Goodbye 2009

OK, well the year is nearly over, and thank you to people for popping in and visiting my blog. I can’t say how much it has been appreciated. I’m going to try and keep it more updated in the coming months, and also try to include more works in progress and sketches. It's been a dramatic and emotional year for me and my partner, so I'm glad to see the back of 2009, but it ended with her being declared clear of cancer of the throat a few days before Christmas after months of chemo and radiotherapy, so I raise a glass tonight to a great Christmas present and to better times ahead.

Anyway... scribbles... This was where my head was at after looking at Kay Nielsen's work and Florence Harrison a lesser known illustrator from the golden age of British illustrators. A bit of an experiment really. I include the sketch as well.

The Steampunk Harem & The Morrigan

A quick update. Two characters of the week from Concept Art.org The first is 'The Steampunk Harem' and the second is 'The Morrigan'. The full version and a crop, which bizarrely I felt looked a bit better flipped... weird... I have a thing for stone circles...

Happy Hallowe'en

A few days early, but a real rush job before other commitments. Vicky the Winter Witch started as a a personification of Winter for a Character of the Week on Concept Art, but I wasn't able to finish her for that. So with a couple more hours she's become a seasonal greeting! I think she must be Trish's sister from last year! Have good one whatever you do to celebrate! :)

Moonlight, you will say...

I was cleaning up a hard-drive and found this, something I started about 4 years ago. I know... another spooky girl in a long black dress! :) I never finished it, but decided to do a bit of noodling on it to make it at least presentable. So here's a suitably haunted image for Hallowe'en, or Samhain.

Alice

Er... Alice. The client said make her clothes shinier so I did...

Ella Hellbound

A couple of ChOWs from Concept Art.org, The Mesmer and Supercute. Ella Hellbound was just a piece for myself, and Mirror Mirror was done for the Chicks vs Guys Thunderdome also on Concept Art. The poem is by my better half, Rosie. It might be a bit difficult to read here...

Thank you again for stopping here! :o)

Various bits of Bumpf

Bit of an update... A finished Character of the Week from ConceptArt.org (Elizabeth Bennet: Pride and Prejudice) and some roughs from various others. Just sketches, but some were never finished. I'd like to work up the Arabian one sometime, Morgiana from The 1001 Arabian Nights.



Lizzie Bennet



Morgiana
Rough for a CGSociety Challenge
Alice and the Cheshire Cat
Prom Queen Killer rough
The Endless: Death, Delirium and Desire
Icarus getting an idea!
Puss in boot...

High School Prom Killer

Another 'Character of the Week' from Concept Art.org. Done between 'real' work things. Tiffany-May White with her sweet smile is the High School Prom Killer. Never happier than when she's stabbing someone! Rather gruesome, I know... but hey ho...

Death

Pop pop... a sketch based on a Character of the Week thing... Thank goodness for texture overlays... or maybe not! Should work it up... bed, tired...

Absinthe and Zombie Killers

I've not updated this blog in ages, so apologies. A job change for me and a serious illness in the family, which has taken over a large part of my life have slowed down my personal work. I've kind of hung around Concept Art, but that's been about it really. Anyway, without further ado, here's a picture of Erica the Zombie Killer (with a nod to Shaun of the Dead!) and the Absinthe Fairy.

Thanks! :)

Silhouette from Watchmen

Well I've not been here for a while. Lots of things going on in my life which are making things very bizarre right now, but I decided to do something just for myself today, so here's a real quickie, Silhouette from WATCHMEN; the recent movie version of Alan Moores brilliant graphic novel. She made a real impression (!) during her brief appearance in the film. I thought I'd do a version of her with a 'nod' to Mr Elvgren.

Thank you to all who've popped in and commented most kindly.


In the movie Silhouette and her lover get a bit of a rough ride to say the least. An interesting perspective on this is here, and in the links within:

BRIGHT LIGHTS AFTER DARK

However she does get the best scene in the opening credits, and perhaps even the movie (gif by Sonnete):

Baba Yaga

Finally got a new laptop after the last one went poo shaped on me, so I have internet at home at last and... I don't know whether it's me or the site but Concept Art is eluding me tonight. I can't seem to get on, so I'll post my Character of the Week here. Baba Yaga. As usual, Photoshop...

