Kid Canaveral's Christmas Baubles

Here's a quick poster I've made for the fantastic Kid Canaveral and their Christmas party / gig / event type thing, Kid Canaveral's Christmas Baubles. Really chuffed to have been asked to do this - I've seen KC (and a bunch of the other bands on the lineup) a good few times over the years at various Fence things and I'm a big fan. I'd thoroughly recommend getting a copy of their recent Shouting at Wildlife record, it's top of the pops.

As far as the poster is concerned, I had a wee false start with this one and completely changed direction at the last minute. The mashed-up Radio Times Christmas listings is my, very British, nod to Art Chantry, who I'm a great fan of. I'm gathering quite a collection of really weird vintage clip-art these days.

Anyway, the gig will kick off at 2pm at The Lot in Edinburgh on Saturday 18th December. If you can make it, you definitely should. Great music, great food, great fun. Great! Thanks to Kate from Kid Canaveral for getting me on board. Here are the full details for easy reading and for the old search engines:

Kid Canaveral's Christmas Baubles
What?: A festive party with live music
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Where?: The Lot, Grassmarket, Edinburgh, EH1 2JU
When?: Saturday, 18th December from 2pm
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Who?: Ballboy, King Creosote (solo), Kid Canaveral, Come On Gang! Cancel the Astronauts, The Last Battle and Gummi Bako + Song, By Toad & Straight to Video DJs
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How?: For tickets, visit kidcanaveral.co.uk or nip in to Avalanche Records in Edinburgh.

If this sounds like it's up your street (or up the street of people you know), give it a mention wherever you can. That would be magic. Christmas is really creeping up, eh? Jesus Christ.

Lego Mansion

Sometimes you're just blown away by a thing. This burned-out Lego mansion by Mike Doyle is one of those things. Damn, damn, damn. As far as I can tell, it's 100% legit, as in it's made completely from normal Lego pieces. You can view more pictures of the project on his blog, here.

I do get quite nostalgic for Lego. It was probably my favourite toy growing up (the old, old Robin Hood stuff being my fondest memory) and from time to time, I'll have a look at what's going on in the Lego 'community'. Usually it doesn't really do it for me. Too many men building too many big mech robots and spaceships. Not my scene, dogg. Discovering Doyle's mansion on the other hand completely made my day and (somewhat) justified my hour of skiving-off on geeky messageboards.

Nine New Views

I know, I know, another video. Sorry. Well, should I apologise? I dunno. I presume most people who read this blog are mainly interested in drawings and not whatever boring crap I point my video camera at. Ennyyyway...

This is a short post to promote a slightly longer post over here. What it is, is a collaborative blog to accompany a collaborative group exhibition in Philadelphia in which I'm participating. The show, called the 'World's Fair' features work by a few artists from all over the shop - visit the blog to find out all the details. The video (kinda) makes sense when you see it in context.

I'll try to post some exclusive content up there over the coming weeks, if that's any incentive to subscribe. You probably need to be a bigger bigshot than me for 'exclusive content' to mean anything but hey, read it anyway.

Oh yeah, the track used is 'Looks Like A Sunrise' by Billy Pilgrim on Fence.

The Kitchen Gallery

I've opened a small gallery called 'The Kitchen' in Shawlands, Glasgow. The first, currently untitled, show features work from a variety of different artists.

Above is a little preview video of the space. Right now access to you, 'the public', is severely restricted. I can't have any dirty beggar wandering in now, can I? Hmph, I should think not. Strictly for those in-the-know I'm afraid. Should you wish to exhibit here, please contact me and we'll see if we can come to some sort of arrangement.

The first show includes: A print by Sanna Dyker 'All Will Come Out In The Washing', a print by Gemma Correll, 'I Like It When We Share', untitled bunting by Christopher Bettig, an untitled drawing by Robert Hanson, a print 'Teacups' by Kate Sutton and a collaborative installation 'Washing Line' by Alex Horne and David Galletly.

Fence Hallowe'en Party

For the past, jeez, 10 or more years now I've been a big fan of Fence Records, a record label and collective of musicians based in Fife, Scotland who make some very good music and put on some very good events. This month, they're having their annual Hallowe'en party in Glasgow and I was very happy to have been asked to design the poster.

