Glitched Grinch

Good Christmas to you. Smart and mysterious video game spook Breogán Hackett (@BreoganHackett) made a glitch tool and tested it with my recent video about our green angel of disdain and fluffiness, The Grinch, so check out these gifs from the resulting delightfully broken footage.

It's fitting that it fades into this beautiful, all-encompassing green. It reminds me of Syphon Filter, a great PS1 game that I always used to play one demo level of over and over again, steadily tasing enemies and watching them fall from rooftops like laser-felled snowflakes. What could be more festive?

Soon we will all be overtaken by a growing wave of green, as is the Grinch's will. I welcome this.

The Christmas lights do some interesting and fun things, the degradation of the lights into blobs and shuffling squares just like my family members becoming fuzzy irregular shapes as my eyesight gives up on Boxing Day. Beautiful.

Thank you Breogán for this sweet, terrifying gift. The Grinch would surely approve of this destruction.

Merry Christmas. Merry Grinch.

p.s. check out some glitched Shrek here

Gifts For Your Journey :-)

Please take these green paintings with you on your journey to the caves, or wherever it was you said you're going. I'm sure they'll help you and boost your morale as you travel. They are traditional scenes, telling of a complex mythology which I will not explain here as I know you're keen to get going. I wish you lots of luck in your quest.

May you look upon these scenes in times of peril and be rejuvenated. We're all hoping for your safe and triumphant return.

Also, would you bring us back a Cornetto? Strawberry please. Thanks :-)

Body Catalogue

Here are some scans. Look at my really good eyebrow. And my accidental spindly moustache. Life is truly a gift and a beauty. Sometimes I yearn for a strange moustache, and I'm glad that life has blessed me with a way to simulate this, one of my sweetest fantasies.

There's something very fun about holding my face while I scan it, like it's a delicate object only to be placed very purposefully and carefully onto things. Love to think of my body parts as disjointed, mysterious objects that one can pick up and put down like museum pieces catalogued and stored away. Surely that's the best way to perceive the body. And maybe scanning it lends itself to that. It's good.

The real and strange shifting of light and form become funny puzzle pieces. One tiny segment at a time. And it's fun that the body is this whole big thing that you know, but also this myriad of tiny things, pores and chemical processes. I like all the minutiae of it. The tininess and the vastness.

Take an eyelash as if it's a tear-off strip of paper from the bottom of an advert on a local noticeboard.

:-o

Here are some miscellaneous drawings that have been sitting in my pictures folder for a while, haunting it. Little squatters. I welcome them.

I'm kinda tempted to make this sweet, small bunny (above) my avatar everywhere. I mean, look at it. It's perfect. But then again, I like having the recognisability of my face being my avatar... so I don't know. Maybe. Please offer your opinions on this important matter. Shall I be bunny?

My pink felt tip pen is really running out of ink at this point. A true tragedy. But I'll keep trying to desperately use it as it gets increasingly streaky. That's my way. Gotta keep it going until it really has to be gone. No sooner. Never give up. Inspirational.

For some reason I really enjoy putting the ":-o" face inside a speech bubble like this. I find it very funny and good. But I guess in general I also find the ":-o" face very funny and good, and love to use it wherever possible. I love to feign shock always. This is one of the joys of life. The sweet joys of existence.

:-o

Also, why do I draw creatures so often raising one arm into the sky in a Shakespearean gesture? A gentle, tentative touch to the heavens. The theatrics, the drama, the gentle emotion of such an act... it touches me.

Finally: dogs. A simple congregation of dogs. And a bear, below, who will offer you much comfort. Very nice.

Journal: Branches & Brushstrokes

I pasted a few pictures from an old geography textbook into my journal (my sweet friend Bethany sent this to me), and it's so nice and serene to have them there. Just some nice pictures of some woodland. So I put some colourful brush strokes over them, because it just seems to fit well. Some shapes and movements whirling softly on and through the trees. It makes sense, right?

