Mr Blue, can you come down?

Our time at 826 Valencia was filled with many awesome jobs, but my favourite by far was the daily writing workshop, where a class of primary school kids would write a book in two hours, with some help from a typist, an illustrator, a leader, and Mr Blue, the cranky publisher who lived and worked in the attic. Mr Blue, who never ventured out from his office, spent the two hours ranting about children wasting his time, and insisting on ridiculous amounts of writing to be done within ridiculously tight deadlines. It seemed the more Mr Blue insisted that "children simply cannot write stories" the more the kids loved him.

Here is my artistic depiction of an interaction between Mr Blue and a bunch of school children.

Pigeon Post

Here are some variations on the common pigeon.

Bones!

I drew this little museum series during a particularly boring lecture. It's never a good sign, from a teaching point of view, when skeletons of animals dead for millions of years have more life in them than your class does.

And yes, I know, that is one huge gorilla. Perhaps the picture is simply inferring the massive presence of such a noble and terrifying creature.

Fake Etchings Co.

While taking part in an internship at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, I got to do heaps of drawing (among 500 other cool things). This website was created as part of a fundraising campaign to save the 826 volunteers from extinction. The original plan for the banner was to use copyright free 18th C. etchings of extinct animals, but since we couldn't find any that were appropriate, I drew them instead. It was quite a challenge to create the effect of etching using a black fine liner, but I think it was pretty successful. My favourite bits are the bottom of the dodo's neck, and the hip of the Tasmanian Tiger.

Lucha Pulgar

Here's a guide I wrote to making lucha libre masks for your thumb, adding a new dimension to the ancient and noble sport of thumb wrestling.

The idea came about while I was working on an art project, which eventually morphed into this series of photos. The wrestling ring has a mat made from the plastic cover from an old visual diary, and electrical wires for ropes.







































My friend Mollusk and I then used the thumb masks as the basis for a day of art with a class of grade two kids. They designed their own lucha libre masks, first as a collage, then making real felt masks, and finally miniature versions for their thumbs. I think (and we hope) that we may have created the next banned activity for the playground at that school.