Polaroid Camera

A couple of people wanna see it, so here goes.

When I started using my first Lomography camera on my 31st birthday, I began to enjoy the reputation as that guy who carries around a weird-looking analogue camera.

Actually, it wasn't all that recent. I first had that reputation much earlier than that. 25 years earlier, to be exact. I received a Polaroid camera for my 6th birthday. I used to carry it around taking photos of any old rubbish until all the film was used up.

I was disappointed, as I'm sure you were, when Polaroid went bankrupt two years ago and ceased production of SX-70 film. Hopefully Polaroid revivalists The Impossible Project will toss a few of their stocks down to Van Diemen's Land, and the little grey box below will rise again. Retro? Don't insult my intelligence. Let us now. In return we offer a little incentive.

Pete's Polaroid Land Camera, manufactured 1983 (final year)

Little Friends II

SD Ping Ping. Gah!

RAQ (Randomly Asked Questions), Part 1

Five questions I have recently been asked:

How much of what we see in your comics is based on your real-life experiences?

All of it. I really have crashed a spaceship into the planet Earth from space.

With Spike's age, in some places it's 22, in other places it's 27.

How old is he?

27. At first he was 22, but when I began to approach that age myself, it didn't seem that 'old' anymore. My sister told me to increase it to 27.

Why does the number 61 keep coming up?

61 is my lucky number and I put it into every one of my comics and some other artwork as well. Try and find them! In the fineliner sketch of Flinders Street Station on my deviantART page, I put a 61 on the dome where a tiny circular window should be.

Did you know the band China 5 have a song called "Theme From Juliet Prime"?

Yeah, it's no big deal. Notice how they don't actually say Juliet's name in the lyrics so they can't be sued for copyright infringement.

How did you learn to draw like that?

Like what?

A stick to poke fun with

You knew they would, right?

Little Friends

SD Psyche.

Inspiration Wall

Some creative people like inspiring pictures for their wall; others prefer original quotes, perhaps those said to them personally. Here's an inspiration wall, featuring hand-lettered quotes on scraps of note paper.

Number Plates

Hmm, some numbers arranged in food. Well? Don't settle for this low-res image, go to my deviantART page to find out the rest of the story. You'll be seeing more than three meals there, I tell you!

New Album, New Songs Online

Happy 10/10/10 to the...dozen or so people reading this!

What are the odds that I would complete both Airbury III and the new China 5 album in the same week? Not good. But I did it anyway.

China 5 have finished our 5th self-released album Quarantine and we're quite happy with it. I put the finishing touches to it this week (although I've decided to shorten one of the songs by about a minute) and did the back cover layout a couple of days ago.

There are 13 new songs on the CD. If you enjoy such widely-loved music genres such as alpenhorn, jug band, and musical saw, then this might just crank your cheese wheel.

You can go to the China 5 Myspace Music Page to listen to two new songs, "State Of Flux" and "Too Many Sushi". You will surely not be disappointed.

Airbury Volume III Complete

After months of slaving away at the graphics tablet, Volume III of Airbury Academy is finally complete and I must say I'm pretty happy with it! The drawings are better than anything previous, and there has been an improvement in the colour styling in general because I'm no longer using a mouse to do the Photoshop dodge n' burn. The page count comes to 80, one page shorter than Volume II last year (although Volume II had a couple of 'filler' pages so let's say they're the same size).

As before, Volume III contains six stories: Lisa, Cologne, Psycheswap, Chalkface, Mutiny and Shutdown. So will there be a Volume IV? Not for a while. I'll be taking a break from comic-making for the time being and try to gather more story ideas, while I send out samples of Volume III and the Special Edition to various people. Not that there won't be anything to see on this blog. Well, enough talk. Here are some of the highlights from Volume III which I present to you below.

The front cover.

My friend Megan told me on my deviantART page that Jezebel is a big crybaby, so I had to get that line in somewhere.

Some life-drawing, as mentioned in an earlier post. Hey, why not draw a pear cut in half. There's one in every drawing room.

Lisa, a bad-ass pot-smoking 23 year old. She pops up in the opening story to tell her secret exam cheat method.

Maya goes to the festival (half-)dressed like a circus ringmaster.

Miss Evy tries to bond with her students, but it doesn't always work. Chris, you will find this scene familiar!

This panel of Jezebel looking sad actually appeared in Volume I in 2007. I just changed her clothes and put it in again specially for a page to send to publishers.

Maya: one ligature short of a typeface.

Psyche disguises her younger sister as her so she can sneak out of the school. Can you predict what happens?

As mentioned in an earlier post - the teddy bear prank from my design class days.

A real-life cameo! The guy on the left there is my old uni mate Fashion Boy, so called because he's Taiwanese and someone had to cop all our stupid anime nicknames. Well done FB, you've made the comic and pulled Miss Evy too, it seems.

Gertrude and Erica's conversation here is, word for word, the same as two of my graphic design classmates had in 2006. As for the "FBI - Female Body Inspector" T-shirt, a female friend of mine has one and asked me to put it in.

And finally, I couldn't resist putting in this background joke to take a dig at various things via the book spines.