Finished orc painting: 'Almost Out'

Here, at last, I am pleased to present to you the finished orc painting, which I have decided to call 'Almost Out'. My Lovely Fiancée™ suggested 'Orc-ward', which did make me laugh, but I decided to go for 'Almost Out' anyway, as it's thematic (if less funny). It was painted in acrylics on a 40x30 inch canvas. This will be my last post for 2009, so I'd just like to take a moment to wish you all a very happy new year. I hope 2010 brings you everything you hope it will. As for http://www.pauldselman.com/, I have two top secret projects that will be seeing the light in 2010, both of which are going to cause big changes for the site (very much for the better, in my opinion, and I hope you'll agree). I'm very excited about these projects and I hope I've sown a couple of seeds of anticipation for you folks, too. In the meantime, I'm off to my cousin's New Year's Eve party, so I'll catch you all tomorrow! Bottom's up!

The last review of 2009: 'Gerald's Game'

Much as Alan Hollinghurst did in 'The Spell' (reviewed earlier this week; scroll down to find it), in 'Gerald's Game', Stephen King largely foregoes plot in favour of character and it works extremely well. Warning: the rest of this review contains spoilers, so read no further if you're worried about that sort of thing. What King gives us in place of plot is a single scenario but it's a truly horrific one. Jessie's husband, the eponymous Gerald, is into sexual domination and can only get it up when Jessie is tied up. Jessie, while not as into it as her husband, has been a reluctant but willing partner in these bondage games for some time now. Unfortunately for her (and him) when they go for a short break to their summer house by a lake, miles from civilisation, they only get as far as handcuffing Jessie to the bed before Gerald has a massive coronary and shuffles off this mortal coil. With the keys out of reach and no hope of rescue, Jessie's battle with her inevitable death turns into a war with madness brought on by her own inner demons. Things get worse when a stray dog turns up and decides to use Gerald's corpse as its own personal larder. Then things really descend into Hell when the captive Jessie is visited by a terrifying nightmare creature that she suspects is the anthropomorphic form of Death itself. I have to say that this is one of King's most genuinely frightening novels; my heart was racing like a freight train in places as the story worked its hooks into me. At least fifty per cent of this book is told in dreams and flashbacks, but this only serves to increase the sense of claustrophobia and impending doom. My only minor complaint is that the eventual revelation about the true nature of the horrific creature that visits Jessie while she is trapped is slightly anti-climatic. There are also a couple of unexplained references to King's other novels in this story, which could leave a reader unfamiliar with the books he's referencing scratching their head in confusion. Personally, I don't consider this a point against the book, however, as I actually find the interconnectivity of King's body of work one of its strongest appeals. My one small grumble aside, 'Gerald's Game' is one of King's better novels, for my money, and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes a good scare.

Orc painting stage 5

I didn't quite manage to finish the orc painting today, as I'd hoped, but I did get quite a bit of it done, all the same. I mainly worked on the head of the orc himself today, so I thought I'd just photograph that area, rather than show you another full shot of the painting. (Apologies for the poor quality of the photograph... I'd blame my tools but, truth be known, this is why I'm a painter!) I'm really hoping I get time to finish this piece tomorrow, but for now I must away and be sociable! Adios!

Orc painting: stage 4

My Lovely Fiancée™ has returned home with the camera (actually, to be fair, she got home ages ago but I was out at band practice) so I've been able to take a photograph of the next stage in the orc painting. For the first three stages, click on the following links:

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

As I hope you can see, I'm using an almost sculptorly approach on this painting and I've now started refining the image to include more detail. I'm hoping to be able to finish this painting tomorrow, so I can move on to other projects (not that I'm not enjoying this one, of course). I can't quite believe I started this piece way back on 25th October, but that's what happens when commissions arrive and you have to put your own projects on the back burner.

The rest of the Christmas albums reviewed: 'Landing On Water', 'Classics Live!' and 'Hotter Than July'

I've actually managed to do a couple of hour's painting today, miracle of miracles, so you can imagine how frustrated I am that My Lovely Fiancée™ has gone out and taken the camera with her, so I can't photograph what I've done and share it with you wonderful people. While I wait for her to get home, I thought I'd review the other three CDs M.L.F.™ got me for Christmas (you can find the reviews of the first two if you scroll down a couple of entries).

