A while back I wandered into Blackwells looking for some new books on psychology, hopefully to support my work on How to Draw.They have an amazing psychology section, but unfortunately I couldn't find the books I was recommended, and became totally distracted looking through everything else.

At a party a while back, I was chatting with Sina, a friend I met during uni years who is now a computer scientist doing phd research. We were having an extended and slightly drunken conversation about consciousness, what it is, what it isn't, and what it might be caused by. I reckoned it was just a phenomenon produced by a certain level of particular types of complexity in the brain, and Sina was playing devil's advocate.

As far as my input was concerned, it was a pretty ill-informed conversation, full of supposition and leaps of logic, so back to Blackwells! When I saw this amazingly hefty and awesome sounding book...

...I decided to pick it up and try to inform myself. I'm really glad I did, since although it's very heavy going, it's incredibly interesting. It's an in-depth comparison and discussion of all the different ways we've looked at consciousness, from the philosophical to the psychological, neurological and scientific. It turns out that the subject of consciousness touches every study, from visuals to memory to religion to all kinds of perception.

Basically, it seems that to be totally thorough, the study of anything that a human has ever thought must begin with a study of consciousness, the seat of experience and thought itself!

Thankfully, I've also begun to find tie-ins with my work on How to Draw as well! The title of this blog entry and a lot of the book itself refers to Phenomenology (which I still can't pronounce out loud without stumbling), which is:

"...a 'leading back' or redirection of thought away from [the mind's] unreflective and unexamined immersion in experience of the world to the way in which the world manifests itself to us. ... Things remain before us, but we envisage them in a new way; namely, strictly as they appear to us ... an investigation concerned with the modes or ways in which objects are experienced and known ... focusing not on what things are, but on the ways in which things are perceived."

 This struck me as exactly the perceptual method I attempt to describe in How to Draw when I say:

"Draw the object in front of you, not the symbol of the object.
Forget words, and treat the object (be it natural, human, mechanical or otherwise) as a set of shapes, a sculpture, a physical entity. Look at it as if you've never seen it before, you don't know its name, and all its form is fascinating and unknown."

  It seems that the ideal mental state for an artist is either very similar to, or identical to a central mode of thought in the investigation of consciousness, and a lot of that investigation is obviously wrapped up in our visual perception. I'm excited to read more, and see if what I read supports or undermines my ideas. I'm sure I'll at least find plenty of inspiration for ways to expand my little bookling.

It's also a compelling read for the simple fact that as it proceeds, I'm brought closer to our collective best understanding of what consciousness is! I wish I had more time for reading ><

I often get asked why on earth my website address is spoonbard.com

The short answer is, it's a very very old hotmail address that I ended up sticking with for reasons I'm not so certain of anymore. It's a bit silly for a professional site, but I'm very fond of it and I love the look on people's faces (or the sound in their voices) when they ask what my email or wesbite address is... and then I inevitably have to spell it for them.

The long answer is that I was a massive final fantasy fan. I'm not so sure this is still a valid label, since a saddening amount that is new in the franchise has failed to impress, but none-the-less, I started with Final Fantasy VII and have played most of the others since then. When I came to play Final Fantasy IV which I never actually finished, I did get at least as far as an infamous and dubiously translated insult:

This amused me up so much, I chopped off the "y " and used it as a screen-name (my first ever website was angelfire.com/spoonbard) and to this date I don't know anyone else who has the same online handle.

Other amusing things about "spoonbard"... it's very easy to misspell in comical ways including: poonbard, spoonbrad, spoobard, spoonboard, sponbard, spoonbared, spoonbar and spoonbad

And now you know.

Me and Kate woke up very early this morning for some unknown reason, and the sky was still clear and dark, with a beautiful moon up.
I'd not seen the morning sky with my telescope yet, so instead of curling up and going back to bed, I set it up and watched the sky until dawn! I saw Saturn for the first time, which was a pretty incredible sight, even though the rings are tricky to see at the moment. Even making them out a little is enough when you know, that's Saturn I'm looking at with my own eyes!

I also managed to attach my camera a bit more firmly to the scope (using a hilarious rig which included bits of rubber band, PVA glue soaked paper, a pile of DVDs and fine adjustments made by folding envelopes and adding them to the DVD pile) and take some pictures. I'm still really shaky at this, especially as my camera is a quite average consumer level one, but I managed to capture a blob which I assure you is actually Saturn (honest):

And a picture of the moon which is much better framed than my last, although not as well focused (this is the main problem with the Galileoscope, focusing is a nightmare):

The dawn was a beautiful lilac wash across the sky that lit all the vapour trails blood red. I feel like I can get a good amount of work done today!