I think it turned out pretty good. The deadline was quite short on this one, so I kinda just went a bit nutty grabbing all sorts of odds & ends and mashing them into shape. Looking back at my sketchbook, the only planning I really got done was writing 'cowboys + sci-fi + vintage horror + Fence' in the corner and a couple of quick scribbled layouts. Sometimes it's better just to have fun and cross your fingers that a few ideas will jump out at you along the way.

Anyway, the party is sure to be a belter. If you can make it along, you should. Can you think of anything better to do on Hallowe'en than a full day of live music, djs, fancy dress (fency dress), drinking, dancing and general goodness? I doubt it. It's like a mini-Hallowe'en festival for Christ's sake. They've even set the great wee theme of 'wild-west 3010: space cowboys & aliens' to get your costume ideas a-flowin'. How nice not to be bombarded with a million folk kitted out as The Joker, a 'sexy' cat or the ever-hilarious Borat*.

The important details are as follows:

Fence Hallowe'en Fancy-Dress Party

On: Sunday, October 31st, 2pm - 2am
At: Stereo / The Old Hairdresser (which is the building across the lane from Stereo)
In: Glasgow
Remember: Fancy dress is mandatory, so no spoilsports
Tickets: are available at fencerecords.com, £25 for the full day.

I'll hopefully do a little reminder post shortly or perhaps write a little more about Fence for anyone who isn't familiar with who they are and what they do.

If you could, please promote/post/tweet this poster and details of the event. That would be great. There is a larger version here if you need it. They'll be up around Glasgow and beyond shortly. Hopefully there might even be a few for sale at the gig. Big thanks to Johnny Pictish for getting me on board.

* not hilarious

The List Student Guide

If you're a student, and in particular, a student in Scotland, keep your eyes out for the new Student Guide magazine by The List. They should be around in all sorts of campuses (campi?), unions and other student-friendly places. I was asked to provide a few drawings for the issue, including that fella above.

I've not actually seen a copy myself but I've heard reports that it's out there now. Inside is all sorts of useful information about student life and stuff to do in Scotland (wear a kilt, play bagpipes, smoke heroin etc). I think it's free but don't quote me on that. Check before you stuff it in your bag and end up in the jail.

I now have an updated page showing both character illustrations.

Movin' On Up

I am moving house! As of tomorrow, Alex & I will be staying in Glasgow in our own little place. The last few days have been a crazy pack-a-thon / insurance-a-thon / internet-provider-a-thon, and I'm just about ready to hit the road. Moving cold sucks when you're a hoarder.

So in terms of art / illustration stuff, I might be a little hard to get hold of. We'll have tons to do and I don't expect I'll be online properly for at least a week. In the meantime, if you email and I don't get back right away, it's because I'll need to nip out to a coffee shop for wifi. Items in my shop have been temporarily removed from sale as they'd take forever to sort out at the moment.

Glasgow people - if there's anything going on, jobs / projects / collaborations / whatever, I'll be around and looking for things to work on. Please contact me if something might be of interest. That would be awesome. If anyone wants to follow my riveting moving-in updates, I'll still be updating my twitter from my phone. Here we (Glas)go(w)!

Odds & Ends

Recently I've been trying to clean out my hard drive a little, deleting all the junk that builds up over time. iPhoto is one of the worst offenders. Because it just magically sucks all the photos from a camera, arranges them nicely and is generally headache-free, I never, ever delete anything. Pure black photo from when my camera went off in my bag? What the hell, keep it. Blurry photo of the carpet? Yes please! Back of a complete stranger's head? Don't mind if I do. Well, no more. I've been sorting through it, trying to delete all the garbage.

One thing I've found, which I'd totally forgotten about, is a few stop-motion animation sequences. I guess there's been occasions over the past couple of years where I've felt the urge to take a bunch of snaps with the intention of slapping them together later. So, as part of my clearout, I chucked them into an editing program and slapped a bit of music over the top.

I know the end result isn't exactly mind blowing but, for me at least, it's quite a nostalgic little video. Maybe stop-motion does that to everything, gives it that Wonder Years, old-home-movies kinda feel. I dunno. It's nice anyway. Nice to see these fairly boring pictures from days I'd forgotten about come back to life. The music, once again is from the album John's ABC by the Fence Collective.

Blackpool

This is just a little video made from the few odds & ends I shot while I was away in Blackpool. Nothing particularly amazing but I felt if I didn't edit these clips together, they'd just sit on my computer and never get looked at.