I was over the moon to receive a copy of a Neil Young CD I don't own, 'Landing On Water'. There's a very angry Neil on display on this album; all but one of the tracks included are very negative lyrically and the last track, 'Drifter', is a thinly-veiled attack on his record label, so I don't think Mr. Young was a happy bunny creatively when he made this album. Most of the songs are mourning the loss of the hippie movement from the '60s and '70s to the aggressive corporate 'me generation' philosophy of the '80s. The one track that actually possesses a positive lyrical slant is the opening number, 'Weight Of The World'. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was as gloomy as the rest of the tracks, considering the title, but it's actually a song about not having the weight of the world on one's shoulders anymore and, as much as it's a great song, lyrically it feels a little out of place here, amidst all the doom and gloom. The music on this album is great, though, and as experimental-without-losing-sight-of-what-he's-good-at as you'd expect from Neil Young.

I also received the fantastic 'Classics Live! Complete' album, which was originally released as two separate albums; 'Classics Live!' and 'Classics Live! II'. I'm a huge Aerosmith fan, so I obviously had the original studio versions of all the songs contained on this cracking double live album, but there really are some amazing live renditions of some truly classic Aerosmith tracks to be had here! There are also a couple of their less well-known tracks on this CD, which is great for a hardcore fan like myself who sometimes gets tired of hearing the same hit singles over and over again. To be honest, in my opinion, some of Aerosmith's better songs are the less commonly heard album tracks; I think a lot of people get the wrong idea about Aerosmith from only ever hearing the singles. I can only hear 'I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing' so many times before wanting to punch somebody in the face, after all... (It's not on this album, though, so we're all good.)

Last, but certainly not least, of the CDs I got for Christmas is Stevie Wonder's seminal album 'Hotter Than July'. I had to chuckle at getting an album with this Summery title in the middle of winter, as well as getting an album with a song called 'Happy Birthday' on it as a Christmas present: never let it be said that My Lovely Fiancée™ doesn't have a very well developed sense of irony. This album not only contains the aforementioned tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. but it also holds my very favourite Steve Wonder song; the stunningly beautiful 'Lately'. I did have these two songs already, on a Stevie Wonder greatest hits album, but it's great to have the original album that they're taken from in my collection as well. Especially as the album also contains the brilliant 'I Ain't Gonna Stand For It' and the reggae-licious (you heard me) 'Master Blaster (Jammin')'. To be honest, there isn't a dud track on this album and I'm sure it will be in heavy rotation throughout January, if not longer.

From the vault: People like flowers, right?

I will find time to paint tomorrow, if it kills me. In the meantime, here are some flowers from the vault. People like it when you give them flowers, right? First two: oil pastels. Third one: ink. Me: Far busier than I have any right to be.

From the vault: Back to basics

I have to go to a wedding today, folks, which means that we're going to have to take another trip through the vault on the website today. What follows are four sketches of the kind I produce in idle moments when I've got five or ten minutes spare while I'm waiting for a telephone call or for the kettle to boil. These kind of moments are ideal for dashing off a quick still life and it saves the time from being entirely wasted.

This first drawing is a pencil sketch of an ornament that I've always assumed is of a deformed cat. I hope the deformities are the scultor's doing and that there isn't an actual cat walking around somewhere that actually looks like this: Here is a charcoal sketch of the bane of my life; the blasted sunglasses I have to wear whenever I leave the house during the daylight hours, thanks to my deteriorating eyesight:

Another charcoal sketch, this time of a metal kettle (actually, it's a teapot, but 'metal kettle' appeals to me so I won't let accuracy of terminology stand in my way):

This is a slightly different sketch, in that I've taken this one step further towards abstraction, probably with taking it another step closer in a painting, at some point, in mind. It's done in oil pastels:

Anyway, that's all for today (apart from the Christmas album review I posted earlier, of course; scroll down if you haven't read it yet). Wish me luck with the wedding! If my wedding suit still fits me after the amount I've eaten over Christmas it will be the only genuine Christmas miracle I've ever experienced...