Been rewatching Twin Peaks recently, it's a show that stands up eerily well to the test of time every time I see it.
Yesterday, Kate and I were working industriously, when all of a sudden, she said "I need to do some Agent Cooper fanart!", whereupon, unbeknownst to each other and totally unsuspecting, we both turned round and drew:

One loled.

I've recently got into a podcast called "Are We Alone?", which is put out by the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) institute.
They talk about everything, history, the future, archaeology, evolution, genetics, anthropology, psychology, science fiction, aliens, the paranormal, animals, love, sex, technology, language... I could really go on and on, just check out the archives.
Each topic is covered by interviews with experts including some pretty amazing scientists of all different kinds, and the pitch of the show is just right, with seriously profound content and a light-hearted easy to digest shell. I love it to bits.

This has also prompted me to become a member of the SETI institute. I now proudly own a membership card, and I'm waiting for the glossy photograph of the staff of the podcast (it's bizzare, every show they play up how awful it is, and suggest various ways to mutilate it or dispose of it, and every show I want to see it more and get more excited about finding it in the post XD).

As a kid, I used to be fascinated by Aliens, UFOs, government conspiracies and the like. Now I'm older, and the curtain of mystery is lifted to reveal not all that much on the home-front, discovering the serious and scientifically grounded search for ET is an exciting evolution of those old passions! It's a stunning thought that we may actually receive a signal from another civilisation. I hope that if it happens it does so whilst I'm alive.

A day feels well spent and rewarding if it's spent living with, creating or contemplating the kind of life you want to live, the kind of friends you want to know and the kind of work you want to produce.

I think I'd lost sight of that for a while.

I was asked recently to draw a series of covers for Kieron Gillen's new comic with Avatar Press, The Heat.
This is the first of two I've done so far, and since it was unveiled at the MCM Expo, it's time to show it here :)
Just to confirm, I'm not the actual artist on this project, only a cover artist. The interior artist has yet to be confirmed, so there's a gap on this cover where the name of the artist will go, just under Keiron's.

Since this one turned out to have an extremely involved creation process, I thought it would be good for a step-by-step feature:

The whole process of creating a cover normally begins with a bunch of thumbnail ideas. These are like the visual equivalent of making a quick note in a notebook, and are normally only intended for my eyes. As soon as the idea for a cover or page forms itself, I make sure to get a thumbnail done in case I loose the image before I begin and this is the one that eventually turned into this finished cover:

The next stage is to create a rough which I can run past my publisher to see if they like the idea. This is normally about A5 size and done loosely in pencil:

In this case, the image itself is quite plain, and it was the lighting that was the strongest element in my head, so to indicate the atmosphere I quickly added colour in photoshop before sending off the rough:

Once this particular image was accepted, I decided to make a 3D model (in 3D Studio Max) of the environment, which I could use to help make the lighting as atmospheric and accurate as possible. This is a line-art render of the model, which used the rough as a template:

I then printed out a guide, and drew the hanging costume and the figure on the bed by hand, in 0.5 HB mechanical pencil. This drawing was scanned back in and composited into the rendered background:

The next stage was to add flats to the image. I used the 3D model to help me generate these flats for the background, and filled the remaining figure and clothing in manually using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet.

Since I wanted the lighting to have real depth, I decided to render out an image of the 3D background using a light-gathering technique (sometimes called ambient occlusion) that gives a very photographic and atmospheric look:

This was then added to the photoshop file on a layer above the flats on "overlay", along with a number of photographic textures (mostly from CGtextures.com) which were skewed into place on photoshop. The text was added in the same manner.

I then used the 3D file to render out directional lighting from the grate:

Which was then edited in photoshop to include the figure and used as a mask to create shadows. A glow was added in photoshop behind the grate to give the appearance of a strong light source:

I knew that I also wanted light emanating from the screen, so I rendered out a new directional lighting image:

Which was then used in a similar manner to create a green light in the photoshop file. After finishing this, I decided that it looked a little too harsh, so I toned it down by reducing the intensity of the green light, and blurring out the sharp edges:

Next, I added the floating screens into the 3D file, and rendered them out as a template:

...along with another directional lighting image:

...and used them to create an orange glow and light source in the developing image. The info on each screen was composed in a separate file and skewed into place.

I had originally intended to finish here, but I realised I wanted a bit more complexity from the lighting. Remembering some sections from the new Battlestar Galactica in which Cylon glyphs are projected on the walls, I decided to do a similar thing using the screens as a light source. It took me a while to figure out how I could achieve this without a heck of a lot of effort, but the solution presented itself in the end. I first created a flat texture with all the info from the screens quickly cut and pasted onto it...