I filmed these on the new still camera that Alex got me for my birthday (a Nikon Coolpix s8000 - I almost bought Alex one for her birthday last month but got her a bike instead). The quality isn't quite up to my other camcorder videos, but a wee compact still camera shooting HD is pretty awesome. Click it up to 720p to make it a little easier on the eyes. Youtube should really have the option to let the uploader chose the default resolution.

Blackpool was, of course, tacky, funny, nostalgic, scary and weird but that's why you go. The photos I put on Flickr probably show it off a little better but, as I say, I had to do something with the video clips. A good holiday.

Rain

Earlier today I was planning on nipping to the shops to pick up some stuff. The rain came just as I pulled on my shoes. It reminded me of school holidays. I used to get so angry any time it was wet because all I wanted to do was go skateboarding.

So, stuck inside, I made a tiny video from the window. The music is a track called 'G' from the compilation album 'Johns ABC' by Fence Records. An hour later it was sunny. Scotland, eh.

9 Empire Biscuits

So I finished a job, saved it and sent it away. I figured, what the hell, I'll take the last hour of the day off. I've earned it. Reckoned I'd play a game or something. Just as I was closing down the last few windows in Photoshop, I started mucking about with little shapes and, almost completely without thinking, spent 20 minutes making 9 little empire biscuits. Why did I do this? What a weirdo.

To be honest, I am pretty obsessed with the damn things. The Galletlys have a particularly sweet tooth and I have spent my life surrounded by cakes and biscuits. My problem is that as soon as I've eaten something savoury, an unshakable craving for something sweet kicks in. It niggles away like having one shoelace tighter than the other. This means I eat chocolate after cereal, cakes after lunch and ice cream after dinner almost every day.

Empire biscuits are my new lunchtime fix. It's the icing. The icing is the best. I'd eat solid blocks of it if they wrapped it up like a chocolate bars. I'm lucky I'm not fat. My insides must be suffering in some other horrendous way. The shop in town sells giant empire biscuits. The staff keep them aside for me and everything. When they started stocking smaller, inferior ones, I complained.

Holmes vs. Potter

Tonight we watched a film that I remember fondly from my childhood. The Spielberg-produced, Young Sherlock Holmes. A decent Indiana-lite adventure that once freaked me out with its trippy hallucination sequences. It always came on the telly on a wet Saturday afternoon.

When trying to convince Alex it was a worthwhile watch, I said 'You'll like it, it's a bit like Harry Potter'. I don't mind a bit of H.P. now and again and neither does Alex. I'm not into the books or anything, but I'll watch the films. Anyway, having not seen Young Sherlock Holmes in at least 10 years, 'a bit like Harry Potter' turned out to be a hell of an understatement. Y'know Withnail & I has that drinking game? Well here's one for Young Sherlock: take a swig everytime something Harry Potter-y comes on screen - you won't make the credits.

The main 3 characters, Holmes (Harry), Watson (Ron) and Elizabeth (Hermoine) wander around their big old school in their stripey scarves getting into all sorts of pavlovas. They make friends with an eccentric old professor (Dumbledore), sneak about after dark and take the piss out of Watson for being a clumsy arse. Sherlock spends most of the film with a scar on his face (given to him by the bad guy, for goodness' sake). Tea is eaten in a massive hall complete with a million candles, comedy twins and scowling teachers:

There's even a fencing (wand) lesson where Holmes proves himself to be a formidable fencer (wizard) but is warned that he needs to keep his emotions in check, or else. As the mystery (concerning an Egyptian cult) unravels, the gang head out into the London underworld (Diagon Alley) to visit curious shops in the search for clues. I'm using Google to find these names, by the way.

Best of all though is Holmes' rival, Dudley (Draco). A right proper ponce who sneers and scowls his way through the film as he plots Sherlock's downfall. He's a bad egg. He chats up Elizabeth. He gets Holmes expelled. He nicks a trophy. Just take a look at him next to Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter. Ooh, that rotter:

Pretty close eh? When you see him in action it's hard to not be all 'hang on a second, this is getting weird'. I guess it could still be a coincidence though. Well, yeah, but just wait until Sherlock goes and makes a potion that TURNS HIS GODDAMN HAIR WHITE:

Haha! It's like J.K. Rowling wrote some weird Young Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction and it all got a bit out of control. Look, he's even got a couple of cronies tagging along with him. There has to be something fishy going on, right? Right?