A couple of Christmas albums: 'When My Heart Finds Christmas' and 'Christmas Through Your Eyes'

We had an amusing moment in our house on Christmas Eve. I was attempting to create a Christmas playlist and was moaning loudly that I hardly had any Christmas music on my iTunes, when My Lovely Fiancée™ handed me an early Christmas present and insisted it be opened. It turns out she'd bought me Harry Connick, Jr.'s Christmas album, 'When My Heart Finds Christmas'! I guess she knows me pretty well! The CD quickly went on and I have to say, checking any musical credibility I may previously have had at the door, that I loved every minute of it. I'm a big fan of Connick's anyway, owning several of his albums, and I'm happy to add this one to the collection. He just has that perfect crooner's voice that really brings Christmassy songs to life and gets you in that festive mood. This is a good thing for me, as I'm normally a bit of a Scrooge. There's a great collection of songs on here; half of them are new compositions and half of them are real Christmas classics. I have to say that his version of 'Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!' is the highlight of the disk, in my opinion, but the whole package is great and, if you're looking for a heartwarming and festive, yet undeniably cheesy, Christmas album, you really need look no further!

You know what I said about checking my musical credibility at the door? Well, not only can I check it at the door but I may as well take it outside and shoot it with this next album! On Christmas morning, Wendy presented me with a second CD-shaped present. I had to laugh when I opened it to discover another Christmas album, this time by Gloria Estefan! I have to say, though (and don't worry; My Lovely Fiancée™ agrees with me on this point so I don't need to worry about offending her), Mrs. Estefan's 'Christmas Through Your Eyes' is nowhere near the classic that Mr. Connick's offering was. Unlike Harry, whose voice suits Christmas standards perfectly, 'Christmas Through Your Eyes' sounds like a band playing about as far from their strengths as they could possibly get (apologies to Gloria for talking in band terms for one of her 'solo' albums, but I think we all know it's just Miami Sound Machine by any other name). Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of Gloria Estefan and own a few of her other albums... but this one just doesn't do it for me, I'm afraid. The thing is, while each track taken individually is absolutely fine (and there really are some great tracks on here, particularly the title track... which is also the only song on the album that isn't a cover of a Christmas classic), it simply doesn't hang together as a cohesive whole. I'm sure I'll be happy to listen to any of the songs on this album when they pop up on my iPod (I tend to listen to it on 'shuffle all' mode) and they'll all grace my future Christmas playlists, but I very much doubt I'll ever listen to this album all the way through again.

A few reviews: 'The Spell', 'The Village' and 'Jam & Jerusalem: Series 2'

My Lovely Fiancée™ bought me Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line Of Beauty' last year and I absolutely loved it, so I thought I'd try one of Hollinghurst's other novels, 'The Spell'. This is a reasonably short novel about sex, drugs and music. I can't quite say it's about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, as the music in question is more along the lines of house, techno and drum and bass on one hand and classical and choral on the other, depending on the character in question. Either way, this is a tale with a close eye on a determinedly hedonistic kind of mid-1990s decadence. You could possibly call it a love story, but to do so would be stretching the term almost to breaking point; a lust story would be far closer to the mark. There is remarkably little in the way of narrative drive in this tale and there's not a great deal of actual plot, but to insist on these things would rather be to miss the point of the novel. 'The Spell' is a wonderfully written character study. It takes a group of men and examines them and their complex relationships, both with each other and the rest of the world they live in, with a wry eye. The characters are intriguing rather than likable and while there was aspects of each of them that I could relate to, there wasn't really any one character that I felt I could actually root for. The writing is beautiful, however, and contains a liberal sprinkling of Hollinghurst's pun-loving, bone-dry sense of humour. This is an author who is clearly in love with language and that makes his work well worth reading, even when he's telling a 'non-story' like this one. 'The Spell' isn't up to the standard of 'The Line Of Beauty', and if you haven't read Hollinghurst before I'd definitely suggest you read the latter first, but it certainly hasn't made me change my mind about seeking out more of Hollinghurst's work.

Some friends of mine bought me M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Village' on DVD for Christmas and I was eager to give it a second viewing as I haven't seen it since I first watched it at the cinema a few years back. I recall that, at the time, I came away pleased that it was better than the slightly disappointing 'Signs' but still nowhere near as good as either the wonderfully creepy 'The Sixth Sense' or possibly-the-best-superhero-movie-ever-made 'Unbreakable'. Watching 'The Village' for the second time today, I tried to forget the rest of Shyamalan's work and just watch it as a stand-alone movie in its own right. I found that I enjoyed it much more this way. Instead of trying to fit it into some kind of 'Shyamalan mould' I found myself enjoying a tense piece about the dangers of creating your own reality. Shyamalan's secluded village is a nice metaphor for the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive and, if we're completely honest with ourselves, who doesn't have to focus on their own small part of reality in order to prevent themselves from being completely overwhelmed or driven insane by the larger world around us? This movie has a wonderful cast (even if some of them are criminally under-used) and it is beautifully shot. All in all, this is far from Shyamalan's best movie, but it's one that I'm happy to add to my collection and one that I'm sure I'll enjoy re-watching again in a couple of years.

