Dan Germain

the dinosaurs

I drew this picture when I was six or seven. Actually, to say I drew it is a bit of a lie - the outlines were already there and I coloured it in. Then I wrote a story below it.

howies are going to use it in a catalogue soon. Exciting.

a familiar face

Was looking at some stuff on a site this morning (Marcus Walters - a fine illustrator) when I came across this.

I was taken aback. It looks a bit like me. It's a better version of me than the one I drew last year (below). Maybe I'll get a copy.

julius caesar, by mustashrik

Mustashrik is an amazing illustrator who worked here at innocent as a designer for a while in 2007. He's only been out of college for a year but has already had his first book published – a manga version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

What a feat. Definitely puts my doodlings and scribblings into perspective.

There's more Mustashrik here.

how i do art

The short answer is that I don't do art. Not very well at least. But I can sometimes be quite good. I go to galleries and look at stuff. When I visit big cities I dutifully go along to the places you're supposed to go to. But I'm still learning the moves. There's a stance that experienced gallery goers have. They look like they know what they're doing. I'm usually trying to work out which room's next and whether I've missed the famous one yet.

I still enjoy it though, especially when I find something that amazes me. Rich sixteenth century Italian blokes painting other Italian blokes of a similar ilk, sometimes on horses. That doesn't impress me that much (although they're better at drawing than me). But beaming Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata at the Moon via Morse code, and then collecting the reflected code and turning it back into music, give or take a few notes that got lost because they bounced into the wrong crater. Or being able to phone a glacier. That impresses me.

Read more about Katie Patterson's Earth-Moon-Earth and her glacier thing.

strictly no photography

Here's something smart. A photo sharing thingy called strictly no photography where you can post pictures of places and things that you weren't supposed to take pictures of. The Russian air base. The Mona Lisa. The Turkish bath incident in Stratford. If you weren't supposed to have a camera with you, you should stick the photo here.

self portrait in marker pen

We had a little creative thing last week, where we sat in a room for a day and talked about fonts and ponytails and all of that other great creative stuff. At one point, Kat (one of our designers) asked us to quickly draw self portraits - a scary task. The results were pretty scary too, as you can see above.

I looked at mine afterwards and could think of only one word.

Rasputin.

beard art

Franklin (black), originally uploaded by ashleyg.

My wife found these excellent pictures of bearded men on flickr and pointed me towards them. I like them.

Thank you to Ashley G for letting me post them - there are lots more here.

a painting by the dead artist

I think I've blogged about Marcus's painting before, but I thought I'd do it again. Every time it gets blogged about, the value should go up a bit. It's quite complicated, but Marcus explains it clearly here.

ed grace is excellent

I would like to use my blog to highlight the excellence of Ed Grace. Ed worked at innocent for a good while, using his excellent illustrative and design skills to make our world a better place.

I just discovered Ed's portfolio site. Naturally, it looks beautiful. So, if you need an excellent illustrator/designer, you need look no further.

[found via Ted's blog]

a discussion about art

Marcus has been talking about painting recently, so I thought I'd get in on the act. But I'm not going to show you something that I've painted. This is because I don't really paint. I'm more of a conceptual artist. By this, I mean that I mainly just have concepts. They are very rarely executed.

The last bit of art I created was some bits of old VCR players screwed to a piece of wood, in my mum's garage about eight years ago. In this case, the concept was that we are very keen to throw lots of stuff away, so why don't we stop, take stock and screw more of those old bits of junk to pieces of wood.

As you may recall, this idea did not shock the world of art to its very foundations.

I still have it somewhere in the house. If you ask nicely enough, I may post a picture of it.

Anyway, the painting at the top of this post was a birthday present from my wife. It was done by a friend of a friend; a graphic designer turned painter (I've forgotten his name but I'll find out and stick it up here).

I really really like it. It's very satisfying.

You'll have to forgive the colour of the wall behind it. We meant to paint it but never got round to it.

Even my DIY skills are conceptual.

*** update - the artist is called Marcus Freeman and you can mail him here ***