Anyway I love the scratchy soft brushstrokes extending and turning like branches. Every strange, meandering shape is like the outdoors in some way, and I love that.

Diary: Hazy-sleepy

Woah, it's December! I've been listening to some really great music, such as:

• Aly & AJ - The Distance
• BØRNS - Past Lives
• ONEW - Blue

Just some really great stuff that makes me feel... extremely good. I'm really happy that Onew released a solo album. His voice is a gift. So beautiful. So good.

I've been sort of alternating between feeling kinda hazy-sleepy and working on a bunch of stuff. Since I'm going to see my family in Scotland for around ten days over Christmas I'm trying to prepare as much art and video stuff as possible so that I can keep posting just as much (or almost as much) over Christmas. It's kinda fun working on a lot of stuff like that, super satisfying to tick off big tasks. But I gotta get packing pretty soon too.

I've also been doing some miscellaneous new and old stuff. I met a friend to drink wine and talk about Brexit, I added some new tiers to my (still new) Patreon, and for some reason I love doing little arty admin things like that. Drawing little header pictures and stuff.

I've been reading a bit more (currently 'Housekeeping' by Marilynne Robinson, which is honestly one of the most interesting books I've ever read so far), and I've started setting an alarm so I can get up relatively early. Sometimes I'll read for half an hour to an hour right after I wake up, and it just feels really good to do that. I have to wait for my eyes to stop being fuzzy for a few minutes first though. Why do they do that? I can't look at anything like a book for a good five minutes after I wake up because my eyes are being strange.

Mulch

Here is a happy boy. His cheeks flush with the warmth inevitably brought on by thoughts about decimating your enemies with one wry thunderbolt from a Pikachu hellbent on vengeance. This is what fuels him and brings forth a passion within him.

These paintings were noodly little offshoots from a painting of a big Brussels sprout I made. The red added to dull my bright green from the tube into an earthy, forest mulch sort of colour. An appropriate cabbage-y colour.

Every time I use basic colour theory principles (like, in this case, mixing green and red, opposites on the colour wheel, to make the green become more dull and muddy and muted) I notice myself thinking it out really purposefully like a proud child reciting their times tables. I just can never get over how cool it is, you know, that some colours are opposites or partners in certain ways. It's good! I love the colour wheel! And I love saying to myself, "yes, these colours [wink] are opposite each other on the colour wheel, I am very knowledgeable and cool."

Anyway, I really like the muddy, leafy green colour. It seems appropriate somehow for the season and how cold it is. It's so cold now. It's glove time. Time for my hands to get all red if they are out of a glove for five seconds or more. So the muddy green and slightly dirty blood red are sort of fitting colours. Relaxing. They remind me of all the little tactile experiences of going outside in the fresh winter.

Here are some spaghetti-limbed friends. Love a wobbly, dangling spaghetti arm. Beautiful, aimless, wavy. All the best things to be.

And here is a strange moth creature, ambling foolishly through the underbrush, no doubt. Just like me.

New Journal + Tissue Paper + Spooky Cat

I'm getting really close to having filled up a journal now, and I'm excited about it. I love closing a finished journal, seeing all the pages have become crinkled and warped and made the journal fan out in defiance of its binding. A changed object, bursting with all of its mess and chaos.

I also found some tissue paper and painted on that, and I love the texture of it. It's so light that it's really easy to accidentally send it across the room, and that's annoying but also quite fun. Just the constant threat of creating a gust of wind that sends your painting tumbling away. I feel like it keeps me on my toes, when a painting can just escape at any time thanks to the laws of physics.

When I finish a journal I sort of feel like I could hurl from a speeding train and change my name, maybe move abroad and buy a cow. You know, it's a beautiful time of change. A transition. From an old journal with all these things you've done in the past however long, to a new journal where you're going to do the same things more or less, but it's going to feel imbued with all the context of a different time period. It's a different world. A new frontier. But one where you will continue to paint little bunnies staring into the distance and surrounded by hearts and flowers and things. Because everything changes but there's a fundamental repetition. Because you're growing, but from the same seed, new roots poking through.