And then used that to cut out the text from a sphere floating in the middle of the 3D model, inside which I placed a virtual light source. The text was then projected on the walls and I could render this out as a directional lighting image:

This was then placed on top of the other layers of the photoshop file, and tweaked to fall over the figure and appear green. This was the finished image:

Watch out for more covers from The Heat as the project progresses :)

The first three books in the DFC Library have been announced and are now available for pre-order on amazon.co.uk! If you're a fan of the DFC, please read on for some important and exciting information, if you've never heard of the DFC, here's what it's all about:

The DFC was a weekly comic for children from David Fickling Books, featuring a number of ongoing strips that ranged from one-off funnies to episodic fantasy stories, with something in there for readers of every taste. Here's just a selection of the genuinely all-star cast involved: Adam Brockbank, Andrew Wildman, Ben Haggarty, Dave Morris, Dave Shelton, Emma Vieceli, Etherington Brothers, Gary Northfield, James Turner, Jamie Smart, Jason Cobley, Jim Medway, John Aggs, Julian Hanshaw, Kate Brown, Laura Howell, Misako Rocks!, Neill Cameron, Nick Sharratt, Patrice Aggs, Philip Pullman, Robert Deas, Sarah McIntyre, Simone Lia, Ted Dewan, Tony Lee, Zak Simmonds-Hurn.
For a full list of everyone involved, check out the Super Comics Adventure Squad Blog.

Despite being a well needed product and filling a big hole in the market, the timing was wrong and the economic recession meant that a project that should have been given a few years to take off was only given about 6 months before it was canned by Random House, who funded and published the comic.

Thankfully, it rises once more from the ashes in the form of the DFC Library which is being launched with lovely (and remarkably cheap!) hard-back collected editions of The Spider Moon, Mezolith and Good Dog, Bad Dog. This is great news for fans of these strips, but for anyone whose favourite strip isn't here, please bear in mind that these first titles are testing the waters. If all three don't do well, there won't be any more, so you can increase the chances of owning that strip you love by collecting the lot.

The last piece of good news is that the DFC itself might be back soon, with more funding straight from David Fickling Books rather than through Random House. This will mean that if it does return (and buying the DFC Library books will help with this too!) it'll be given a longer run and much better chance to succeed. I believe the British comic industry needs the DFC, it's one of only a handful of publications that have treated comics and comic artists well, and taken risks to push new and exciting material.

I'll be supporting it all the way.

The Arts Foundation award grants each year in different categories. This year, comics are up for the first time ever which is an exciting prospect, and the winner, picked from four shortlisters during an award ceremony (sounds a bit strange, but they're presenting this more like an mtv award than a professional grant) will receive £10,000. This is one event among many that reflect a genuine growth in the acceptance of comics as a legitimate and diverse medium in the U.K. and will hopefully be of high enough visibility to help accelerate the process. The moment a comics-based public event can be covered by a variety of newspapers without a single headline reading "POW, BLAM, Comics are Back!" or something of the like, I'll be happy, but we're not quite there yet... maybe the grant will change this.

There'll be a panel at this year's Comica featuring the four shortlisters and the judges. You can find official details and book tickets to the panel here.

"The event at the ICA will introduce the judges of the award Pat Mills, Posy Simmonds and Paul Gravett who will discuss the graphic novel’s ascendancy in this country and announce the finalists who will each present and discuss their shortlisted ouput."

With names like that, it should be a great panel!

Now to the even more exciting news, one of the shortlisters is Kate! ^_^ This is incredibly exciting, and she'll be presenting her work at the Comica panel along with an impressively diverse collection of artists. Of course I'm terribly biased, but I think Kate's work represents genuine quality across the board, from storytelling to style to page flow to accessibility, and I know that she's got fantastic plans for a self published piece called Fish and Chocolate that would benefit perfectly from the money, so please give your support! At the least, this will be a fantastic opportunity for promotion, which is perhaps the trickiest aspect of self publication.

Regardless of who wins, I'm happy that there's a wide range of aesthetics on display here, and a great level of quality.

I was half expecting my post about Carl Sagan to be met by a few people who don't agree with his world view and find science, secularism or humanitarianism pernicious or irrelevant. To my surprise, I find instead two evident Sagan Fans who bothered to comment only to nitpick my entry in a condescending manner.

I'm happy to admit my faults and have made appropriate edits, since both comments contained valid criticism.

I'm sad that an entry intended to celebrate Sagan's life and message attracted what seemed to me to be posturing, devoid of warmth or a sense of a shared humanity.

If the two people who commented read this, I hope you pause a moment and consider that the ideals behind secular humanitarianism are achieved as much by the gracious manner of your communication as they are by the vital content. Either one without the other will usually reach deaf ears.