Peter Smith - Blogging The ImPossiMaL

Tiny Small Minute Wee

2012-01-27T11:33:00.002Z

On one of my latest pieces I have included a lot of detail, some of it is absolutely minute like this little glass ball that I painted. It was only 9mm across so required a very, very small brush but I thought you would like to see the stages involved. First I use a compass to roughly pencil it out, you can tell how small it is with the size of the pencil marks. Once done I added in a rough sky, curving the sides to emulate the sphere and a shadow.

Next add the ground colour in, again roughly but leaving a gap between sky and ground.

Then very quickly do a quick sketch using the colours in the rest of the painting of what's around the sphere. You don't have to go overboard just an little hint of everything is enough.

Once done use a very soft brush to blend everything together taking care not to lose much detail. This was very tricky as using a soft brush on a 9mm painted ball tended to try and push the sphere out of shape.

As a final flourish add the light onto the sphere making sure it comes out the other side and softens the shadow. to give more depth a fine brush loaded with titanium white is used to lay a raised lip around the top left and a few blobs bottom right, this gives a true intensity to the light.

To put all this in context the little glass ball is in here somewhere, can you spot it?

A Light Read

2012-01-26T09:51:00.000Z

I was in Waterstones (other bookshops are available) a few days ago and I came across a book titled Natural Bust Enlargement Using Mind Power. I almost purchased it on the spot, not that I need any moob enlargements I just imagined it would be a cracking read. Use 90% of your brain power to pump them up it claimed, obviously you will need the other 10% to maintain your balance as they swell to the size of basketballs. SO I thought I would dig out a few more inappropriate books to guffaw over and look what I found...

It's not the title that's wrong, it's difficult to describe it any other way, it's the footnote 'A Schiffer Book for Woodworkers Who Want to be Buried in Their Work'. Nice. It could be worse though according to this book...

You would have to evict somebody so you could fit in your handiwork. Apparently it's a popular British attitude. News to me.

I like how the emphasis is to keep your tractors happy before your family but look at this sex pot draping himself over a Kronkite 2657 twin cam shaft Plough-Master, how could you or any young filly resist? Makes you want to rip his dungarees off and dig up his King Edwards. King Edwards? Looks more like King Kong's. Oh Matron...

In a time when gay was a happy word I can only imagine the confusion this book would cause today, especially as they seem to be shielding the children from a waterbased frolic. Judging by the background the gay dolphin has found a way to walk and wrecked the house in frustration. No ones safe, what eve next?

Oh, this. Let's not mince our words eh?. I can only assume the 'First Shocking Printing' was also it's last.So lets saddle up and soldier on...

Not quite sure apart from telling you there is more than one brown colour. Even more amazingly is that it contains illustrations. The mind boggles, surely they didn't need an illustrator to essentially draw a cigar shape? Although I suppose you need to be a bit more artistic if you depicted the full spectrum of exhibits.

Finally a book that tells it like it is, a healthy dose of realism bound to ruin any childhood. It even has a sequel called 'and then you die'.

Nice sentiment to make your horse more confident, probably an inappropriate title, gives the impression of covering it in kevlar with a pig iron undercarriage and turning it into an equestrian tank, maybe with a mounted flame thrower for taking our motorists who fail to slow down when they overtake them.

Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my.

I wouldn't have liked the job of illustrating this Tell-a-Tale book. Just exactly how to you draw a pair anyway? Not quite sure why Jack and Jill are in the background unless they were the doctors and the bucket is full of (CENSORED)

And finally my favourite of all, Cooking With Pooh, couldn't think of a better thing to do with it and after you can identify it using one of the other books whilst riding your tractor thinking your way to a larger chest. Priceless.

Card Sharp

2012-01-25T13:13:00.001Z

As promised, in replacement for the calendar here is the new range of art cards just in time for the release of the Losts in a little over a weeks time exclusively available online from www.reallyfabcards.com

Sixteen designs to collect with a few select old favourites thrown on a redesigned card. Here's the collection.

Weight Watchers

Are We There Yet?

The Best Things In Life are Sweet

When Boy Meets Girl

I Need Some Bunny To Love

Forget Me Not

I Do

I Eat Cake

I'll Get My Coat

I'm Macarooned Too

But I'm Not Tired

L.O.V.E.

Love Boat

May Contain Nuts

Mummy

The Naughty Step

It took a while to select the right images for this first batch but I think the balance is just right. You can look forward to these being joined by more in the future on a regular basis to always keep the art card collection up to date with the Impossimals. I love them, I hope you do too!

A Little Lost

2012-01-24T11:28:00.000Z

Before Christmas I passed off all the Lost Impossimal prints and the whole process of creating the editions began. As part of the process we decided to embellish each and every 'Lost' to add even more to their authenticity as forgotten pieces. The photo above shows you the extraordinary lengths we have gone to on the prints so far with the addition of gold brushstrokes mimicking my original work, light enhancing glazes and pure texture work, additions which should make the Losts what I hope they will become, a foundation for a body of work that will unfold over a number of years. A collectable collection that also includes the unique Impossimalsaurus Giganticus, the only guide book to the Losts that will accompany the work.

Yesterday was the big signing, the first batch of Losts were lined up, unwrapped, checked against a master Lost for accuracy then signed, numbered and despatched to framing.

For these special pieces we have chosen a unique frame, deviating for the first time away from the pure black one normally found around Impossimals to this, a very ornate aged frame and slip in two colours which really does suit the work perfectly.

Crate one complete and onto signing crate two, a long process that took over three hours just to add my signature to each one. As you can probably guess a lot of love and attention to detail have gone into the three years it's taken to complete the pieces so it was a very proud moment as the last one was signed and sent on it's way. All that remains now is to wait until the 5th February when the Losts are let loose followed by the first date of the Lost Impossimals - A Complete Twistory Tour on the 18th.

The clocks ticking!

Chicken

2012-01-23T03:58:00.004Z

Shopping can be a boring task at the best of times but I think I might have the answer to pass away those useless minutes in a checkout queue. Checkout chicken.

The rules are simple, just find a queue with one person in front of you with goods on the conveyor belt, a stock of dividers and that's it, you are good to go. Normally at the checkout and finding someone else's shopping in front it's good manners to place the little divider thing at the back of their goods, this then allows the checkout operator to discriminate between the goods of the two purchasers or players as we will now call them. However, with Checkout Chicken, you must avoid placing the divider in between their goods and yours, to start just pile your goods onto the conveyor belt as fast as possible with an aim to distract the person in front.

As time passes the tension builds as your goods edge closer to the cashier, feel the excitement as you start to believe that your goods are about to become part of those of the person in front and that you are about to cause untold chaos and havoc at the checkout. In the meantime though the person in front may have noticed that there is no divider and will join in, hopefully becoming quite worried too.

The first person to lose their nerve and place the divider on the conveyor belt loses Checkout Chicken. You may of course at this stage wish to inform the loser by flapping your arms and clucking, although previous experience deems this an unwise move. Sometimes the person in front doesn't notice, which effectively means you're playing on your own and cannot win, a situation that will certainly screw your nerves up. Other times though your 'opponent' will dive straight in there and you'll get an easy win. On rare occasions you both may keep your nerve and the goods reach the cashier where you enter the bonus game. It's not mine it's yours, or Checkout Chumble, see how long you can deny any item being yours.

Seasoned veterans will play the level 2 version of Checkout Chicken and play the person in front and the one behind, although this requires nerves of steel and should not be attempted on the first play.

If you want a starter game before tackling this big boy try Supermarket Spammer. See how many tins of Spam you can randomly place unnoticed in other shoppers baskets. Only one item per customer and as soon as you get caught it's game over. As long as you don't get thrown out tally up your 'Spams' and keep a score card for the next four visits, mark yourself below.

1-5 - Sorry Spammer

6-10 - Sly Spammer

11-15 - Supply Spammer

16-20 - Super Spammer

20+ - Supermarket Spammer Supreme

Have a nice day and please call again, this has been a public service announcement on behalf of the bored shopper.