The second part of my Boxing Day DVD viewing was series two of 'Jam & Jerusalem'. (It occurs to me that my Stateside readers won't know what I'm talking about: this is the series that was re-titled 'Clatterford' in the U.S.) The show is based around the lives of the members of the Women's Institution in a small country village, focusing mainly on the recently widowed Sal Vine (superbly played by Sue Johnston). The first series of this Jennifer Saunders-scripted show was a wonderful semi-dramatic comedy that contained just as many genuinely deeply moving moments as laughs. I'm happy to report that the second series actually manages to be even funnier than the first (I found myself laughing aloud a lot more often) thanks to a incredibly well-written script. Don't fret, though; the poignant moments haven't been jettisoned. There are still just as many of the touching, sentimental moments that give this show it's charm. I'm actually slightly in awe of Saunders and her writing partner Abigail Wilson for being able to strike this delicate balance so skillfully. My only slight grumble is that Joanna Lumley's character is written out early on in episode one, but they must have had their reasons and at least they did it in a genuinely funny manner (and I've heard that she returns in series three, so that news softened the blow a little). Also, there are no extras whatsoever on the DVD (apart from subtitles), which is a little disappointing, but the show's the thing, really.

Santa Claus 40K

Just in case you thought that all I had for you for Christmas was one measly book review, here's a cartoon I've just scribbled for the geeks in the house: 'Santa Claus 40K'. If you don't get it, you need to... get less of a life, I suppose! Happy Christmas, one and all, from the website that doesn't even take a day off for Christmas! Have a good one, people...

Christmas Day book review: The Wishing Wand and Other Stories

I'd just like to take a moment to wish all my loyal followers (and anybody else who happens to drop by) a very Happy Christmas! It seems somehow appropriate to be reviewing an Enid Blyton book today...

'The Wishing Wand and Other Stories' is another great collection of Enid Blyton's short stories for younger readers, that is sure to delight the little ones in your life just as much as it has mine. While this is not the sort of thing I'd sit down to read to myself, I have to admit that I get a huge kick out of reading these stories aloud to an appreciative audience. The tales are simple yet educational and always have a strong moral which is a good lesson for a youngster. What I like the most about these stories is that they seem to be designed to elicit questions from the enquiring young minds they are aimed at. It's not all 'nicey-nicey', however; one of the stories in this book, called 'I Dare You to!', is about a young boy who takes horrifying risks in traffic on his bicycle and the consequences are dire indeed. While this is a very good lesson for slightly older children, the teeniest tots might find this particular tale excessively disturbing. My only complaint about this collection is that the illustrations are some of the worst I've ever seen in a children's book; unimaginative and very poorly executed.

Christmas Eve portraiture...

Finished the portrait I was working on yesterday. It was quite a challenge actually, due to the fact that I'm working in coloured ink washes and if you leave an ink wash piece half-finished and come back to it, all the layers of ink wash you've previously put down are now bone dry and copious amounts of water are required to 'reactivate' them (and sometimes you just can't reactivate them at all). After much banging my head against the table and swearing never to leave an ink wash piece half finished again (as well as just swearing in general), I'm actually pretty pleased with the end result. Here's hoping the client is too...

Putting the ink on

I've just been informed that I have to start getting ready to go out this evening, so the portrait has come to a screeching halt! Rather than leave you good people hanging, I thought I'd show you how far I'd got with putting the coloured inks on before I had to stop. The poor chap on the left will have to put up with being nothing more than a pale yellow-ish shadow until tomorrow morning, I'm afraid! (The lady on the right isn't quite finished, either, but she has less to grumble out, I feel...) Work shall recommence tomorrow, which is Christmas Eve, so we should all be getting a bit festive, I suppose! See you then...