Cosgrove Hall

The last few months for me have been a series of endings. Something I am progressively becoming tired of in so many ways, so adding another to the list was something I kind of viewed with trepidation. But last night, in a bitterly cold Manchester I strolled across to Albany Road in Chorlton cum Hardy to witness the end of an era. Cosgrove Hall Films (formerly productions), was closing its doors for the last time. A round robin email to previous employees had circulated and people had decided to gather to say, well... goodbye really. As I wandered into the front car park familiar silhouettes of people I had once worked with came into view, and with whom I had often lost touch as you do; as we all do and regret. Brian Cosgrove stood on the steps in front of the shuttered door where I had first entered in 1986, and said a few emotional words about how it was the people who make a company such as Cosgroves and their talent, now spread out across the world. A sentiment the 'money' people of the world would do well to remember as they turn all magic into corporate product; into washed out generic drivel.

I had started as a 'newcomer to grade inbetweener' animating on The Big Friendly Giant and went on to 'key' on productions like Count Duckula, Avenger Penguins, Victor and Hugo, various pilots and of course the last ever series of Dangermouse. I was made redundant in 1993 when the ITV franchises went up for sale, and Thames TV stopped paying us! But I stayed in the building as a freelancer with a small group of animators and called ourselves Keyteam. This lasted for a further seven years, but in 2000, as 2D animation work grew thinner on the ground, I upped sticks and went to work for a computer games company.

After Brian had said his words on the steps, we all wandered to The Lloyds pub in Chorlton, and what could have been a sad affair was actually rather different. Alcohol has that effect! Catching up with people is never really an ordeal, particularly when they are all so special.

Cosgrove Hall was a massive part of my life, and without them it's safe to say I wouldn't be doing what I do now. Brian Cosgrove, specifically, as he was more concerned with the 2D side of things, gave me my first break in the industry after being introduced to him by another Cossies employee Ben Turner. So to him and Mark Hall, I say thank you, and I hope that somehow Cosgrove Hall can continue, even if it's not in that old converted tea warehouse it was in for over thirty years.

Cosgrove Hall, I raise a glass to you!

Judith and Holofernes

Well, I might as well update... I recently entered the latest CGSociety Challenge, which was 'Steampunk Myths and Legends'. I'm a bit of a Steampunk nut I suppose. Funny really. I was always into historical based Sci-Fi, HGWells, Jules Verne etc, and writers from the Fin de Siecle period. Wilde, MRJames, Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle and many late Victorian and Edwardian authors. Their work has long informed my imagination. And then a few years ago along came Steampunk; a name for things I was kind of into anyway. For the challenge I eventually settled on Judith and Holofernes. A bit Biblical for me, or should I say 'Catholic', but I'd always loved the story as it featured a strong woman with motives other than just 'doing it for the man'! And of course the paintings of Artemesia Gentileschi, Caravaggio and Klimt. Well I never finished the version I set out to, and edited it to get something produced for the end of the challenge. Personal things also edited my time...

Bettie Page

Well, I might as well post some 'art' as well!

A recent Character of the Week on Concept Art was Betty Page after she passed away. This was my entry portraying her as Little Miss Muffet. It looks nothing like her, but was very much a Gil Elvgrenisation of her. Hope it works a bit!

Thank you!

First off, than you so much to all the people who took time to post comments or contact me personally concerning my father. Your kindness was heartfelt and supportive, and much appreciated.

I went to New York City at Christmas with my partner and we stayed at Hotel Chelsea, where my father's mother lived for so long. The building was stunning in a slightly old world way which I hope never changes. The art, atmosphere and the wonderful staff made us most welcome, and I will miss the place.

My partner in NYC. She's got all the ones of me!

Old Pictures

Some more family images to do with my father. I've been discovering so many since he died. I know they won't really interest visitors to this blog, but I hope you get an inkling of a 'life' from them.


This is my grandfather Arthur with my dad about 1940ish. I love this picture because they look so happy together.


Arthur, my grandfather on his wedding day to Florrie about 1932.



My great grandfather on the Trinchera Ranch in Colorado.


Dad, the 'typical American kid' in California 1942.

Dad 1956. He's 22 here, pre-beard and glasses!


Arthur and my step grandmother Barbara, Arthur's second wife in India 1944, both smoking. They all did then! I like this one of Barbara. She looks 'very of the time'.


Dad is the one bottom left with the aviator sunglasses, with a bunch of mates in 1951.


Finally, my great uncle Malcolm Elwin to whom my father was very close, in his study. Malcolm smoked about 500 Capstan Full Strength a week. I distinctly remember the smell of his study: old books, tobacco and the smell of Eve's cooking from the kitchen.