Feeling Blue

2012-01-21T15:28:00.000Z

Painting lots and lots of bricks and stones is not fun. I have spent hours today doing just this to add a castle turret and edging stones to my big 'world' painting before I get to add the last few elements next week. It's about time I finished this, a year is a long time for any painting and it's making me feel old and I don't like things making me feel old but it seems to be a common theme at the moment. Take this for example -

we just wanna lickle rhyme bruv

call me what you want but you should not call it a night love

and I might just join the mile high club

only problem being that I couldnt give a flying f**k!

yeah lemme touch back down

slap her on the bum until it

comes back round

half a rooms like OI whats this all about, with the other half jiving

I love that sound

so flick you fag butts at once in a mad one like

yeah yeah your mama can hump

mama do the hump mama do the hump hump, mama

won't you please let me do the hump hump

mama do the hump mama do the hump hump, mama

won't you please let me do the hump hump

Rizzle Kick's 'Mama Do The Hump', great tune but it's lyrically abysmal, that is not what made me feel old, it's the fact this song was performed on Blue Peter, a program for five to twelve year old's, try explaining the mile high club to them and what exactly is a fags butt. That made me feel old.

Blue Peter, with an excellent logo designed by Tony Hart, was the BBC's flagship children's program and was aimed squarely at good wholesome family fun. The only performances you got was from brass bands and the like, in other words anything that was safe. If you wanted edgy you switched over to ITV and watched Magpie, if only for Susan Stranks, although I preferred her with Itsy and Bitsy in Paperplay. In a world where we are constantly bombarded by celebrity, advertising, spin and a penchant to treat everything as throw away Blue Peter was an antidote, it was a moral straight line never deviating from it's core values.

Apparently not in today's society, the new Blue Peter has been quoted as wanting to appeal to the Top Gear audience. So I would like to declare the end of the world starts here.

No longer will we get that calming, moral program that taught us how to behave in society, gave us interests other than the Internet, showed us how to make things, pottered about in the garden and looked after pets using a set up that reinforced a happy family mentality.

The new Blue Peter, with a new ransom note logo, ditched the garden a long time ago, reduced the presenters down to two, decided to disengage it's brain a little and start the short fall from top to bottom. That makes me feel ancient.

I am looking forward to next weeks episode though, Lady Gaga will reveal if she is a man or a woman, the Blue Peter's pet dog 'Killer' gets to toboggan the Cresta Run, they show you how to make a working bong from a fairy liquid bottle and guest Brian Blessed teaches you how to make a roll up. The new theme tune will be 'Good Ship Venus' by the Sex Pistols and the whole thing is sponsored by Babestation.

Can't wait!

Yum

2012-01-20T16:51:00.000Z

Losing five stone three years ago was the easy thing, maintaining the ideal weight on a daily basis is another thing entirely. Admittedly I don't use too much energy up whilst I paint as primarily I'm sat down most of the time apart from short trips to the paint drawers so even a little of the wrong amount of food can add on those pounds. Christmas is always a difficult time as is Easter, oh, and summer for the BBQ stuff as the shops are full of inviting products that are begging to be tasted but part of losing all my bulk was learning about food. It was the only way to keep the pounds off forever.

If I said I only had one meal a day you would probably freak out and say that kinda weird but it's true, I do only have one main meal a day. My personal diet comes from two sources, first the Mediterranean and secondly the Victorian era. The Mediterranean side is easier to understand, it involves fresh stuff, tomatoes, olives, beans etc, but the Victorian era bit sounds wrong. The only things I have taken from this period is first, to have a good breakfast and secondly to eat the days main meal before 1pm and avoid the gigantic meal they used to have in the evening, although a lot of that was done to impress guests and I didn't fancy Mrs Beetons Pickled Calf Head or Spiced Pike in my diet.

This eating of the bulk of food before 1pm helped greatly, if I feel hungry a little later I can still eat in moderation but the snack must not be from a packet, so ideally it's fruit. I followed this routine for the first year, it was damn hard but it worked, now it's part of my daily routine and I now know I can supplement this with additional treats. If I fancy a bag of crisps I now know I can have one and as long as it's only one or two a week it stays off. Bread, initially off the menu has now been introduced back in using Tesco's healthy eating naan bread, very low calorie wise and amazingly does not bulk you up like bread. Alcohol, a typical Achilles heel for a lot of people is unlimited as long as it's either wine, cava or gin / vodka and slimline tonic. Finding alternatives is half the battle but there is pretty much a healthier version of everything, including crisps (M&S reduced fat plain crinkle - beats everything).

We now have around fifty dishes to chose from each day that we have painstakingly worked out which brings me round to today's photo above, it's my current favourite meal. Cajun salmon, two soft boiled eggs, spinach and beans, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar adds more taste and a naan bread to dip in the eggs. So if you have decided to diet this year, stick with it, it ain't all that bad once you get used to it.

Rapid Eye Movements

2012-01-19T15:28:00.001Z

Every year I try and improve something on the Impossimals, this year is no exception so my attention has turned to the eyes. After experimenting with them a little over a year ago I spent 2011 working from models, a radical departure from the previous six years when I used sketches as my only reference so I think a return to the eyes are on the cards.

The eyes of an Impossimal have always been important, they can express emotion, direct the viewer or can even be made to follow you around the room depending on how you paint them. The eyes I have been working on today are simply looking forward but even this has it's difficulties as it's almost too easy to make them look cross eyed.

To start any eye I basically put in the main shape using a grey and a white. The pupils and iris, because they always remain circular, is marked out using a compass before being blocked in with the appropriate colours. Notice that I have left a gap around the whole eye, this is because the red paint is wet and once the eye is in place I will push the red up against it to smooth it off.

Blocking in finished I change to a smaller brush and start to work the details in paying attention to the radial sweep of the iris and the white highlight which is very important as it defines the roundness of the eye as a whole.

The whole thing is tidied up using the red and touches like the highlights are smoothed out using a very soft brush. Additional white is added to the black pupils giving a better appearance of light being cast across them. This will dry overnight then I can glaze it tomorrow. It's glazing that really brings the eyes to life. I will be adding an intense blue to the existing blue, a green in the corners and a sky blue around the highlights, this helps to give a softness to the light and makes it look as if it comes from multiple sources.

It's only then that I can start to improve the eyes beyond what I have been doing, my first thought is to reflect the scene very faintly in the pupil, I'll give it a go and see what happens.

Mentalist

2012-01-18T15:39:00.005Z

After Mondays judging in Stoke on Trent, yesterdays e-mail deluge and press release preparations for the Lost's followed by Skype calls to America, today has been relatively calm with a good stint in the studio to catch up with a few pieces. The only problem is I went a bit mad.

One of the newest paintings is a large heart on a shelf with two Impossimals on top. All well and good but for some strange reason I thought it looked a little empty so I started to play a little. First to go in was a moon complete with face just hanging in the space in front of the Impossimals, secondly was stars hanging from string, then it all got really weird as I painted a mouse hole or house depending how you look at these things, mouse and cheese quickly followed by a light bulb switched on and wired into the floor and a glass ball that reflects the entire scene in reverse. Twenty six nails and floorboards have also been added, I stood back and the whole thing looked like a jumble sale, but amazingly, I like it.

So I now have a new quest, fill the remaining area up with objects that are related but also so the first letter of each object actually comes together to form a word that describes the painting. Looks like I have set myself, yet again, another tireless challenge.

Challenge accepted - Game on.

Judge & Jury

2012-01-17T11:34:00.000Z

The UK Children's Fine Art Competition is the exclusive UK tributary to the annual International Children's Exhibition of Fine Arts (ICEFA) - the largest fine art competition for children in the world reinforcing the core values of friendship, tolerance, empathy, respect, responsibility, courage and determination.
The ICEFA has been running for 40 years now and receives, on average, 30,000 entries from around 70 countries, organized and coordinated by The Lidice Gallery in Lidice, Czech Republic yesterday I took part in judging the UK leg of the competition, a honoured privilege not to be taken lightly considering the competitions horrific origins.

Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just north-west of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised and filmed atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. The buildings were then bulldozed the cemetery emptied so that no trace of the village's former existence would be found.

The atrocity committed by the Germans against this defenceless mining community outraged the British public, particularly in the mining communities of North Staffordshire and from Stoke-on-Trent came the defiant voice of Shelton GP and city councillor Dr Barnett Stross, who coined the slogan "Lidice Shall Live" in direct response to Hitler's orders that "Lidice Would Die Forever!" This gave the lead to the free world, and the campaign to rebuild the village after the war, which had gathered huge support in North Staffordshire, with its thousands of mining families, spread worldwide.

"The miner's lamp dispels the shadows on the coal face," Dr Stross, a Polish, jewish immigrant, wrote at the time. "It can also send a ray of light across the sea to those who struggle in darkness."

The International Children’s Exhibition of Fine Arts was established to commemorate the children victims from the Czech village as well as all other children who have died during war conflicts. It promotes not only the inspirational aspect of art but also tolerance and understanding of cultures and people worldwide, a noble cause.

