is my working sketch for a painting I’ve been working on for my pal Jared’s short story which he has based on L. Frank Baum’s “Dot And Tot Of Merryland“.
The painting will feature the same colours as used by W.W. Denslow in his original illustrations and I’ll post the results up on here when I’m done.

You can read L’ Frank Baum’s original story as well as see W.W. Denslow’s illustrations by clicking HERE.

You May Also Be Interested In:
* The Making Of A Scarecrow
* Anything Of OZ
* Salvador Dali: Alice In Wonderland

Alternative Movie Posters. PART I: Daniel Norris.

I do love a good ol’ redesigned movie poster don’t you?

Movie poster artwork is so imaginative and alive these days and yet you never really get a true sense of it when the official poster is released.
Some time ago, I put up some poster artwork which in my opinion, DESTROYS the official material and you can see it by clicking HERE but today, I’d like to show you some work by a talented feller named Daniel Norris…

For a lot more from Mr. Norris, check out his Flickr stream HERE.
View Part II of this post HERE.

You may also be interested in…

* Amazing Minimalist Posters.
* Modern Vintage Posters Part I & Part II.

 

“Borrow & Never Give Back”.

Remember that song “Follow The Yellow Brick Road” from “The Wizard Of Oz”?

“Follow the yellow brick road.
Follow the yellow brick road.
Follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow the yellow brick road”.

Well,
Every time I walk into a library,
That song plays in my head on a loop.
Except the lyrics are different.

“Borrow and never give back.
Borrow and never give back.
Borrow, borrow, borrow, borrow,
Borrow and never give back”.

And folks,
That’s why to this day,
I can’t get a library card in the whole district of Lanarkshire.

Y’see,
Sometime around the early 1990′s I borrowed and never gave back a book called:
“A Nasty Piece of Work: The Art & Graft of Spitting Image”.

I fucking loved that book.
It detailed the sketches, technique, concepts and work that went into the satirical 1980’s puppet T.V. show “Spitting Image” by illustrator Roger Law:

Anyways,
One day the book fell apart in my hands and the last I saw of it,
The pages got blown all the way up Stewart Street in Bellshill.

That book is long gone out of print now and I’ve been looking all over the internet for some of the pictures from the book.
I found nothing.

But!
I did find a mint copy of the book on http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ and bought it straight away.

Here are some photos of the puppets from the book:

My Tin Man.

A rough sketch of my version of L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman:

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Me & Anna eventually managed to get ourselves over to the Festival this week.
And lemme tell y’folks,
What a great day it turned out to be!

We had tickets to go see internet funny man Limmy.
His show was pretty damn impressive and the time flew by all too quickly but he has a great show.
I reccomend it.
Find him here: http://www.limmy.com

We then found ourselves aimlessly wandering Edinburgh and bumping into things like the tourists we were.
I don’t know Edinburgh at all and as for Anna,
When it comes to directions,
I’d be better off asking this guy:

I should also mention that i’ve found the best cafe in the entire of Scotland!
It’s called The Underground Cafe and can be found at 34 Elder Street.
A lovely laid back atmosphere with live piano music, excellent food, and just…homely.
Great. Go!

Our time in Edinburgh ended with us walking up and down Princess Street taking lots of photos which I’ll upload soon somewhere.

I like Edinburgh and i’m goona go back soon.
This time, i might even buy a map.
I probably won’t though.