Back to Work

Hi! How are you?

After nearly 4 months of lockdown I am writing to declare, almost entirely to myself, that I am back to work as of today. Not that I really stopped working, but you know what I mean. This is a tentative declaration as things are still far from ok but, given the situation here in Scotland, I feel like I can now return to my studio responsibly and work more regularly.

My lockdown has been unremarkable in the grand scheme of things and I'm thankful for that. Everyone in my life is safe and all our difficulties are pretty surmountable. I've not done... much, but I'm trying not to give myself a hard time. I reckon I've been a good dad. I'll take that. I also used my exercise quota to get good at rollerblading. That's not a joke.

Working from home started out great for the first couple of months then slowed to a crawl by the end. That's entirely on me because Alex and Beth are THE BEST and gave me loads of time and space. Still, I found working during lockdown difficult and, as every working-from-home-during-lockdown article says, that's ok.

I have a small backlog of jobs to work through (apologies to anyone who's waiting on something) and then I'm good to go on new stuff. What that new stuff is, I'm not sure. THE FUTURE is a lot more uncertain than it was a few months ago and my priority is making a feasible plan to continue earning a living doing what I do.

With that in mind, I hope to diversify my income a little so that I'm not relying on a single source of cash. While I don't want to spread myself thin, a few steady earners would help to settle the nerves. I've got some ideas I'd like to try.

The first, and least concrete, is to fiddle with Patreon. I've made one here. I mention this with the massive asterisk that I understand that the whole creative world is crowdfunding everything right now and I'd be daft to assume that it'll work for me. It's worth exploring, though.

For now, I've no specific goals or content to offer anyone who supports me and I'm making no promises about my output until I properly figure it out so I have zero expectations that anyone'll sign up yet. I'll share more when if/when I'm ready to commit to something. That said, I'd be delighted if you have a look. Can I triple-underline 'no promises'? Ta.

Other than that, I'm really looking forward to making things again. I'm most likely to talk about new stuff on my Instagram and on my Twitter. I'm also looking forward to interacting with non-family members again. That'll be weird.

Hope you're ok btw x

Red Neck Zine

I have made a new zine! It's called Red Neck. For a while now I've been mentioning that I've been playing around with making something like this and a couple of weeks ago, with the incentive of the Dundee Jamboree, I finally put it together.

Red Neck is a 28 page zine full of new drawings (all drawn in a 4-day marathon). I set out just to have fun making weird death & destruction pictures, the kind the crazy kid in your class might doodle in his schoolbooks. The end result, as you can imagine, is a little bit grisly but, I dunno, maybe kinda funny?

As an added thing, I knew I wanted to do a little bit of hand-colouring so 17 of the pages have red ink details. This was way more time consuming than I guessed it would be but hey, it means every single copy is unique and has a bit of a different look compared to the usual b&w zine style.

I don't want to post too many of the drawings yet as it kinda ruins the surprise a bit but I'll gradually put up a selection over the next couple of weeks. There are a few full-on patterny pages, some severed limbs, some skulls, some fire and a lot of blood. It's lovely though.

Of course, Red Neck is now available in my online shop. You can pick up your unique copy for the low, low price of £7. Man, I'm a bad salesman. Just have a look and see. Also, if anyone would like to stock a few copies in their shop etc. or needs any further info, contact me and we can sort something out.

I'm really hyped up for doing another zine soon, I've already got a few ideas in mind. Hopefully without the pressure of an immediate deadline I can really focus on doing something quite elaborate. Full colour? Huge? Tiny? Eh, maybe. Stay tuned. I'll also be putting up some new prints and things this week so subscribe if you haven't already for news on that (please).

So yeah, that's Red Neck. Available now. Thanks to Stuart for help at the print place and thanks to the Dundee Jamboree for providing the motivation to put it together. Here are the full details:

Red Neck
by David Galletly

A5 zine
28 pages
b&w print with hand-coloured elements
Edition of 100
Signed and numbered

Available here.

Work examples

I've decided to write a few things about previous bits and pieces I've done, so there are examples of my work up and about before I finish my website. I'll also link to these posts in the sidebar so they're easier to find amongst my usual daily stuff. I'll start with the stuff I did for "Rouge" at Flesh in Edinburgh (the above post).

Blog News

Hello.

I've decided to start using this place again because I need to put some stuff online and I like blogger - it's pretty slick. Instead of starting a new blog from scratch I've just deleted and editied a few terrible posts from this one. It'll hopefully start looking a little nicer when I work out the html junk and I'll eventually twin it with my new website when it goes online.

As far as content goes it'll be a combination of what I'm working on and what I'm looking at.

Cheerio x