Judges included Frederick Phillips, Susan Law-Webb, Pointon and Julie Winwood amongst others totalling seven, with three votes each for every county and over 600 entries this was going to take some time.

Initially the counties yielded a manageable amount of work to vote on. As a collective we judged each piece on relevance to the brief, which in this case was quite extensive and included the theatre, film and popular culture, and by age. Three votes each, the top six pieces were separated from the rest and we voted again for the county winner and two runner ups. This was repeated for every county that entered until we had a pile of winners.

We did have some international entries too to cast our eye over, this amazing piece is full of incredible detail and actually quite difficult to imagine that it was produced by a four year old. Wow!

Some regions were particularly tough to judge, look at the amount of entries for this one, it's quite mind blowing looking through them all. The final International judging takes three to four days though, so I suppose we got away lightly with five hours.

It's not just paintings either, sculpture, photography and collage, all were acceptable mediums in which to enter and enter they did, we even had a Sooty made out of Sooty's, a Wizard of Oz inspired stage set complete with tin man and a rocket with it's own ping pong ball moon.

An immense amount of fun that cumulated in the last hour to the narrowing down of the overall winning entry and the selection of children's artwork that will be spearheading the UK in the International competition later this year, a tough call, but the winning entry was quite simply astounding. It's a little bit like 'A Song For Europe' and the Eurovision contest selection so I'll follow the fate of the UK entries through the year, as with all these things it would be nice to see a UK International winner too. ALL entered artworks though are forwarded to the ICEFA. International awards are issued by the ICEFA with presentations taking place within the UK often in the presence of the Czech Ambassador, there is also the possibility of a trip to Lidice for a lucky winner to attend the opening of the ICEFA in June 2012. All the children who entered do get a special certificate from the foundation irrespective of their place so nobody leaves empty handed. A special prize giving ceremony is pencilled in for February which should be every bit as exciting as the judging by all accounts.

Later this year the 2013 UK Children's Fine Art Competition, backed by the Department of Education and supported worldwide by celebrities as varied as film director Ken Loach and Nick Hancock will be launched, if you are interested taking part or helping in this exciting International event that grows in stature each year, be it as an individual, school or community then you can get full details from Alan Gerrard at info@artvenue.org. Lets make the 2013 UK Children's Fine Art Competition the biggest yet!

Judgement Day

2012-01-16T04:28:00.000Z

The UK Children's Fine Art Competition & the International Children's Exhibition of Fine Arts receives 25,000 to 30,000 entries from children representing 70 different countries each year. Today I join the other judges to try and choose the winners from the UK. This is going to be tough...

Brrrr

2012-01-14T15:28:00.001Z

Bunnyopolis glistened in the morning light heralding a new and very cold day. Aaran, Jura and Iona hopped out reluctantly at first until a quick head flick confirmed that the new white surface was safe to walk on. All three trooped out and spent the next five minutes flinging themselves around the garden, sometimes turning 180 degrees in the process only to repeat the process again and again. They only went in for breakfast then they have pretty much spent all day outside enjoying the crisp air.

They normally watch the squirrel and birds on the bird table but a few days ago I noticed the squirrel wandering around the perimeter of Bunnyopolis looking down at Jura. It was a little too suspicious so I raced upstairs to rewind the security footage. Sure enough ten minutes before Mr Squirrel had decided the best place to bury his nuts was in Bunnyopolis. Ever inquisitive Jura stood looking up at Mr Squirrel when he suddenly dropped onto Jura's back. Panic ensued, not from Jura but Mr Squirrel as he found out what a 28lb rabbit can do when surprised, a quick flip and she was facing him, seconds later he was back on the fence panting away with Jura admonishing him from the ground. 'Try that again Mr Squirrel' she seemed to be saying, 'You just try it again buddy!'

In the studio it was a little warmer, 18.5 degrees to be precise, so I started work at 8:00am determined to get the groundwork done on at least one painting. Seven hours later it's done and joins its friends in the airing tank to dry overnight. I'm trying to get as much done as possible so I can throw everything into helping with the judging of the UK Children's Fine Art Competition on Monday. Over 600 entries have to be judged over the course of the day, that's a lot of entries to sift through especially when there are seven judges. It also looks like it will be extensively covered by the press and maybe TV, better not turn up in my too outlandishly decorated clothing lol.

I'll post a full breakdown of the day on Tuesday with as many pictures as I can cram on the blog, it should be a good day.

A Crumb In The Butter

2012-01-13T15:48:00.003Z

I thought today I would describe and episode from my morning (partly true) written to be read in the style of Alan Bennett but obviously nowhere near as good. A typical northern grump for want of a better description and a bit of an hero of mine.

So downturn mouths at the ready lets begin...

It's not a particularly adventurous order - two slices of wholemeal, browned but not burnt, two butters and no jam delivered with the lack lustre flair and grace of an aged stripper but it suited the surroundings, a department store of no repute, perfectly. Optimistically called Zest, the restaurant, if one could call a self service cafeteria a respectable establishment, remained empty.

The two slices, uncut and a little burnt around the edges, looked disappointed. I turned them over to check both sides and fumbled with the small packets of melted butter from my plastic chair. The knife was dirty and a thin film of grease covered the once clean table. I ran my finger across the the cheap finish, noting with some distress that it felt gritty with the dirt of others, the dirt of life my mother might say.

She said things like that you see, my mother.

'How is yours, mines burnt again.' I said.
'Butters soft too' Jayne replied only confirming what I had already found out.
We sipped our coffee for a while and even ventured to cut our toast, a futile effort that only filled the table with crumbs.

You get the picture, I could carry on but it's would take ages to tell the story so instead here is the proper Smith version.

We went to Nottingham this morning for a bit of pre-show shopping, always an exciting time and normally we find somewhere small and cosy for a quick coffee before we begin. This morning though after battling through Nottingham's horrendous lane change, speed change, speed camera, bus lane road system we decided to skip wandering around for a suitable coffee shop and instead go straight to a department store for coffee and toast.

For the record I think any place that has the word zest in it's title should be struck off the face of the earth if it fails to live up to expectation. For a start there is nothing zesty about cafeterias that no amount of lemon or lime colour could ever improve on. The zest didn't extend to the staff either when our 60p a slice toast, after ordering, was thrown quite literally, onto our plates. I half expected a quick two fingers to be shown our way as a bonus when they turned and walked away in silence. What had we done?

Nothing apparently, this lack of respect was repeated time and time again as we sat and watched in silence trying in vain to spread, no, let me rephrase that, trying in vain to pour our butter on the toast. One particular gentleman foolishly ordered a full English, the staff almost burst from apoplexy whilst he tried to decide between five or six items. I believe he would have been stabbed with the serving spoon had he become undecided over a choice between the sausage and bacon.

It's a level of service that I have seen repeated up and down the country though, so it came as no surprise that our little treat consisted of over priced toast, cold coffee, melted butter and dirty cutlery washed down with a cup of ineptitude.

A slight disappointment to the day that failed to dissipate, the shops seemed full of overpriced poor quality goods, shop after shop all shared a similar look in design and colour, I lost count of the amount of check shirts in red and blue I came across and the fact that the 80's look is coming into fashion, well, all I can say is I was there the first time and it ain't that fashionable. Blue shirt with yellow and orange buttons? No thanks, but widely available should you wish to go all clown like. If you want to try this high street copycat theory out just try buying jeans that are skinny but not bootcut. Twenty different stores later we failed miserably.

Don't be fooled by all the new fashion ideas either, they are all saying 'layering' is the new fashion. Well, Gok Smith says don't fall for it, a lot of the high street layering is an excuse for thinner clothing that they can make cheaply, sell for the same price and tell you to buy more to look fashionable.

Must be the Friday 13th feeling kicking in, at least tomorrow I'm locked back in my little box for a nice painting session whilst I get ready for Monday when I join seven other judges to judge The UK Children's Fine Art Competition, something I'm really looking forward to. Here's a little recap on what it is all about.

The UK Children's Fine Art Competition is a highly rewarding, all inclusive, fine art competition which aims to raise the aspirations of children and reduce levels of racism across the UK. There is currently no other annual fine art competition to compare with the UK Children's Fine Art Competition. Other art competitions relevant to children in the UK tend to be “one offs”, annual but small, or merely art for art's sake. The UK Children's Fine Art Competition is not like that.

Instead it provides cross-curricular learning opportunities in History, Geography, Citizenship, Religious Studies...as well as Art

The UK Children's Fine Art Competition is the exclusive UK tributary to the annual International Children's Exhibition of Fine Arts (ICEFA) - the largest fine art competition for children in the world. The ICEFA has been running for 40 years now and receives, on average, 30,000 entries from around 70 countries. It is organized and coordinated by The Lidice Gallery in Lidice, Czech Republic.