Bryant Turner Fell 1934 - 2008

On Friday, the 7th November 2008, at about 10.30 in the morning my father had a stroke. He was sitting in his armchair in the kitchen with the cat on his lap. My mother came home from shopping in the local village and found him. The first thing she said to him was: “That’s a funny position.”

I like to think that this is where Bryant Turner Fell died; in his armchair with the little cat that wandered in one day and adopted us, sitting purring on his lap. And maybe it is where he died, at least the element that described my father, the part of the brain that gave him character and personality; the part I knew. But to some extent, the truth is he died a lot later, in Bangor Hospital Gwynedd, Wales; Prysor ward, nine days after he was admitted. His body having endured a week of pain and loss of dignity from both the multiple sclerosis that had destroyed his later years, and the agonising twists and contortions that the massive stroke he'd had provided him with.

My parents live in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Anglesey in Wales. When my mother found my father she contacted the local doctor, and because of their isolation he called a helicopter to the farm to take him to Bangor hospital about 25 miles away. He vomited at some point and probably inhaled much of that, which gave him pneumonia.

My father was born in June 1934 in Oxford to a peripatetic American mother and staid upright British father. How the two of them ever got together in the first place is beyond me. The differences were extreme to say the least. But maybe that was the point. I didn’t know my grandfather, Arthur. We met a couple of times, and I found him reserved and very British. He had been a doctor. Florence Hayes Turner, or Florrie, my grandmother was a hippy before there were hippies. She worked as a talent scout for MGM studios; although exactly what she was doing in 1934 I don’t know. I have a great photo’ of her from the twenties sitting in a huge American roadster that I can’t identify. She was the daughter of a Colorado rancher, my great grandfather, and she and her sister Eve had grown up on the Trinchera Ranch, which at one point had covered a huge swathe of Colorado.

My dad moved to the US with his mother and sister Chantek not long after his birth and spent the war years in Colorado, Santa Barbara and San Diego and Malaya. He came back to England in 1946 aged 11, a typical American boy he would say. He arrived in Liverpool, and some waggish Liverpudlian told a naïve American kid to support Derby County football club, and my father was a firm follower of them all his life.

He went to St Edwards School in Oxford. When I say ‘went’, I mean his mother put him there to allow her to travel the world. During his schooldays he would spend holidays staying with his aunt Eve, Florrie’s sister, and her husband, the writer Malcolm Elwin in Devon. Malcolm was friends with Daniel Farson, the great nephew of Bram Stoker, and also the witer of Tarka the Otter Henry Williamson. From these people he learned to love books and reading, and I think some of his happiest times were here in the leafy lanes, and windswept sand dunes of North Devon. Malcolm had also been a friend of the poet Louis Wilkinson who had been in turn a good friend of Aleister Crowley. This had always excited me. More so when I learnt Louis had taught my father to swim.

Florrie was a fascinating woman. A teller of tales and extravagances she could keep you riveted for ages, if you allowed her to. As a child she always used to bring my sister and I presents from America. She lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City as a resident, where she hung around with Warhol and his ilk, until she moved to Edinburgh to be close to my Dad’s half brother by her second marriage; Malcolm LeMaistre. Malcolm had been in a band called the Incredible String Band in the ‘60’s and ‘70s and Florrie had always felt closer to the more rebellious son.

In the 1950’s my father did National Service like everyone else, and became Second Lieutenant B T Fell in the Duke of Wellington’s regiment after being at Sand Hurst, and all his life would look forward to the regiments magazine The Iron Duke dropping through the post box. He loved his military life, and made lifetime friends there, constantly telling us endless stories of what he got up to. He was stationed in Gibraltar, but never saw any ‘action’ despite almost going to Korea. (A broken arm prevented this). As a child I used to find his canvas army sleeping bag and sleep in it every night if I could, as I loved the smell of my father. It was only recently he told me he had never washed it!

It was in the late ‘50’s he got the first signs of the illness that was to destroy his later years when he first went almost blind in his right eye: Multiple Sclerosis. He met my mother in 1961 when she was a nurse working at the BBC, and he was working for Mann’s brewery in London. He had something in his eye, and she removed it. Their first date was to a cricket match! He was ever the romantic! Mum say’s she knew she was going to marry him almost from the first time they met. They did, six weeks later, and lived in a small flat in Barnes.

