How to Draw and Paint Balloon Writing

This is a fun typeface for posters or birthday cards or banners. you can see this and all my other videos in schools at www.shoo-tube.com

How to draw a cute cartoon Japanese Geisha

I was asked to draw this by a YouTube friend in Croatia! I’ve always loved Japanese things so this is the result. She doesn’t look very Japanese. Everytime I tried to make her look Japanese she was either too much a weternised stereotype or it looked like an 18th century print. Have a go anyway.

If you can’t see this at school or in a library because Youtube is blocked, then go to my own site www.shoo-tube.com which is allowed through most content filters in schools.

How to draw a Squid!

This drawing lesson was inspired by a story we made up at Cwmtridwr Junior School near Caerphilly, recently. Squid are weird and wonderful things. I’m beginning to quite grow fond of them and octopi too. You can see this on my website www.shoo-tube.com if you have difficulty seeing youtube in schools or libraries. if the pages look odd – please update your browser! Some schools are years behind!

My worst design award

Something about being by the seaside made me want to get fish and chips tonight. So I walked the mean streets of Llandudno and got into Tribells just before they closed.

That’s when I realised that the tomato sauce sachet must be one of the worst designs ever.

When you get it to tear down the “tear here” line, the plastic tightens up, so it becomes impossible to tear off a corner. You then have to squeeze the sauce out in a random direction, usually over the table. When you do get the sauce out, it is never enough.

There must surely be a better way of serving portions – I’m not sure about the little paper cups and the press squirt dispenser system either.

The Viking Belt Buckle

My Viking Belt Buckle

Okay, I realised that you’d like to see my Viking Belt Buckle. It’s made out of aluminium armature wire that sculptors use, and the snakes’ heads are made out of the ever-wonderful Milliput If you don’t know about Milliput, I’d say it was almost more useful that Duct Tape. I use it all the time to fix and make all sorts of things and no, I’m not on commission.

Mother’s Day – How to draw and paint a lovely card for the one you love the most!

Mother’s day is not far away, so here is a lesson to show you how to draw and paint a lovely vase of tulips to surprise and please your Mum or Mom or Mam or Mummy!

It’s really quite easy if you follow the instructions. As ever, please rate the video with the stars on the top left hand corner if you like it, and why not subscribe to my youtube channel?

Google – Angel or Devil?

Google claim to be “the Good Guys”. Maybe they are – at the moment. When that amount of power is focussed in one place, you can bet your bottom dollar the bad guys will want a piece, if not all of the action.

At the moment, Google makes so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. So what it does, is create new little bits to further colonise the web and other communication technologies, so that in a couple of years, when a some nerds from Stanford come up with a “Google Killer” idea, the web will be owned by Google and they won’t get a look in. Google has learned not to let itself fall into the same trap Microsoft did.

If Google were making real things or selling food or any other utility, they would have been broken up into pieces by now, but somehow, we are perfectly happy to blindly let a real Big Brother outfit take over our lives, because they keep telling us they are the “Good Guys”.

If they really are the good guys, then they should stop fiddling about with operating systems and phones and apply their considerable power and inventiveness to the problem of content.

Google is a parasite. It makes its money by exploiting people like me – the creatives, who spend our lives having ideas, using our brains to move the human condition on. Google sucks up what we do, mashes it up and sells advertising on the back of it. It pays us nothing for our work and claims all the profit. That is either theft or slavery. The very word content demeans the work of creative people. The Mona Lisa is content to a web technologist. Picasso and Shakespeare mere content providers. Content is just a nebulous medium that can be focussed by aggregating technologies to sell advertising to finely chosen markets.

I’m beginning to feel a bit jaded about the wonder of the web. No one makes money as a creative person on the web. Certainly not enough to live on. It makes communication faster and easier, but is that a good thing? When I was young, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would be delivered by tea. Isn’t that really enough? we used to pick up the phone and actually talk to people at the other end – wasn’t that better?

I find myself glued to my communication devices these days. The day goes by and I’ve done nothing but blog, sort through spam and obsessively check my youtube and website stats, this because my publishers tell me it’s not enough to have ideas, to write and illustrate and visit schools and libraries and perform at festivals anymore, I have to blog to create and maintain my market. Woah! Isn’t that the publisher’s job? I blog away like mad, but I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference to my market, because I don’t address my blog to my market. If I did, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the books, as I’d be giving all my creative work away to the kids who aren’t the ones who buy the books anyway.

Meanwhile, as you read this blog, you and I are putting a journalist out of business, because you really should be reading carefully considered, well-written work from a paid-for journal and I should not be dashing this off for free, but submitting it to a journal who would pay me for my time and effort.

If Google really are the good guys, they should put all their energy into one project – online micropayments.

I’ve removed creative projects from the web because I did not get paid for them while they were online. As they were free, they took away from sales of real books from which I earn real money. Now I can’t be bothered to work on all the great ideas I have because I can’t afford to do them, because I know I won’t get paid.