The UK Children's Fine Art Competition is a partner of the Lidice Gallery, and any artworks submitted to the UK competition are also entered into the global ICEFA. So you could say it's two serious fine art competitions for children rolled into one.

A worthy competition of which you can read more about http://www.ukchildrensartcompetition.org

And with that I'm off. Until tomorrow, toodle pip!

BTW Did you know yesterday was international sound check day? 12.1.12

Meanwhile, In The Real World.

2012-01-12T08:30:00.003Z

Seems like whilst I have been tucked away in the studio quite a number of new film have been released, so here's my personal picks of 2011.

Animal Deckard hunts down felt based replicants in this Sci-Wool epic Blade Drummer. Bound to be a classic, especially the slow motion gunning down of Prisporkborg in one of Didley Scott's finest moments.

A scientist on the edge. When Bunsen Honeydew's assistant can take no more Beaker goes on a violent rampage through downtown LA shredding every ounce of fur along the way provoked entirely by a fast food joint that fails to understand a word that Beaker says for nearly an hour before declaring the breakfast menu closed.

The first rule of fur club is you don't stroke a fur club, or something like that anyway. The seedy look of the club is further underlined by the dysfunctional Marla 'Porkington' Singer and the pill popping action of the green Tyler Durden who's jaded life finds excitement once the felt starts flying. Best quote 'Did you felt that? Did you felt it! Yeah, that felt GOOOOD!'

Reservoir Frogs, Tuentin Qarantino's descent into muppetry after a bungle heist on the Muppet Theatre causes the gang to exit stage right and enter a nightmare world of cloth based violence. When Mr Blondish, played by A.N.Animal ties a Police Frog to the chair and brandishes his drumstick it was time for me to look away. Not one for the squeamish, if exposed stuffing and kapok being liberally strewn around does do it for you then don't miss this.

I was expecting more from this one but the detective played by Ms Piggy, Clarence Starlinghamjoint is sadly outclassed by the awesome presence of Fozzie Bear as Dr Hammibal Lecter. Best quote 'A puppeteer once tried to test me. I ate his fingers with some fava beans and a nice chianti.'

I didn't see this one coming, Rowlf the crazy mild mannered piano playing dog turned sparkly vamp was quit a shock. The sight of him chomping down on Gonzo had me bury my head in either shock or shame. The jury is still out on that one.

A true American hero. Nuff said.

Wow, Hamtrix Kiddobacon (Ms Piggy) racks up the most stuffed toy body count I have ever seen in a movie. Apparently based on a real life split between Ms Piggy and Kermit she really pounds the pork with knife skills never seen before outside of a butchers. Following a sequence of revenge unstuffings we see Link Hogthrob and Lew Zealand become unstitched before the sword before taking on the entire Crazy-BB (Boiled Bacon) squad in what can only be described as a pork bath. Can't wait for Kill Kermit Pork II.

Some fantastic films there, if you do get chance to see any of them then drop me a line at itdoesntexist@muppetmaybes.moc

Pretty In Pink

2012-01-11T08:57:00.001Z

The real start of the 2012 paintings begins today after doing all the preparation yesterday and last week I finally get to paint on the four new images ready for my attention. I'm starting with this lurid pink as a basis for a sky, yes, I know it's quite pinky but it needs to contrast the yellow base. That sounds even more hideous doesn't it but actually once I get all the browns, green and whites in there it won't look too bad.

This first set of four will join another four before I move on to design and complete the Impossimals Remastered project, again a set of paintings, this time sixteen in total which should take me through to June time, especially as I will be on tour after February. My painting schedule from July onwards depends entirely on the tour itself so I'll sort that one out as I come to it but already I have a sketchbook bursting with lots of new ideas for that too.

So time to oil the brushes up, squeeze a few tubes, slap on the headphones and lose myself for a month or so before the fast approaching 5th February when we unleash the Losts.

Full Circle

2012-01-10T08:41:00.003Z

This was in the news just before Christmas and I got very excited. Just seeing this picture I knew immediately what it was from the type of external connections it offered, from the SD card reader to the visual output and something resembling a USB connector. It was a computer and resembled something I built along with my dad way back in the 80's

A Sinclair ZX-81, my first real computer. It was an absolute pig to build, hundreds of parts all needing to be carefully handled and soldered to a motherboard. For the princely sum of £49.95 computing didn't get much better than this back then as the only real alternatively was something like the Kevin Keegan TV game, essentially TV pong, or soccer as they called it, pretty basic none the less.

After what seemed like days we finally powered up the monster and got this. OK, now what? Well, it's not that easy. To get a game loaded you first had to attach an cassette player, have a pre-recorded program to load then wait around ten minutes for it not to work. Get angry, try again and again and again until it did work then become a little disappointed because the Sinclair ZX-81 only had a black and white display, a resolution of 64 x 48 pixels and no sound. Even the keyboard was a slippy affair being of the membrane type, not idea for games. Even less ideal was the 1k of memory, to give you an example of how small that is, 1K is 1024 bytes or for the sake of explaining a byte lets use characters. So it could hold 1024 characters, about enough to write a very short note to yourself. If you compare that to a Gb, one of today's popular sizes, a Gb can hold 1,073,741,824 characters. Some difference.

To help with this Sinclair released an expansion pack to increase the memory to a whopping 16k that fitted wobbly into the back and generally caused it to overheat so you had to stand a milk bottle on it to act as a heat sink, pretty much what the internal fan does in your laptop or desktop computer today.

The biggest draw for me though was programming. I used to spend hours tapping away trying to make the most of the computing power. I learned BASIC and Z80 machine code then moved onto Forth and Pascal. Just as was doing this Sinclair released it's next computer and it was a drooler. The ZX-Spectrum truly bought computers to the masses. Here was a cheap computer that had colour, sound, a proper (nearly) keyboard and could play real arcade games (not really, but we liked to think so). I was already hooked in the burgeoning industry and joined the growing band of home coders that were creating their own games.

In 1983 under the guise of Javelin Software I launched three titles, one being Demon Chase, the forerunner of that addictive snake game that appeared on Nokia phones some years later. It was an average hit and gained a 3.5 / 5 review in Sinclair User, one of the big magazines dedicated to the machine in it's day. But I was up against some exceptional competition.

Manic Miner came from nowhere. One of the first real platform games the quality and design of each level by Matthew Smith it blew the ZX-Spectrum world apart and showed just what home programmers could achieve. It went on to make quite a lot of cash for its creator and spawned several sequels. Through the 80's I watched new firms make the move from back bedrooms to boardrooms. Some of the biggest names of the time Ultimate Play The Game, Ocean and US Gold were looked upon as gods and the programmers were buying flash cars and taking out expensive adverts in the magazines to hype things up. By this time though I had moved on, at the end of the 80's I was using dBase, a relational database programming language and starting to surf using Bulletin Boards and unusually Archie and Gopher, or what we now call the Internet.

Games by this time were coming close to the arcade, Snapper on the BBC Micro was so close that an injunction was taken out to stop distribution of it.

At the height of my computer ownership my room was full with a ZX-80, ZX-81, Atari 800, BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC, ZX-Spectrum, Commodore C64, Commodore Amiga, Atari-ST, Dragon 32, Lynx and seven monitors with three modems and two floppy drives. Quite a haul, some of the computers had unexpected titles that predicted the future though.

The Commodore C64's Little Computer People was essentially The Sims albeit many years before. You typed commands to your little chap and he responded. You could play cards, send him parcels and even get him a dog, fascinating stuff at the time.

Which brings me full circle as to why I was excited with the photo at the beginning. It's a computer called the Raspberry Pi. Don't laugh, remember the Apple? It aims to bring back the real aspect of computers that control all our lives. Programming. Without it you would have no iPhone or iPad, the Internet wouldn't exist, ILS systems on airplanes wouldn't exist and the telephone exchange would still be manned by 93 year old Mabel from Skegness.

The Raspberry Pi is a computer for the masses, it's even from Cambridge the home of the ZX computers, it comes with no software but everything you need to create your own or interface with almost any item currently available.

The UK needs a good solid workforce in the IT industry, a recent study in 2010 showed that out of nearly 30,000 teachers who qualified only 3 qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification, compared with 750 in ICT. We going to be desperate need of computing specialists, Facebook, Google and nearly every IT based global business is starting to look at programmers and specialists to tailor our internet and gadget experience making it more personal. Three years is the estimate until we all have our own personal Internet bubble where everything we read or witness has already been decided by others.