My dad became a teacher in the ‘60’s, and taught at Millfield Public School in Somerset where he became a housemaster. He lectured in all sorts of things, but sport was his obsession, and he ended up helping to pick the Olympic Pentathlon teams when he became secretary of the Modern Pentathlon Association. At weekends he would play rugby. My sister and I came along in the mid sixties. The house dad was in charge of was called Holmcroft, and it would alternate between girls and boys each year. My favourite years were the ones with girls. A little boy gets lots of attention from teenage girls, and I loved it! Debbie, my sister, of course preferred the years with boys! I remember one year, my sister and I standing in the street in our dressing gowns with severe mumps, waiting for the Queen to go past.

In 1974 we left Somerset and moved to Cheshire. My father had got a job teaching remedial studies at Tarporley and would run Summer Schools for children with dyslexia. Mother returned to her first career of nursing at Chester. We lived down a small country lane near a large mansion called Bulkeley Hall and enjoyed a rural life with the nearest and only shop over five miles away. I remember my sister and I squirting the foxhunters with water pistols from our bedroom windows as they passed down the lane. Dad tried to save money on petrol during the fuel crises of the 1970’s by buying a moped and travelling the 10 miles to work on its wobbly wheels. He came off it a number of times! Mum hated it.

Another move took our family to Kettering in Northamptonshire, a move my father later regretted, and it was here my mother’s kidney disease, which had killed her mother and one of her sisters, developed further and she had a kidney transplant. Here also, the multiple sclerosis of my fathers started to make its presence felt. After a second move across Kettering, my father took early retirement in 1985 and he and my mother moved to North Wales where they would stay. There was some disagreement as to the location from my sister and myself. With mum’s kidney problems and my father’s M.S., the last place they should have chosen to live was an old farmhouse in the middle of no-where in an unfamiliar place, thirty miles from a hospital. But they wanted it, or at least my father did. He had some romantic notion about it being a retreat; a place to escape the world, as his aunt Eve and uncle Malcolm had done years before. My sister and I had long since moved away, and had started our own lives in other places, so we couldn’t be there all the time. Ultimately, as my father started to deteriorate, my mother became his full time carer, and despite her own illnesses, which were many, she stayed his constant companion and love until Friday, the 7th November 2008.

This is his history, however paraphrased. But the man was much more. As a younger man he had been energetic and sporty. He loved cricket and rugby, and developed a deep affection for American sports such as Football and baseball. His team were the Green Bay Packers, and that is as far as my knowledge of this game goes. Humanised chess he would call it. The multiple sclerosis put the lid on any kind of taking part in such things, pretty much after the mid eighties. He became a dedicated armchair sportsman, and enjoyed the massive tv screen in his last months a good friend gave him.

Dad was a thinker, a reader and a deep sentimentalist. He would deny the latter, but you had only to look at his record collection to see how true this was. When he discovered CD’s he started collecting all his favourite music all over again, and I would wince as his old 78’s were confined to history. The music was important to him, not how he heard it, and CD’s sounded so much better than scratchy old shellac. Jazz was his love, particularly artists like Mugsy Spanier, and old traditional jazz. He also enjoyed sixties music, and movie soundtracks. How I will ever listen to the Gettysburg theme, or Morningtown Ride by The Seekers again is a sentimental bridge I will struggle to cross.

He had thousands of books. Literally thousands. I grew up with their familiar spines and book jackets painting the walls of my youth. Many American authors like Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis. But also books of poetry, and biographies, particularly of other writers. Malcolm Elwin’s biographies of Byron spring to mind. He loved G A Henty, Rider Haggard, H G Wells, Somerset Maugham and Walter Scott. He loved the history of the American Civil War because an ancestor who also bore the unusual name Bryant had lost an arm at Gettysburg. In fact it seems Bryant was a name that occurred frequently in his family. One of his favourite movies was Gettysburg.

According to my mother, many of his happiest times were spent in the armchair permanently rooted in the corner of the big kitchen in the house in Anglesey. Next to the chair was his zimmer and the telephone for any emergency. But to me, every time I would come home, the chair represented a prison. A ball and chain my father could never get away from, and was permanently tied to. Coincidence plays stupid games with you when emotional trauma finds you in life. But next to dad’s chair, top of the little pile of books from the library he would work his way through in the following week, was a novel called ‘The Empty Chair’. God may not play dice, but I really believe he works as a comedian in his spare time. The thing is, I don’t find him very funny.

Characters...

Seeing as I'm at home today with a dodgy boiler, brrrr... Some Characters of the Week.

First an intergalactic smuggler that was a bit Tank Girl inspired. Secondly an unfinished illustration of Dr Watson and Holmes on Dartmoor. Thirdly a very bizarre ChOW, which was an Aztec child sacrifice. Sometimes the Character's of the Week can be quite, er... challenging!