Childhood dreams are being fulfilled, new products are being launched, drawings have been finished and as always media has been consumed and I’ve been having some thoughts on current events.
Should we grab a dream dictionary?
No, it’s not quite as esoteric as that. It’s actually a rather common thing among millennials. Sometime after your frontal lobe snapping into consciousness, but before the foggy hands of dementia reach out towards you ever millennial has a powerful awakening.
“I am earning my own money, it’s unlikely I’ll ever own a house, the world is burning around me, so I will spend my money on things that make me happy.”
This awakening normally goes hand in hand with a glut of articles bemoaning how millennials are responsible for single handedly destroying industries, how their lower socioeconomic standing is their own fault because of their avocado addictions and not late stage capitalism.
This dichotomy has been highlighted, hashed and rehashed more times than I’m happy admitting I’ve engaged with so I won’t bore you with sloppy reheated takes from 2010, but I will confess that sometimes I’m as guilty as the next millennial of buying a nostalgic product to just make myself feel SOMETHING.
This week I bought a tamagotchi to scratch that itch.
I think I’m showing my age, but I don’t remember them being this much work. It might be because I also just have a lot more responsibilities now, so when this little guy (his name’s Goji) starts beeping, sometimes he has to fend for himself. I’m a terrible dad.
A few people have asked me why I got a tamagotchi, because the fact that they seem to be back in the zeitgeist in the last few months has passed them by. Honestly as well, I just never had a tamagotchi when I was younger, I always had rip off versions, and not the 100% authentic tamagotchi experience, and I decided to change that for myself.
This inspirational approach of parenting my inner child (by buying it exactly what it wants; am I actually a bad dad?) has also spread into the studio and I’ve been obsessed with making stickers recently.
To be honest it wasn’t originally my idea, it was a friends, but I’m not mad about it. I’ve looked into getting stickers made before, and for a small business the cost of getting stickers made to try things out can be prohibitive, and it hasn’t been until I’ve invested in my home print set-up that I’ve been able to play around with printing some stickers.
As much as it’s been fun making sticker packs for people to buy, and the response to them has been great, it’s also scratching another one of those itches where I now find myself making stickers of old work I’ve made, and not even for sale, just so I can stick them on things. What I wouldn’t have given to have had this power when I was a child and I had to satiate myself with drawing all over my furniture. Yes I was one of those children.
So that’s the new products?
It is, they’re on the store here, and you can go and have a look at them, and maybe pick a pack or two up, but it’s also not the only new thing that I’ve added on to the shop recently. I’ve also added some new postcards – Spinning Wheel Spindle and Looky Looky, if you’re interested in some postcards.
What else have you been up to?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, or if anyone has told you, but it’s October now, and if you’re as heavily involved (or even partially involved) in art internet as I am, you’ll have heard about Inktober.
If you haven’t, it’s a drawing challenge where you force inspire yourself to do a different ink drawing every day for the month of October. There are prompt lists online that people follow, or some people come up with their own prompt list for the month.
I’ve always wanted to do Inktober, but with different priorities in October (us gigging artists who don’t have hot commissions from film studios tend to start preparing for Christmas in October, and I’m no different) it’s always a bit of a struggle. I actually did an alternative the other year and I did an ink drawing of a different Scottish Mythological creature and that became the basis of the BeastieAry.
This year I have been trying to keep up with Inktober though, as tough as I find it, and it normally ends up with me on the couch scribbling away while I try to watch TV in the evening, which is why I always struggle to keep up with it. I struggle to commit to ‘down-time’ at the best of times, so when there’s a drawing challenge afoot it starts activating the unhealthy “I can’t stop until I’ve done all of these drawings!” It’s like collecting pokemon, and I walk straight into sinking my life into it.
There are some artists who have historically bossed Inktober however, If you’re interested you can check out Andrew Mar, Miles Johnston and Dani Diez
Inktober hasn’t been without it’s controversy over the years. The challenge and the creator, Jake Parker, have been cancelled, accused of plagarism over a book teaching inking techniques, and then faced the ire of the wider arts internet when he copyrighted the name and logo for the Inktober brand, so many people don’t do the official prompt list any more, and you can really tell that if you search for Inktober on your social media platform of choice.
Regardless of that, I’ll be posting ink drawings for the rest of October over on my instagram, starting from this Friday, because I don’t want to overwhelm people’s feeds with a drawing every day, but they’ll go up on my story as and when they’re finished.
Is that it?
No, of course not! There’s also a new charity print to commemorate my 5k that I’m still working towards!
It’s the original print that the stickers are from, and it’s based on the animals I see when I’m out running. There is nothing too exotic, but the grey heron is simultaneously my nemesis and my inspiration, because it loves to stand on the path I’m running on and watch me run past like a ballsy little toddler. I’m terrified of it, and it flies around the size of what I can only imagine a pterodactyl was.
Surely that’s it, time to talk about what you’ve been watching?
Yeah, you’re right it’s that time.
The best thing that I’ve watched and enjoyed recently was Alien:Romulus. I went to the cinema to watch it, and not only has it been a while since I’ve been to the cinema (the last thing I watched in the cinema was Dune 2) but it’s also been a long time since I went to the cinema to see a horror film.
The Alien films are a huge part of my DNA and Ripley is an inspiration.
That being said; I can understand why the most recent additions to the franchise, the Prometheus universe, are different, and a lot of people don’t like the differences. We’re now normally not in space, we’ve got new alien types scuttling around and the timeline has gotten… confusing the say the least.
Alien:Romulus doesn’t follow the new paradigm and attempts to take things back to basics with having us being back in space and fighting the alien.
That being said, I was discussing it with a friend recently and I firmly believe that Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, the writers (Alvarez also directed) were massive fans before they got this job, because Romulus plays like when me and my friends would play Alien after watching it at a nice and traumatising age of ‘too-young’.
Although the set pieces we’ve come to know and love are all present; Weyland-Yutani, synthetics, facehuggers and the Alien, there are parts that take those set pieces and recombine them in exciting and novel ways, and I really enjoyed it. It really made me feel like I was back playing Alien while running through the streets around my childhood home with my friends.
I really enjoyed it, and I would hope maybe not just because it was an Alien instalment, and it might be worth watching this October if you like your horror movies with a pulse of sci-fi.
With that, the weekly Studio Update has come to an end, so it leaves us with only one thing left to do; the question of the week. This week’s question is
If you were a Power Ranger, what dinosaur would your powers come from?
As always; let me know in the comments. My dedication to being the Pink Power Ranger is such that I would always pick Pterodactyl.
Have a Good Week!
Josh
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