All the Raspberry Pi needs is a little imagination to help bridge the skills gap and whilst it won't turn you into a world class coder it might just give you enough of a prod in the right direction to be part of this change and at £22 for the top model I think it's got a good chance of working.

Sherlock CSI X-Files Goes All Cracker

2012-01-09T09:46:00.000Z

What do all these pictures have in common?

They are all part of a weird event that hit the blog yesterday. Around 6:40pm last night I was doing some routine maintenance on the websites, for this I use two PC's on three monitors, when I noticed the real time hit stats on the blog suddenly start to spike. Originally I thought it was just a blip as you do occasionally get those but as I watched further the spike got bigger and bigger registering a hundred hits in twenty minutes.

On a daily basis the hits fluctuate between 150 - 200 a day, Tuesdays is the most popular day for people to catch up with it and Sunday night normally the quietest making the hits even more stranger. I stopped what I was doing and investigated further.

The blog was being systematically read in reverse, December, November, October, every entry was being scanned. Occasionally the user downloaded an image. My first thoughts was somebody searching for clues for the Lost Impossimals as the first five images all related to that but then it got a little more random and started picking up other work but the common thread was that they were all paintings and none of the other fluff I post on there. The IP address was fixed so I knew it was the same user and I could even tell if the entry they were currently looking at had been read or not depending on how fast the next click came in.

At 8:00pm it was still going on, this felt a little uncomfortable as this obsessional rooting through my blog, which is of course there for anybody to view, delved deeper and deeper.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against any of this, it's just to see it happen in front of your eyes was quite strange. I get used to people talking to me in galleries as though they know me as by default the blog does give quite a lot away but this felt...different.

Overall this went on from 6:40pm to 8:17pm when their ticket was updated by their service provider and they carried on under a slightly different IP address from 8:18pm to 9:00pm then had a break for an hour and a half and returned at 10:30pm for another go.

So lets go and get all Sherlock Holmes and have a bit of fun with the info I gathered and build a psychological profile. For a start all the images downloaded could be construed as images that only show colour work, techniques and texture or ideas which leads me to believe that the person was in fact an artist. Male for a guess, as the images are all male orientated and around the 30'ish mark in age, that's down to the entries that are read and the length of time spent on those. For example, entries which discuss things from my childhood in the 70's are skipped whilst anything interesting from the 80's and 90's are paused on a little longer whilst it's scanned.

The break at 9:00pm is a little more puzzling, the TV listings for last night doesn't show anything on for that period, Sherlock had already been on thirty minutes and it was till thirty minutes to Dancing On Ice so the only point I could draw from that is either the person had some family time with their other half or the deluge of reading my mind numbing entries for so long had made the individual deserve a break!

Thats about it, I won't reveal the location of the IP address as that would be unfair, but congratulations to reader X you now hold the record for reading my blog at a staggering two hours and nineteen minutes, beating the previous XX users 56 minutes by a gigantic margin, something even I couldn't stomach lol.

I wonder if I'm right?

facegrump

2012-01-07T15:54:00.000Z

Finally the last job of the week is completed, a third micro site for the Grumpits, a set of characters again taken from real life and given a disgruntled outlook on our existance. I have added a link to the main site should you wish to visit.

I'm whacked though, three sites in five days has been a little too intense but at least they are all done and in place to be updated on a regular basis. All that remains now is to make them all smartphone compatible and that is going to test me a little I think!

www.petersmithcollective.co.uk

Looks Great!

2012-01-06T15:20:00.004Z

I'm really disappointed already with 2012, a brand new 'lifestyle enhancer' catalogue graced the centre of my TV listings paper but for once it was quite boring and nothing made me guffaw or gip straight away. I'm a big fan of looking through these just wondering who on earth buys them and how much money do these companies make from them.Quite a lot I suppose, then again there are some strange people around at the moment but more of that in a later blog. For today it's another short tat tour.

Now I was quite taken with this Kaftan (not really), for a start it's figure flattering and makes the pounds disappear although that probably means from your bank balance rather than your waist and is perfect for all day wear should you want to look like a walking curtain. This one was not as special as this on the next page though

Yes, it's the same one in a different colour and this time you get to call it your 'Sophie Skilletti' kaftan, which actually sounds like a contract killer. So if you want that authentic Bond girl look in a garment that is decribed as 'roomy' then this is perfect for you. 'No Mr Bond, I expect you to fry. After all we did employ you in our chip shop'

Don't rub your eyes at the 'Giveaway' price it announces. Surely that should read 'Don't rub your eyes, we really can't give them away'. Even the strapline at the top proudly announces this white tiger fleecy blanket with a hint of danger, 'One of the worlds most magnificent species will keep you warm as toast through the winter months' Personally I can think of nothing more uninviting that a neighbour popping in unexpectedly when I have a six foot tiger head wrapped around me, especially as I have only got the Kaftan on underneath. And another thing, wearing a pith helmet does not make it any more exotic.

We had to finish on a new addition to garden ornaments now the rush to buy meerkat (my spell checker just tried to change that to beermat lol, what a flicker) ornaments has abated. It's been replaced by this swish solar spinning flower light, I'm certainly a fan. Seriously, a spinning flower that lights up at night? Night is just the time you don't want to see this garden monstrosity and that's exactly the time it lights up to remind you and the neighbourhood just how ridiculously gullible and twee you are. Don't get me started! Too late!!

So a little disappointing all round, no new meerkat sculptures or furry banana holders and only one new comedy clothes addition and that had to be repeated twice.

I really should get out more.

Redux

2012-01-05T13:10:00.000Z

The more eagle eyed viewers may have noticed a few subtle changes to the website along with some new banners to compliment them. First the gallery is back but hosted on Flickr instead, so with one click you can browse around 180 Impossimal paintings. The button is under the Artwork section straight after the Lost Impossimals button.

Google+ has been added in the Contact section so feel free to join me and the tumble weed if you can, I do post extra stuff on there and I'm about to increase the pace of things as I sort out my Google+ circles. There is a 'Find a Gallery' button too which takes you straight to my publishers gallery locator.

A censored Lost Impossimals site is now online, you can click on things and generally snoop around but there are no extra hints at what's coming in February, well maybe a little thing but you have to find it, the site should go fully live next month and will then include all the stories to every Lost Impossimal created.

And finally there is this. It's for the Impossimal purist and I'm not even going to tell you what this is all about but it's shaping up into something quite unique. An ongoing project that's going to keep me very busy in 2012.

The collectors club is growing in numbers and over the next few weeks we will be try to activate the mailing list via e-mail, the last newsletter mail out postal costs hit £500 so we decided to abandon that as the members have doubled since. If it works then the Mission Impossimal magazine will be available to collectors club members to view exclusively for two weeks before hitting the main website.

That's about it for now I think, now to carry on with my boat of biscuits.

A Storms Brewing

2012-01-04T10:36:00.000Z

If you wondered what happened to the blog yesterday my time was taken up by two things. First the end of the world which looked pretty close to happening when this mega storm started to form around midday. I expected to see houses and cows flying around and had visions of me and Bunnyopolis taking off Wizard of Oz style. Boy was it wild out there. Secondly I was working on this.

It's the Impossimalsaurus Giganticus, the Victorian steam driven website for the new Lost Impossimals, which, due to recent events, required a massive update and additional graphics. It pretty much kept me busy all day along with dashing out to see if Bunnyopolis was still there.

As the whole tour is set in the Victorian era I'm toying with the idea of giving away at each Lost Impossimal appearance my authentic Museum documents to anyone that joins in the spirit of the event and arrives in something typically Victorian. Things are still at an early stage but I'm thinking along the lines of a special signed and numbered certificate / document and genuine pages from my copious Impossisaurus Giganticus making it the only way to obtain these rare items. More details as I work out the logistics of this and possibly a lot more, although with only the rest of January to go I'm cutting it fine.

By the end of this week the full Lost Impossimal website will be live but with nothing revealed which sounds a bit crap really but it's not that bad and will give you a taste of things to come when the site goes completely live. Seriously, I have never been more excited than I am now, the limited editions have been approved, the brochure designed and ready to be printed and I'm trying to learn all my notes a little each day. I have even managed to get hold of assorted coins and boxes from the correct period along with some of the Lost Impossimal originals coming in genuine Victorian frames. Oh, and in other news I'm building a boat. Out of biscuits.

More soon.

Ghosts Of Christmas Past

2012-01-02T13:36:00.002Z

We took down all the decorations today and bunged them back in the attic until next year. The tree, as expected, was troublesome and in a final defiance dropped each and every one of it's needles as I wrestled it to the ground. I gave it a good thumping though.