If I got a micropayment every time someone looked at one of my projects, then it would become worthwhile to start putting projects together, or it would be worthwhile for publishers to gravitate towards online delivery. The way things are going, in about five years time, there is going to be a blood bath in publishing unless an equitable way is found to pay people for the work they do online. As far as I’m concerned, my good will and the fun of experimentation has worn out. Like everyone else, I need to eat and in this system, that means I need cash, not the promise of a new paradigm in a generation’s time, when I’ll be 90 and having to stack shelves at the supermarket.

I tried setting up a secure area of my site to provide quality content. But I could not guarantee the security of it and I found myself turning into a systems administrator – I shouldn’t have to do that. The business guys will tell me that I should be entrepreneurial and set up my own content delivery business, but then I’d never be creative again – I’d spend all my time employing others to do the creative work, while I did the paperwork and programming. I have a publisher to do that. It’s a weird twisted re-cycling argument that technologists and web business people don’t seem to get.

Since the web began to take hold, my workload has at least doubled. If only my income had done the same. I may have stayed in the same place – I think I’m probably going backwards in real terms.

The internet is turning into a place that is purely commercial, a system for screwing money and free labour out of the plebs, (that’s us) by legal or illegal means. Will we continue to walk blindly down this path, or will we revolt or will the good guys come to our aid and create a future that we might want to be part of?

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, at the moment.

Lanier is one of the original geeky gurus of the net. He’s taking stock and having a think about where we are going in this book, which he calls a manifesto. I haven’t got to the manifesto part yet, but his musings are most thought provoking.

I got in on the net quite early, building my first website in early 1997. Most people thought I was silly, self-indulgent or plain wasting my time. everybody told mw I was crazy when I told them they would all be emailing and video conferencing, shopping and banking online. “You won’t catch me doing that!” they all told me.

They were exciting times. If you weren’t there, you’ll never understand. The net was growing in dog years, the speed of change was incredible, keeping up with it was like being on drugs. Every day was a bright, new dawn as new possibilities opened up. I think my family worried about me for a while! I never did make a million – not many did – but the intellectual pursuit was worth it in itself.

But now it’s been corporatised. Just like the record companies collared the music industry, Facebook, Google et al have collared the net for their own ends. Does it matter? Maybe not now. These are pretty good guys – at the moment. But for how long?

Everyday Google and Facebook colonise our lives, not just affecting our society, they are becoming our society. We think we are the customers of these giant corporations, but we are not. We are the product. The advertisers are the customers! It takes a moment to get your head around that one. We do a deal with Facebook and Google – Give us these amazing tools and we will give you gigabits of high-level information about us and our lives, so that you can sell to us stuff we never knew we needed.

Lanier argues that we are becoming conditioned by the providers. We are being turned into homogenised purchasing units – infinitely targetable by the advertisers. A good number of people now think Facebook is email – that is how they communicate.

Facebook is a boring, corporate, homogenised environment. It always looks the same and you are not in control. Remember last week how your front page changed? Did you have any say in that? Slowly, in tiny baby steps, they are grinding down their users so that they don’t notice innovations anymore and accept things into their lives that, if introduced in on fell swoop, would get them out on the streets protesting.

Facebook is there to make money for itself and for advertisers and for no other reason. The same with Google. They call themselves the good guys, but so did the Nazis. Google, in the hands of a dictator, could be the end of civilisation.

Lanier wants to celebrate humanity, and that is what we do not do in this brave new Web2.0. We homogenise and we anonymise. Yes, you can be who you like on the net, but what does that do to the real you? What does that do to real interaction between human beings. When you make a comment on the net and sign yourself, anonymous12547, what does that say about you? You are worthless and your comment is worthless, it may as well have been posted by a robot making up a stream of words that seem to make sense if read in the right order.

What happened to all those whacky personal websites? They all became corporatised. We are told what a website should look like and so they now all look the same.

I’m with Lanier, let’s bring a bit of humanity back to the web. It is a tool, not our god.

How to draw a Daffodil for St David’s Day

Just in time for St. David’s Day on March 1st, here is a lesson in how to draw a daffodil. St David is the Patron Saint of Wales. For my international readers, England is not the whole Island of Britain. Wales is on the west and Scotland is on the north side of England. Ireland is an island on its own to the west of Britain.

Wales is a country with its own language and culture. The Daffodil is the national flower of Wales.

I am English. I live about six miles from the Welsh border. My children went to school in Wales where they learned a bit of Welsh, my Grandmother was a Welsh speaker and I lived in Welsh-speaking, wild, West Wales for a while, when I was starting out as an illustrator. I learned a tiny little bit of Welsh in all that time. I was sat on my own for most of the time – you need to hear a language all day long to really pick it up.

You can always draw daffodils to celebrate spring or for a Mother’s Day card – which isn’t too far off either.

Speed drawing – just for fun

I know I like to watch the speeded up drawing on YouTube, so I thought I’d put one up there myself. Here you are a a speeded up bulldog drawing for your entertainment and amusement.