And the shiny new journal is about to get destroyed. By which I mean I'll probably get some pasta sauce on the front cover sooner than I think. Because I'm constantly surprising myself, and life is a gift in that regard. In the regard of pasta.

But this is fine. I really do like the texture of the tissue paper though. It's good. This strange and almost spooky-creepy cat painting is my new Spotify icon, and it makes me smile:

Look at its face! That's a good face.

Neverending Dog Pile

Here are a bunch of super blobby little paintings I made recently. Just some thoughtless things for the sake of moving. I think for me part of practising (although I wouldn't even call it practising now, it's like the art equivalent of humming maybe) is really just moving. Just physically painting for the sake of routine and memory. But I always like it a lot. It's comforting in its aimlessness. Like watching leaves move around in the wind, and you just have a moment to be there.

I've been thinking about whether I should try to experiment more with different forms - paint some things I don't usually paint. I remember at high school we did a lot of stuff focusing on still life (we looked at Cézanne paintings and painted some oranges) and I'm kinda fond of those memories. Painting oranges over and over. Actually, we probably didn't even paint them that much, but everything seemed like more work then.

I do wonder a lot what it would've been like to have a higher arts education that had anything to do with form and technique, and maybe art history. That's stuff I'd always like to know more about. It'd be great if I could stop time in every art gallery and get to be there on my own in this still, stuck piece of time, walking around lines of people frozen in place for hours. I feel like art galleries would be boring without people there, though. Dark figures huddled round the thick, bright colour and stretching shapes.

But anyway, I painted a dog again. One more dog to add to the dog pile. The pile in my garden that keeps getting bigger. Dog after dog standing obediently on the top of the dog mound.

And there will be more and more of them forever, as long as I keep moving just for the sake of it.

Scanner Adventures: Death & Dreamworks

Winter is coming and it's time for more scans of my face. It's traditional. Because I said so. Please partake of this tradition and scan your face during the winter months. Thank you.

Sometimes when my eyes are closed in these, I'm reminded of memento mori pictures of the dead. Not in a morbid way, but in that some of them are so beautiful and well-arranged and serene. It's a weird thing to think about, but I'd kinda like to imitate them and take black and white pictures of myself lying atop flowers with my eyes closed. I mean, it's nice, besides the death part.

This one is kinda gross, but here it is anyway. It's the way my teeth look which alarms me most. Warping teeth. I don't like it. But I will name a song that. Warping Teeth.

I really like the long eyebrow on this last one. Beautiful. Good. Maybe I'll try to do an extreme Dreamworks face in some future scans.

Diary: Movies & Woods

I guess I've been doing some fun stuff as usual. Watching another movie as part of "mothcub film club" with some people online - and the movie was painful but it was fun to watch it with my little group. It's really nice to have a little online club where we can congregate and watch stuff together and joke around. I wish I could do it in person, invite people round for a little screening. Some hot beverages, some good cushions, a projector on a huge white wall. I'd really like to do that some day. When I can get an appropriate wall.

I also went to see The Grinch, and that was fun. It's a cute little film. I didn't realise that I've been watching a few movies lately, but I did also finally see Coco, and I can't believe how good it is! It's been so nice to just sit down and watch a movie and focus on it lately. I feel like so many things are happening all the time, and maybe... they're not, but it's been so so good to watch a movie, those times when I watched a movie. More movies.

I have been going on the long walk to the woods fairly often recently too, always to film something (especially since it's so dark so much of the time now that it's harder to get that daylight sunlight in order to film indoors). It's tiring and cold and muddy, but I love it there so much.

I also really want to get into reading more, since I've been in a phase of not reading much for a while and it'd be nice to get back to that calm and exciting little secret place. Feels right.