Whilst in the attic I stumbled across a tightly wrapped package, feeling around the edges I realised I had found Christmas treasure, otherwise known as TV listing magazines from way back. December 1991 all the way up to 2002 before I decided that it was getting silly and wrapped them up and instantly forgot about them.

I think I collected them because of my childhood memories of excitement when three weeks before Christmas the TV and Radio Times was made available. Excitedly this signalled Christmas for me and I would sit for hours scanning the listings for little gems of programs and the odd blockbuster movie that in the 70's had to wait three years from it's cinema release before being allowed on terrestrial television. This was an era when James Bond on Christmas day was considered an essential part of the day. So too was programs like Top of the Pops, The Two Ronnies, Morecombe and Wise and the Queens speech.

So today I thought I would look through select listings to see how much things have changed over the years. Each image is a high resolution one so you can zoom in and scan them for yourself if you wish.

TV Quick - 1991

This was a time when satellite television was in it's infancy and television adverts were paying the way for some decent programs. The BBC was reasonably funded, all shown by the reliance on new programs rather than repeats. BBC1 had gone for a classic line up with Noels Christmas Presents to make sure you weep over your turkey, a classic 1984 Two Ronnies, Top of the Pops of course, Only Fools and Horses, Christmas Generation Game and Keeping Up Appearances. In the 90's that was a comedy overload. guaranteed to be a family pleaser. Interestingly the main film Batman was shown at the great time of 6:00pm, you will see this change over the years as they use films to plug gaps and save money. More noticeably is a lack of an Eastenders death misery show.

BBC2 was always a little bit more highbrow though, Wizard of Oz for the masses then Steven Sondheim's Into The Woods, La Clemenza Di Tito, Zeor De Conduite and that classic L'Atalante. Don't know what any of those are but they sound impressive at swanky parties.

ITV always did a bit of a mish mash programming. Christmas on Children's Ward was a direct assault on Noels BBC slot, both vying for the most Christmas tears. They decided to show eight movies through the day, thats around fourteen hours leaving only ten for decent stuff. The obligatory Bond movie was there and there was one or two classics. Minder for instance, I lied about being one or two classics, we will just leave it at none I think. Poor ITV, they even extended Coronation Street to cope.

Channel 4 was still reasonably new and still experimenting at Christmas but the classic stalwart The Snowman was still there having been shown every year since it's creation. Nothing particularly Christmassy from them apart from a program I really wished I had seen, The Ghosts Of Oxford Street where Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren tours the underbelly of London accompanied by a diverse selection of music. A understated classic bit of programming made just for the hell of it. Status Quo was probably a mistake at 7:00pm, come to think of it they are probably a mistake at any time.

Not a bad year, the traditional TV Christmas I remembered was just hanging on by a thread though.

TV Quick - 1995

The first and most obvious is a mid morning film on BBC 1 and repeats from 6:00am - 9:25am. Fools and Horses was in there but as a repeat only, Top of the Pops was starting to look a little ropey as we headed towards 2000 and the very poor Auntie's Brand New Bloomers wasn't even funny before it became brand new. Terry Wogan looked pained and the clips of Eastender actors fluffing the same line over and over again quickly wore thin just like Wogans toupee. It looked a little brighter though after the misery of Pat Butcher trying to top herself in Eastenders at 7:30pm when we had specials of Keeping Up Appearances and the classic One Foot In The Grave. I don't believe it. Bet you said that in Victor Meldrews voice didn't you?

BBC2 Still tried hard to be high brow and nearly managed it with the witty Alan Bennet at 9:00pm, an Opera and a program about the National Trust. Top Gears Rally Special looked a little inappropriate amongst it all, maybe it should have been took outside and shot. Ooo, a controversial joke, sorry 'bout that.

ITV really couldn't decide on what Christmas to give us. Eight movies again padded everything out, Coronation Street had started the Christmas disaster season with an hour and a half of prime time slots all about Steve McDonald losing his legs or something. Robson and Jerome, with a very dodgy photo, was supposed to be good fodder for us. Maybe for a bonfire yes but in 1995 they were apparently a 'pop phenomenon' which is probably creative writing at it's best. Can you believe the cheek of it, they even included their own Christmas message, just like the Queen, sheesh!

Channel 4 tried to rescue us with The Snowman again, which I don't mind, especially the bit where he tries the false teeth in, snigger. But the decline was setting in, four films padded everything out and repeats from 6:45am - 12:25pm was shameless. Coping With Christmas at 5:45 was an entertaining diversion but overall shoddy.

What's On TV - 2000

Oh, my BBC 1 we are now up to five films a day, repeats from 5:30-10:00am and still flogging the dying horse of Top of the Pops that was looking so outdated now we all had discovered MTV. Satellite channels had started to come of age so the money shifted away from the terrestrial broadcasters and the film became the replacement choice for all those specially commissioned programs that made Christmas past more family orientated fun. Eastenders double programs piled on the misery with cheating, fighting and arguing for what now is an acceptable part of Christmas viewing, the soap shock. It was all a pretty sparse affair with only Victoria Wood and The Royle Family propping up the failing listings. Oh, and Titanic was on, I'll spoil it for you will I. It sinks.

BBC2 come to my rescue. Sorry can't do that it replied I'm too busy showing seven films and repeats, although I do have a not very Christmassy documentary about Alfred Brendel. Don't forget the very festive westerns I'm showing too.

ITV that bastion of averageness struck back with another uninspiring set of shockers which basically can be boiled down to repeat, film, sad program, Bond film, sad soap, TV clip program, Chris Tarrant, sad soap, Christ Tarrant, film, repeat, film and film. It's even worse when you realise that You've Been Framed at Christmas not only contains everything you have seen before but it was also hosted by Lisa Riley. Remember, this was the dark days before Harry Hill, called the Wilderness Riley Years.

Channel 4 please, please, please be good and put something nice on. Noooooo! No Snowman! You @1%$"£! That's torn it, my Christmas ruined. Damn you, cheer me up. Not really trying are you with repeats from 5:50am-4:45pm and a cheap film thrown in. The especially unchristmassy Joan of Arc documentary about a woman who gets burnt at the stake is not very family frinedly is it? Apart from that jolly bit of programming I think I would be best looking at the relatively new kid on the block, channel 5.

Ooo, a new channel to look at. Hmm, I see they have picked up the ways of the wicked already with repeats from 6:00am-1:35pm and I don't think The Oprah Winfrey Show, the awful Fort Boyard complete with baddie and part time webcam porn victim, allegedly, Leslie Grantham. National Lampoons Christmas Vacation is the big movie, a movie that had already been shown year upon year which i don't mind as it's one of my favourites but according to my magazines each year it's reviewed and starred differently. This year it has two ticks, last year it had one star and the word dire in it's review but three years later it's got four stars and great family fun. Go figure. Channel 5 you get a D-, must try harder.

TV Choice - 2002
Hmm, can this year be any better? Well, I think the BBC decided that they had maybe gone a little too far so they slashed the films down to four, I say slashed they just played repeats from 6:00am - 10:00am then decided to show exactly the same film as they did two Christmases earlier and again Top of the Pops, yawn. But we did get Bargain Hunt Christmas Special with mahogany David Dickenson, Ground Force Christmas Special with Alan and Charlie's Dimmocks on show, The Big Impression, Only Fools And Horses and French And Saunders before they resorted to chocolate oranges. Not bad BBC, a little better, can the rest follow suit?

BBC2 , a few choice repeats but I can overlook that because you have been quite Christmassy with It's a Wonderful 'Every time a bell rings an angel gets it's wings...sob, sniff' Life, Lesley Garret at Christmas, A Gilbert and Sullivan film, Swan Lake and Bing Crosby. A nice return to the high brow BBC2 of many years ago.

Come on ITV show us what you are made of. At first glance, and that's all it deserves, it looks decidedly average. Only three films but one is Thunderball for the umpteenth time and the other is Jaws, ideal Christmas viewing if you say Ho,Ho Ho,Ho Ho,Ho,Ho,Ho,Ho,Ho and pretend your Santa Jaws. It's a year of doubles you cheap channel. Blind Date on twice, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? twice and two hours of some of the most depressing soap stories ever. Coronation Street has a serial killer trying to murder Emily Bishop and in Emmerdale Louise somebody kills somebody to leave a body. In other news on the same day Jamie dies after being hit by a car, in Family Affairs a bout of violence leaves another body at the bottom of the stairs, in Hollyoaks everybody gets off with everybody and a murderer is after somebody called Mandy, as for Home and Away Vinnie gets banged up for two years in the slammer, thats a long time not to bend down for the soap. Merry Christmas.