Well, maybe. Turns out some guy beat me to the comparison by about 5 years. He goes into a fair bit of depth on this blog about it. There's a lot of interesting stuff about J.K. Rowling's influences, Chris Columbus' involvement in Young Sherlock / the H.P. films and more nerdy comparisons that I could ever make. Here's me thinking I was dead insightful.

I'm not meaning to go all conspiracy theorist here, Harry Potter has a ton of really cool ideas going on. It's cool. These similarities only make watching Young Sherlock Holmes more fun. If you're in the mood, you can even watch thewhole thing on YouTube right now.

100 Tuesdays

Close to two years ago I asked Alex to go out for dinner with me on a Tuesday night in Glasgow. She said yes. It went well, we had a good night, so I asked her out again. The best day for both of us, by chance, was the following Tuesday. Another restaurant, another good night. I was feeling pretty smooth! The next again Tuesday also found us out in a restaurant eating a meal - a pattern! - and there and then we made the decision to try to go out to eat every Tuesday from then on.

Today is the 100th Tuesday from that night. We're still going. I have seen Alex every single Tuesday since our first date. Not bad considering we don't yet live together. If I were to guess, I'd say we'd made it out to a restaurant, cafe or bar on 90 days out of those 100. We've maybe had 5 take-aways and bought in food to cook or had a picnic on the remaining 5. There have been no real hurdles, problems or mishaps. Actually, a schedule clash sometimes makes for the best nights - my Newcastle trip was purely to avoid missing a Tuesday.

How's it been? It's been great. We've eaten some really nice food in some really nice places. We used to joke about how we turned Tuesday (the most boring day) into the best night of the week. I guess it was expensive at first, but we learned to tone things down pretty well. We've learned where to get a good deal if we're tight for cash. I only wish I'd kept a diary or something so I could remember more specifics, but I make enough bloody lists.

You could say this is our 'date-night' but I dunno, that implies all sorts of things about trying to keep the magic in a relationship and spending some quality time together - things we don't particularly need to work on. We're doing fine. This is more like a joke that got out of control (in a good way) or a weird game. I'm just happy I've never had a slap or a glass of wine pored over my head. Nobody's gotten food poisoning and we've never even argued. I've probably moaned a bit, but I do that all the time. Alex has been great.

So tonight, Tuesday 100 (Alex and her friends call them 'Dave Tuesdays', but I ain't about to get into that), we're going to one of our favourite places. Wilawan in Stirling. A place I'll full heartedly recommend if you ever find yourself nearby and fancy some Thai food - the best place to eat in town, by a mile. Pro tip: it's all about the starters in that place. Damn.

As for the future, who knows? We're planning our move to our own place soon which might change things up a little. Maybe not. There's no sign of stopping anyway. 100 became a goal to aim for a while back and I'm very happy to have reached it today. What's for tea?

What I Wore Today In Video

I've been playing with my camcorder a lot recently, more for fun than anything else. Well, that's my excuse for being rubbish anyway. I kinda feel like there is a goal to aim for with this video stuff, but I guess there isn't really. Will I be a director one day? Will I make a documentary or conquer Hollywood? Nah.

Anyway, the above clip is the most recent thing I've mucked about with. A real-life version of my What I Wore Today drawings. The goal was to work out how to get images to show over the top of video and, hey, I managed it. My initial intention was to produce quite an elaborate little movie about what I was wearing but once I started, that went right out the window. If I don't delete this after a week (it's quite a weird, invasive thing to put online), I might have another go. It already makes me cringe but I feel a little better when I remind myself that I'm just a beginner.

Apart from that, in the past wee while I have added a dumb trailer for a skateboard film I'm making with my friends (this is almost exclusively for our own amusement, pretty much nobody else will find it funny or in any way impressive), a stupid clip of us sliding on a wall and a video showing the mess Alex leaves when she makes a birthday cake. If you want to follow my progress in the world of moving pictures you can view and subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

Hmm.

EDIT: I should also mention that the idea for this video and all my What I Wore Today drawings came from this wonderful Flickr group started by Gemma Correll (of doing amazing drawings fame). Also, the song is 'Food and Pussy' by Dan Reeder from his self-titled album. Check out Work Song when the Man is getting you down.

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.