Your Brain
Eu fui surpreendido muito hoje ver que este website’ s que começ de repente cargas dos visitantes de Brasil. Olá! Brasil! Eu estava querendo saber embora… porque é este? Meus desenhos animados apareceram de repente em algum lugar para baixo lá? Se algum de você pode me dizer, aquele seria grande. Você pode alcangar-me em luckyheathercomic@googlemail.com. Amor Andy
And in English:
I was very surprised today to see that this website’s suddenly getting loads of visitors from Brazil. Olá! Brasil!
I was wondering though… why is this? Have my cartoons suddenly appeared somewhere down there? If any of you can tell me, that would be great. You can reach me on luckyheathercomic@googlemail.com .
Love
Andy
Death By Chocolate
Now this… this is good. Click to enlarge the picture on the left; the toaster bunny suicide rendered by a master chocolatier called Patrick. He came and found me in the Wonderland comic shop in Hasselt to show me this pic, which won him a competition in HUMO magazine who publish the bunnies in Belgium. And I got some free chocolate too. Not bad!
I’d better plug them, it’s only fair. And their chocolate is magnificent so you can’t go wrong.
Boon
Paardsdemerstraat 13
3500 Hasselt
Belgium
+32 11 422 199
Ouch.
Courtesy of Geoffrey Barbeau, who owns the back in this picture… another bunny tattoo, the third I know of in the world. His friends call him ‘lapiiiiinou’ which roughly translates as ‘buuuuuunny.’ Looks like that’s the name he’s stuck with now. COngratulations, Geoff!
It is a pretty well rendered bunny though. The artist has paid a lot of attention to the line thickness – it’s the variations in the line which give my drawing style half of its energy. Nice work.
Just got back from a fantastic 4 days in Belgium. My cartoons are in Humo magazine; I hadn’t realised till I got there quite what a big deal Humo is in the Flemish half of the country. My stuff’s very well known there now. Lovely! Thanks very much to everybody I met and who made me feel so much at home and who filled me with beer until I couldn’t move any more.
I was on a guest on De Laastse Show; it’s kind of the Flemish David Letterman. Sat next to the former Prime Minister of Belgium. He gave me a hard time for not knowing much about British cyclists (he knows a lot). A cartoonist! On a chat show! I was sure to enjoy that moment.
Puke
In Belgium!
Wahey! I’m coming to Belgium from Thursday to Sunday as a guest of the Antwerp Book Fair. Nice. If you happen to be in the country at the time come and say hello…
Evening of 5th: appearing on De Laatste Show
6th: All morning, I’ll be signing and drawing at Wonderland comic store in Brussels.
In the afternoon, up to Antwerp where I’ll be signing at the fair 16.30 – 18.00.
7th November; signing at fair 13.00 – 15.00 and 6.00-18.00
8th November: signing at fair 11.00 – 12.30
…then my hand will be a claw. Also from Britain will be Posy Simmonds; a proper cartoonist who can draw properly. Come on. Fly to Antwerp. What do you mean, you’re busy? Hell with that. To Belgium.
Boiled Pork
Know your road signs
It’s our Armstrong and Miller bit
Hooray! The new Armstrong and Miller series is on. Me and Kev wrote some stuff for it including these sketches from the first show, of some presenters on a show very much like Blue Peter. Apologies by celebrities are an entire entertainment genre of their own now, so it felt very right to take a pop at the whole thing. Here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ptd-QyOOUg
If you live outside Britain and aren’t familiar with Blue Peter – well, I hope you’ll get the idea. We British people have had Blue Peter, which is just a magazine show for children, burned into our minds for nearly five decades.
We wrote for Ben and Xander way back in the nineties too. We first met Ben before that in 1992, when he and us were on the writing team for a Radio 4 satire programme called Week Ending. For a while that writing team also had Al Murray and Harry Hill. Now you couldn’t get them all on the same show for less than a million billion pounds; back then, a couple of hundred pounds did it. And I don’t mean each.
Chainsaw
I actually can draw a bit, honest
Until a few years ago my pen and ink drawing style was getting increasingly ornate. I was getting downright Victorian. The trouble is, that’s great for the artist enjoying himself with the materials and getting off on his own crosshatching; but when you want to deliver a joke it’s normally best to do it with the minumum number of lines. That’s why I turned my style on its head to do the bunnies – and that became my new style.
And very good it is for humour. But when you’ve spent a few years as I have, drawing in a deliberately blunt way, some people get to thinking that’s all you can do. So do I some days. SO – in an occasional series of blog posts showing I’ve got a tiny bit more range, here’s one of my watercolours. I painted this entirely in the location. It’s of a fantastically dramatic shipwreck – the Plassey, a cargo vessel which was hurled high on to the rocks on the island of Inisheer. I’ve spent a lot of time in the west of Ireland, much of it painting, and the rusted Plassey is one of the very few things there that isn’t green or grey. I’m very fond of it.