Channel 4 what's on? No Snowman again! A so, so collection of middling films but a nice comedic end with The Osbornes, The Real Derek and Clive of Round The Horn fame and V Graham Norton. I forgive them everything though as they are showing Bagpuss and the Clangers in the morning.

Just Channel 5 left, have they learnt anything? No. In fact the opposite as after a reasonable start with a mixture of repeated semi-Christmas stuff they believe that Christmas Day s night should be all about war and destruction with a WWII themed night. You too can sit there in your Santa hat stuffed full of turkey and learn all about the Desert Rats or the most deadliest flying aces in the war. Nice.

Christmas television has changed such a lot, the internet, digital broadcasting and video on demand will continue, the Christmas television will keep getting worse, with this year being particularly dire, and we will all still complain about it till the end of time. Television is of it's day, you cannot recreate what has gone just accept it for what it is, the only tinge of sadness that I have is that never again will the Christmas television be looked forward too, enjoyed by all the family and treated as a special event by the broadcasters. The age of shoddy schedules has truly come of age.

1st

2012-01-01T11:29:00.003Z

2012 is the year of the Lost Impossimals, a project that has taken three years, 32 paintings, 100 pages of stories, the invention of not only of a Victorian explorer but also a museum, reams of aged documents, anatomy charts, timelines, maps and a complete Impossimal Twistory in the form of the Impossimalsaurus Giganticus to get to this stage. Unleashed at the beginning of February I promise to keep you entertained through 2012 with select appearances up and down the country telling tales of daring do, unbelievable coincidences and how the small biscuit you hold in your hand and dunk in your tea came into being. In short it's going to be an Impossimal ride, don't forget to join us on the way!

Last night and into the early hours of this morning we said goodbye to 2011 with a little fun party, Piñatas, fireworks, friends and food all played their part but Jayne couldn't help rescuing little donkey from his beating.

We did have a few special guests turn up, although how Louis Walsh got through the door I'll never know and yes, Simon Cowell does wear his belt high. Great fun.

Hope you all had a great night too, both me and Jayne wish you a great 2012 and look forward to meeting you all later on in the year when we start to make Twistory!

Full Steam Ahead

2011-12-31T13:16:00.001Z

Not much left for me to say this year apart from a big thank you to everyone for another incredible Impossimal year. It's had it's ups and downs just like any other, been hard work at times and very memorable at others, non more so than growing from two to five with the addition of Jura, Iona and Aaran and the building of Bunnyopolis.

January was appearance time for us with events around the country, February I announced our partnership with Suppertime Entertainment in L.A. and released several new pieces. By March I painted my last ever canvas and switched to board, attended a school reunion and changed my website.

April was a mixed month, a royal wedding, Easter, Grumpits and Jayne was finally immortalised in the painting 'My First Toyfriend'. May thundered in bringing with it two new additions, Iona and Jura, we attended the Chelsea Flower Show and released a Summer of Impossimal fun with three box canvases. By June though the Big Giveaway had began ending when I gave away nearly £5000 of prizes and I had my fastest selling original (that I know about), it lasted a whopping 60 seconds before being snapped up.

July wasn't as scorching weather wise as it should have been but I still managed to produce a new set of oil sketches, I researched iced lollies and tried to rebond Iona and Jura after they fell out over a string toy, a solution was around the corner though in the form of Aaran, their brother who we first saw at Fat Fluffs Summer Event. By August I had made a bread slicer, found rude vegetables, spent some time in Britain's most soiled toilet and we now had all three bunnies back with us as friends forever.

September can be described in one word 'Bunnyopolis', the gigantic undertaking to build our three new bunnies the ultimate environment for them to be bunnies. We also managed to cram in a masked ball, lots of paintings and the first ever digital Mission Impossimal magazine. October was fireworks, fairs, chillies, holes, soup and a return to meet Oreo and friends with Walking With Impossimals.

November - Pickled eggs, mushrooms, traffic signs, Mr Mangle, lots and lots of walking all topped off with a new redesign of the website and lots more preparation work for the Lost Impossimals. December, well, was December and now it's nearly finished.

So, quite simply, I hope you all have a great night tonight and wish you all an even better 2012 full of health, wealth and happiness. See you next year!

iHot

2011-12-30T16:59:00.000Z

Don't know why I didn't show you the full painting I was working on yesterday as it's not part of anything I'm doing next year so here it is. Half of the under painting is done (left) with a lot still to do on the other side. After that's complete it will take a few days to dry then I paint it all again, this time using as many glazes as possible to really bring out the depth. On the right I still need to add a signpost, castle, Zoltar machine, a giant robot, a snorkle, two business figures and several hundred flagstones. Every item has been designed to test my painting, from the plastic bag to stone and onto grass, metal, fur, smoke and water.

I'm determined to get it completed in the next week, probably needs around another 70-100 hours work before I'm happy with it.

Whats this? A funky new gadget from Apple? Maybe an iDAB Radio or, let me guess, a iPod Maxi Mini?

No, it's the controller from our latest electric blanket. How sad is this. Our electric blanket died a while back and after pondering on it's replacement we finally decided on a Dreamland Intelliheat. When we opened it up, which in itself is a nightmare as you are praying you have the correct one because as soon as you pop the seal it becomes unhygienic and the shop will refuse to take it back if it's wrong, out popped the controllers.

I thought for one minute that our new funky electric blanket came with a built in iPod for soothing music to send you to sleep as it gradually toasts your nether regions, but no, in looks it's there, in practice it's, well, it sucks.

All this fancy design and you use a good old fashioned switch on the back to turn it on with a clunk. The dial is NOT touch sensitive and you have to press the left button on the front to move a feeble LED light across the numbers. The other button, with a clock on, it merely switches between a timer that does either one hour or nine hours, not exactly the most flexible of things.

So my dreams of fancy technology entering the bed heating department shrivel away, I can imagine the meeting that took place to design this thing probably went something like this.

'Right Simpkins, we need to make electric blankets cool for the kids, we all know they are only for the old and incontinent, although if you are incontinent and you left the blanket on you won't be getting any older, but that's beside the point. Any ideas?'

'Erm, how about making them go up to eleven, you know, just like that film Spinal Tap, kids dig that stuff man.'

'Step out of the 70's Simpkins and get the word on the street like I does. Innit. What we need is some kind of gadget, something like that Ben 27 or whatever it is that kids watch nowadays, something cool that will make them want an electric blanket to go together with their Bob the Bender cover and quilt case'

'It's Bob the Builder Sir.'

'Oh, what was I thinking of?'

'Don't know Sir, lets leave it there.'

''Come on man, think!'

'What about that 'i; stuff thing?, you know Sir the iPud, all the kids have them.'

'Hmm, you could be on to something there. iPud, isn't that the touch thingy that plays tapes in stereo?'

'Thats a Walkman Sir. No, the iPud plays music but I don't know how, let me get one up on the screen. Fire up the IBM 1512 and the 2400 baud modem Miss Moneypurse I'm going to surf the t'internet for a picture.'

'Great idea Simpkin, you really know your technology, you will be telling me you have a Casio calculator next'

'There Sir, that's an iPud. Hmm, it says it's got a touch screen, plays music and looks cool'

'That's exactly what we need Simpkins, the only problem is we don't know how to do any of that clever stuff. What now?'

'I have it Sir, take the cheap controller we have used for the last hundred years and we will get a cheap plastic cover made by peasants for a pittance to fit over it that looks like an iPud. The beauty of it is when the punter opens up the electric blanket and finds this cheap bit of shoddyness hiding our old controller and realise that nothing works as it should it's too late. The blanket is contaminated and they cannot return it, we could even use a photo of the plastic controller to sell it too. It's a win, win!'

'Genius Simpkins, this year you can have all Christmas Day off, just make sure your in extra early the next day'

Nice

2011-12-29T16:24:00.000Z

It's not very often you get to paint a baby shaving but today I have been doing just that as part of a old fashioned television showing an even older Gillette commercial. The scene this has been placed in is turning out more and more surreal every day I work on it.

To be fair it's been a painting that I should have finished by now, it's been going on for a year, the only other to achieve that record was 'How Deep Is Your Love', which also had the distinction of being saved from the rubbish bin by Jayne. I had tired of the idea and couldn't see where to take it, Jayne stopped me destroying it, I finished it and it went on to become a best seller. Strange.