Portrait prep sketch

Getting all incremental again, this here is a prep sketch, done in a 2B pencil on some really nice, thick paper, for a portrait commission I'm currently engaged in. Just thought I'd share it with you folks before I started working over the top of it in ink. If all goes well, I'll share the next stage with you later today.

Blues

I've been struggling with that old demon, Artist's Block, for the last day or so. I finally seem to have broken it down, though. I decided to stop smacking my head against a brick wall with my current commissions and just do something else. I also decided to bung on some Joe Satriani at ear-bleeding volume, which must have helped. The result it this colour study. With any luck, the pipe that supplies me with my artistic juices is now unblocked and I can get on with some actual paid work. That'd be nice.

Book review: Firestarter

I read Stephen King's 'Firestarter' when I was a kid and I remember thinking that, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't one of his best. What the Hell did I know? I hadn't even reached double-figures! Re-reading it now, as an adult, I have enjoyed it significantly more. Perhaps this is because, this time around, I didn't miss the fact that this isn't just an exciting romp of an adventure story (although it certainly works very well on that level too), but a cautionary tale aimed squarely at the world's governments and those who would place too much faith in them. In an America still reeling from Viet Nam and Watergate (this novel was written in the late 1970s, don't forget), King is clearly expressing his belief that if the government could become involved in some of the atrocities that had come to light in recent years they must also have their hands in other sordid dealings that hadn't yet come to light. His warning is that, if the government agencies involved in these things weren't careful, sooner or later they would stumble upon something that could destroy them... and possibly the rest of the world along with them. The Lot Six drug trials and their ultimate result, Charlie McGee (the eponymous 'Firestarter'), is King's chosen metaphor for just such potentially catastrophic shady dealings. It works very well, as the wonderful father-daughter relationship revolving around the McGees is so involving it prevents you feeling like you're being hit over the head with the metaphorical aspects. I've heard people express the belief that 'Firestarter' isn't a very good horror novel. I'd argue that King didn't intend this to be a horror novel at all; 'Firestarter' is a great piece of science fiction (and I'm talking speculative fiction, here, not space opera) in the same vein as the sort of thing Shirley Jackson used to do so well. Funnily enough, King dedicates this novel to Jackson. Perhaps that's a clue to the author's intentions with this novel that most people have missed... including my own pre-teen self.

From the vault: Animals in oil pastels

I've spent most of today recording a demo CD with my band and I have to spend this evening cutting cardboard picture mounts to size for my current commission, which means we're taking another trip through the vault on the website today (the only other option was to post photographs of me cutting out the picture mounts... and, really, nobody wants that).

I have here a series of animal sketches I did in oil pastels. The last of them is just for (how does it go?) 'shits and giggles'. Enjoy!

Moody

Sometimes, when I draw, it's more about trying to create a particular mood than anything else and such is the case with this sketch I've drawn this evening. Done with a brush and a pot of dark blue ink (which often comes out looking black on the computer, no matter how much I fiddle about with the colour balance on Photoshop after I've scanned the drawing in), I'm just going to call this sketch 'Moody' and let each of you put your own interpretation on exactly what mood that might be.

Snowcat!

I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know that My Broken Fiancée™ is now feeling a great deal better (although we still don't know what the problem is... investigations continue). As we had a snow day today, we thought we'd celebrate by making a snowman... er... snowCAT. In the spirit of sharing our pumpkin carvings with you on Hallowe'en, I thought we'd share our attempts at snow sculpture with you, too. In case you were wondering, the whiskers are sticks and the eyes are sprouts. We're nothing if not creative in this house, I tell you... oh, and mental. Yes, that's right... we're mental, too...

From the vault: purdy pitchers

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the sketchbook pages from the vault on the other side.

This is a quick sketch of some flowers from My Lovely Fiancée™'s parent's garden, in watercolours: This is a landscape in charcoal. For the life of me, I can't remember where I drew it... The Lake District, possibly? I should keep notes...

And we'll finish off today with a study of my own hand, done in pencil:

Coming soon: 'http://www.pauldselman.com/ III: The Search For New Material'...

