dinosaur looks

Dino Looks
Acrylic on canvas

Despite the common belief that dinosaurs are comoflagy colours, i can inform you, after watching the dinosaur 3D film in the Science Museum, that the dinosaur looks in Jurassic Park are far from conclusive. Above is my guess. I read this following passage after making my guess, it bares a striking resemblance to my instinctual one...

'....but other paleontologists say the opposite is true — that dinosaurs' skin could have been shades of purple, orange, red, even yellow with pink and blue spots! Rich and varied colors, they argue, might have helped dinosaurs to recognize one another and attract mates.' (Adapted from Dinosaurs: The Very Latest Information and Hands-On Activities From the Museum of the Rockies, by Liza Charlesworth and Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer. A Scholastic Professional Book.)

knock knock

Waves
Acrylic on canvas

humara pind= New Book!

Here are some pages from a new book 'Humara Pind in Pakistan-Part 1'. It's a fictional book about the memories of an old man who grew up in a villiage in Pakistan. It's loosely based on some of the things my dad told me about his golden olden days but mainly its just made up. You can see the other pages by visiting Orbital Comics in Leicester Square, or Bookartbookshop in Old Street where they are now on sale.

rainy day

Rainy Day
Acrylic on canvas

I was walking past this book shop and i became all of a sudden magnetized to this book called 'das house: hundertwasser'. I did some research and found a whole collection of this man's work. He was an artist and architect and he had some really interesting beliefs about nature and painting, he believed that 'painting is a religious occupation, that the actual impulse comes from without, from something else that we do not know'. He made some really magical posters too.
This above painting is somewhat inspired by his work, especially the raindrops.

regular and gigantic

Here are two new books, they are very small, probably not suitable for the fat fingered. I'll probably stick them to florescent postcards so that they don't feel intimidated by bigger flashier books.

elastic revolution

Elastic Revolution

Acrylic on Canvas

This is a small poster painting about the UK clothing size system. I believe the system encourages unhealthy obsessive behaviour in women and general unhappiness and anxiety. The poster explores the possibility of a new healthier system in which we abandon set sizes for elastic. I think it would have many positive effects such as, women no longer placing such great emphasis on out skinniying each other, less wastage because if you lose/gain weight you can just adjust the knot and also i think it has health advantages as looser clothes are better for circulation.

wooden trees

Wooden Trees
Acrylic on canvas

Thanks to Dharine for helping me paint this one and for adding modest golden touches to it, which you probably can't see from the picture but they are definitely still there.

Alternative Press Fair

Sabba and me have a stall at the zine fair next month. Here's a poster i did for it, alternativepress.org.uk for more details.

moon fan

Moon Fan

Acrylic on canvas

the cow king

Barn (2010)
Acrylic, Microsoft Paint and Google

This is something that i did recently, you can see, through the use of digital elements, that i've now become up to date with modern times. The following is the only explanation that i could come up with for the composition, it sounds best when read very fast...

Once upon a time, in a realm unknown to most, there was a herd of cowboys. They had a cow King. This was because they had grown too immoral to rule over themselves and had thought it wiser to defer responsibility to this one especially fat cow who they had never managed to herd. The cow King was largely unbothered with the affairs of these lesser men and spent most of his time grazing. But as time passed and the cowboys became less and less civilized the cow King’s grazing land became gnarly. The cow King had had enough of this herd of lesser men and walked over to a fresh plot of land near an enchanted barn, here he rested and privately ate flowers.

the desert

'There are many more beautiful landscapes in the world but none, i think, that can shape man's spirit in such sovereign a way. In its hardness and sparseness, the desert strips our desire to comprehend life of all subterfuges, of all the manifold delusions with which a more bountiful nature may entrap man's mind and cause him to project his own imageries into the world around him. The desert is bare and clean and knows no compromise. It sweeps out of the heart of man all the lovely fantasies that could be used as a masquerade for wishful thinking, and thus makes him free to surrender himself to an Absolute that has no image: the farthest of all that is far and yet the nearest of all that is near.'
p.144-145, M. Asad, The Road to Mecca.

the nervous valiant knight

This came about when my brother didn't let me listen to his ipod on the train home from Edinburgh, he said 'draw a picture or a write something', so i did. I turned it into this animation several months later. It's a short story about a knight who has trouble adjusting to modernity. The original book is available at bookartbookshop.