A couple of recent things, revisited.  Roger as a square and a rescheduled, re-coloured event poster.

A little piece of green abstraction.

Happy New Year!  I hope a fine time was had over Christmas and that the year's got off to a fine start for you.  Time to look back at what I enjoyed in 2015 - always great fun - and tell you my favourites, just in case you're interested.  What a year it was, for music especially!  So much great stuff being put out; people who moan that they don't make 'em like they used to are clearly not paying enough attention!

Great to see Paradise Lost, Koxbox and Kangaroo Moon return with stunning new albums (after years of nonsense/absense), and Vibronics and Sam Lee delivered the goods in their own unique style.  However I was most impressed by the offerings from the Outsiders, Plasmotek, Dirty Saffi (great times for trance!), and the ferocious Cattle Decapitation.  Cripes!

Two longhaul flights were the usual great excuse to catch up on recent films; Inherent Vice seemed really good but I couldn't hear it so gave up (shame), but I especially enjoyed Slow West (a real breath of fresh air with a pleasingly crooked yet humourous tone) and also Mad Max and Inside Out.  I think all were just about pipped in the closing days of the year by Star Wars, though.

I didn't see enough exhibitions last year but my favourite was definitely the EH Shepard one at Illustration House (it's on till the 24th of January so I urge you to visit if you've not been) - not big but one of those ones where you want to look closely at every last little bit and read all of every caption - great stuff.

As far as books go, looking back over the new ones I enjoyed last year, it seems I'm a year behind and they all came out in 2014.  Still, it was a good crop so I may as well duly enthuse and recommend - balls to time!  Fiction-wise I enjoyed We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler but I was blown away by Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North - an absolutely outstanding book that was great in just about every way a novel can be.  A very deserving winner of the Booker and well worth the hype.  Very much looking forward to getting stuck in to this year's winner, A Brief Hitory of Seven Killings, which I got for Christmas.  I'd also recommend Show Your Work by Austin Kleon if you're anything like me, likewise Drawing Type by Alex Fowkes - best example of this kind of book that I've seen, whilst I'm still enjoying slowly making my way through The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being by Alice Roberts and The Ecologist Guide to Food for a good dose of knowledge!

2015 was also, sadly, the year that my favourite singer, for my favourite band, died.  It was out of the blue, after a show, and left me and thousands of others very shocked and upset.  Always quite hard to deal with when someone who you don't know but has given so much and enriched your life in a massive way for many years suddenly ceases to be around any more!  David Masondo, you will be seriously missed!  Maximum respect for all the great works.  Here's the man in action (he's the lead singer on the left).

Posted above are a few sketchbook pages from our recent trip to Thailand.

Been a little quiet on here of late, as I've just returned from a lovely month away in sunny Thailand.  Here are a few snaps.  For those interested, we stayed in Chiang Mai, Pai and Koh Chang, with not nearly enough time in Bangkok (flew in, flew out).  Although we did go to a fine photography gallery there, which had this exhibition by Welsh photographer Andrew McNeil.  Powerful stuff.  And the definite highlight of the trip was a day spent riding the mountain bike trails of the Doi Suthep National Park - absolutely superb.  Will be returning to Thailand at the earliest opportunity - what a fantastic country.

My lovely Novation Nova - my favourite synthesizer.  Thought it could do with being drawn, seeing as it's great n all.  And it was a blustery autumnal sick day.  Next up: my mountain bike!  Maybe.

Made a little spot illo of some turtles, which I quite like.  I'm going to make a rubber stamp out of this at some point...

A couple of recent event posters.

Thought I'd have a go at something for Illustration Friday for a change - my first time!  The topic this week is 'ink'.

 

Well, my last post seems to have had the desired effect - been enjoying a lovely spell of dream jobs and fantastic clients of late, hurrah!  I might start posting commissioned work on this blog too (check www.edtucker.biz for recent updates - plenty more to go up in the coming days and weeks too), but for now here's some personal work that I've been producing in amongst my recent jobs: tennis, typography, a nice house and some sharks, jolly good.

Had one or two of these in recent times so I decided to have a little fun and make myself feel better about it... it's amazing how cathartic it felt to make this!  Was fun trying out some different Photoshop blending modes n' all.  So, only fantastic clients and dream jobs from now on!  Yes!

 

My new range of limited edition prints is now available, and I'm selling the initial copies to raise funds for my friends' son's medical treatment - all the details are on my Facebook page, and the Treatment For Ted page is here.  Hope you fancy brightening up both your walls and a young boy's future at the same time!