A great read: 'Until It's Over'

I picked up this Nicci French novel as I'd really enjoyed the movie version another of her novels, 'Killing Me Softly' (and because it was dirt cheap). I say 'her' novels, but 'Nicci French' is actually the pen name for the husband and wife writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who both write novels on their own as well, under their own names. 'Until It's Over' revolves around a series of murders that seem to be inexplicably linked to a bicycle courier called Astrid Bell, who shares a house with six other people. The novel is fast-paced and the characters and their interactions with each other are all interesting. What makes this book so great, however, (and it really is great) is the way it's structured. The first half of the novel is the story of the murders as seen through the eyes of Astrid. Halfway through the novel, however, we are catapulted back to the beginning of the story and the same events are retold from the point of view of the killer. This ingenius device turns what could have been just another crime novel into an incredibly enjoyable read that I would recommend to anybody who is a fan of the genre. Nicci French has gone from my 'mildly interested in' list to my 'must read' list; I'll definitely be reading more of French's work in the future.

From the vault: Sketchbook pages

Continuing our trip through the vaults, here are some more sketchbook pages for you. This first one was a partial portrait of a co-worker done in oil pastels: This is a charcoal sketch of my cat, sleeping as usual:

And here we have a sofa-sketch in charcoal of the starchild from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. No prizes for guessing what I was watching when I drew it:

From the vault: Auntie & Niece

My Lovely Fiancée™ is still broken, so I thought I'd share a pencil sketch of her holding her niece that I did a couple of years ago when said niece was new to this here planet:

While I was looking for this sketch, I stumbled across some prep sketches for a couple of paintings I've already posted on this website. I've added them to the appropriate posts and you can see them by clicking on the following links:

Beautiful Bureaucracy prep sketch

and

Muscle Beach prep sketch

I'm back off the the hospital now, so I'll catch you all tomorrow. Be well!

From the vault: Aardvark To Zygote

My Broken Fiancée™ is back in the hospital again today, so we'll have to take another trip through the vault, afraid. Please be patient: once she's better, I will be creating new artwork to post here once again, I promise! I'm just glad I have a bunch of old stuff in the vault to post for you on days when I don't have anything new for you!

What I have for your viewing pleasure today, good people, is a trip back to 2005, to my abortive attempt at doing a webcomic. It was called 'Aardvark To Zygote' and the premise was this: we had four friends, Clee (ostensibly short for 'Cleo', but... well, you'll see), Shay (ostensibly short for 'Shayne' but, when you put it together with 'Clee' you get a terrible pun on the word 'cliche'... which actually makes me wonder if I subconsciously knew this project was doomed to fail from the very start), Hal (named after the computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey' for reasons I no longer recall) and Jez (short for 'Jezebel'... the reason for her name has also been lost in the mists of my abysmal memory). These four friends owned and ran a magical shop that, literally, sold everything... from aardvarks to zygotes (one has to wonder what the packaging was like for the zygotes). They also lived in the flat above the magical shop, entirely platonically. Shay had a massive crush on Clee, but I don't think I ever had any intention on getting the two of them together, it was just supposed to be a source of gags.

Artistically speaking, I would roughly sketch the strips in pencil, then scan them into Photoshop and increase the contrast to magically 'ink' the pencils (a few comicbook artists were using this process at the time to eliminate the need for an inker and I figured it'd be a good time-saving device). I then coloured them in Photoshop and added the word balloons.

I seem to recall that the reason I stopped doing it at the time was that I wasn't happy with my ability to write consistently funny scripts and I had a horrible feeling I was subconsciously swiping from Jeph Jacques' superb webcomic 'Questionable Content' (I've asked people about this, to get an independent opinion; some people have said 'Oh, God, yes! It's just like QC!' and others have said 'What are you talking about, you buffoon? It's NOTHING like QC!' The jury is still out on that one, then, and as I'm not continuing with this strip, it's rather a moot point now anyway). Looking back at them now, I can't believe I was happy with the illustrations. I hate the un-inked pencils, the Photoshop colouring is rather poor, and the word balloons make my eyes want to explode. I unashamedly swiped the idea of having different coloured word-balloons for each character from David Morgan-Mar's brilliant 'Irregular Webcomic!'. If there's anything about them I do still like, it's probably the colobus monkeys in strips six and seven... and I still think strip eight is quite touching, in its way.

I love webcomics (and print-based comics, too, of course) and I wouldn't be surprised if I had another stab at one in the future, but it certainly won't look anything like 'Aardvark To Zygote'. Regardless, I hope you get a kick out of the following nine strips.