Still, no stranger than the current piece on my easel that this photo is taken from, it's a snapshot of the divide between two worlds, ours and the Lost Impossimals. It's not part of the up and coming releases but more of a glimpse into the next five years, the Lost Impossimals you see will form the foundation of an important body of work along side the Impossimals. So for the rest of the Twixmas (between Christmas and New Year) I'm trying to finish this piece to provide the bridge from one world in 2011 (Impossimals) to the new world in 2012 (Lost Impossimals) and what a corker it's turning out to be.

Shedder

2011-12-28T14:01:00.001Z

What a nightmare moving the tree was. It all looked so innocent and nice when it first arrived, the decorations looked perfect with twinkling lights, gold and red baubles and the traditional angel on top. Underneath though it was a different matter.

It was classed as a shed proof tree, a claim that was put to the test after the first day when we noticed at least fifty needles on the carpet, so yesterday when we moved it to another room ready for New Years Eve we were not surprised to find this lot underneath. The worse thing was getting it from one room to the next whilst minimising the mess. The tree is huge, just under nine foot high and at it's widest spans eight feet. All this to fit through a normal doorway. Messy.

After stripping it of baubles we manhandled it to the door. The door frame proved a little too much for it and with a flourish sent another thousand needles to the floor, this is even after excessive watering to help. The mess was awesome and carried on down the steps into the conservatory.

Either side of this it had emptied millions of needles into the plants, each of which needed a good vacuum out after.

Safely in place leaving behind in it's wake possibly the largest amount of needles I have ever seen. The Dyson struggled and we had to empty the dust bag three times along the way. Remind me not to do this again next year.

Safely in place and ready to redecorate, it looked quite nice too when everything was back on it. As you can see Bunnyopolis stands behind it so last night when the lights were switched on it became a monument of bunny wonder as all three sat on the grass pondering the significance of it's flashy lights whilst we sat pondering why on earth did we decide to move it.

Queen Goes Berserk On TV

2011-12-27T11:16:00.000Z

My spiced brussel experiment didn't put anyone in hospital so Christmas day passed without incident and I even had time to make fresh bread for teatime to go with the ham. It's probably the first full day too that I haven't done something creative, apart from creatively inflate my stomach that is. TV as usual was a mish mash of tosh designed to addle the brain a little and place us all in a narcotic slumber for the afternoon.

It was good of the Queen to take time away from her family on this special day to deliver a message to us all, I'm joking of course, I know it's pre-recorded, it's about time she did a rap version.

so instead of this :

"In this past year my family and I have been inspired by the courage and hope we have seen in so many ways in Britain, in the Commonwealth and around the world.

We've seen that it's in hardship that we often find strength from our families; it's in adversity that new friendships are sometimes formed; and it's in a crisis that communities break down barriers and bind together to help one another.

we could have this :

"Family is dope, wit courage and hope, bin cruisin the world in a big black jag, son shacked up with a nag faced hag."

"On the streets they be hatin, no longer a riot, let one be quiet. Queenies gonna require more than bein hard, dress in the right attire so ain't no need fo' a body guard. I listen to people but they ain't listen back so I address the press by startin an attack"

"If it ain't for the gin I wouldn't sin, from my regal crib full of stacks of quid, all you players and ho's, I rule, you don't. Merry Christmas motherhookers, word out."

Not quite sure if it would come across as the same message but she could even wear her best tiara to bling the broadcast up and arrive in a Hummer, getting out in slo-mo whilst large bottomed women slapped their behinds and scantily clad men thrust their hips in her direction. Prince Phillip could do all the 'Yo, bitch' stuff in between and the rest of the royals could form her 'crew'. William and Harry could play pimps I suppose, bit stuck on where Camilla would come in.

Anyway, you can tell I have been too long away from the blog as I'm rambling a little so lets get on with today's entry.

Christmas day at Bunnyopolis and Santa is about to surprise Aaran, Iona and Jura with his presents. Oh, before I forget, did any of you see the new 'Jim I'll Fix It'? Shane Ritchie wasn't too bad, bit of a blast from the past, still prefer old Jim though.

In no time at all the paper had been demolished, carrots eaten and they all got to wear, reluctantly, their bows for a few seconds at least. We returned indoors and opened our presents which were all quite practical this year apart from one hideous item that I would even be ashamed to put on eBay or give to charity never mind on the blog, so we will just leave that one alone for now and just say for the record solar lit plastic animal garden ornaments are not for the sane.

Today though we have the task of moving the Christmas tree in preparation for New Years Eve. This year it's been an absolute pain, real trees normally survive quite well with a good watering and we have saved many over the year that still grow in the garden. This one though has a mission to lose every needle before 2012, you only have to walk near it and it drops 1623 in one go. I know spraying it with hairspray would stop it shedding but the idea of a tree full of flammable product and hot lights is a little unnerving. One short circuit, a large whoosh and you would have a towering inferno sat in the corner melting baubles and shedding burning needles like little flaming arrows in the world of the borrowers.

So our solution is to take it somewhere cooler and try to acclimatise it to life back outside, the only problem is getting it through the door, it's eight foot wide at the base and nine foot long. This is going to be interesting, wish me luck.

Naughty Or Nice?

2011-12-24T11:19:00.001Z

I bet most of you are waiting like my Impossimal for bedtime today, for it's tonight that a man sticks his big bottom into your chimney and shimmies down to fill your stockings. That really doesn't sound nice does it, I'll try again.

For tonight is the night a stranger dressed in fancy dress breaks into your bedroom to fill your sack. Damn! Again too sordid. Last chance.

For tonight a bearded fat bloke enters your house unannounced, eats your food, drinks all your drink then stumbles up to your bedroom looking to fill something with his special surprise.

I give up. Instead here's a *handy guide for the wrapping any gift.

1. Find nice attractive paper and place on floor.
2. Roll out paper so it's flat.
3. Re-roll out the paper because you forgot to place something on it to stay rolled out.
4. Re-roll out paper because the roll of sellotape wasn't heavy enough to hold it down.
5. Curse.
6. With all four corners pinned down with things from the kitchen cupboard place present in centre.
7. Forgot to mention, cut the paper to correct estimated size first, now go back to no.1
8. Remove the tin of soup that is holding down one corner and pull it over the present.
9. Mend tear in paper where the weight of other tin of soup caused the paper to rip.
10. Remove second tin you should have removed before.
11. Re-roll out paper that has curled up again and kneel on it.
12. You removed the wrong tin, not the one to your left but the one on the right, that's it, that one.
13. Take the now unpinned edge of the paper and pull over present
14. Repair holes in paper where it has ripped on the corners of the present.
15. Carefully pull out a piece of sellotape whilst holding paper in place.
16. Try that again this time with the scissors in reach and remove bits of tape that accidentally stuck to the paper repairing any holes made along the way.
17. Carefully pull out sellotape whilst holding paper in place, hold tape in mouth while you use the scissor to cut required length.
18. Find your medical box and put something on you freshly cut lip.
19. Try again, only this time, I forgot to add this previously so sorry about that, pre-cut your sellotape and stick it somewhere in strips ready to use.
20. Remove fluff from sellotape, the armchair was not a good idea to stick it to until you needed it.
21. Stick first edge down carefully.
22. Just remembered this too, you should have released the other side of the paper so the two meet across the present. How did I forget that? Back to step 1 I'm afraid, only this time do step 2-13 for the other side too.
23. Get into a blind rage and throw present and sellotape across the room.
24. Retrieve both items and calm down dear, it's only Christmas.
25. Have large drink, I'm not talking about tea either.
26. Try to focus and try steps 1-22 again remembering to do steps 2-13 twice.
27. Not twice, once. You have already done them, doing it twice would mean you release three sides and then you are in trouble.
28. Not easy wrapping is it. Let's start again and forget steps 1-27
29. Get present.
30. Buy a bag bigger than present.
31. Put present in bag and give to recipient.
32. Swear that this is the last time your messing about at Christmas, eat twice your body weight in food during Christmas dinner and get blind drunk before the Queens speech.
33. Sleep in chair.
34. Suddenly wake up and salute as you hear the National Anthem then slump back down and doze.
33. Wake up at 4pm with a distended stomach, reach to your left and polish off that box of chocolates that have been teasing you cheekily all day.
34. 4:03pm feel hungry and wobble your way into the kitchen looking for Christmas fayre.
35. Return back to your seat with a plate piled high with enough food to last a week.
36. Watch James Bond film on TV for 28th time.
37. Denounce Christmas television as rubbish and announce you prefer Boxing Day anyway and you can't see what all the fuss is about.
38. Eat more chocolate, drink more drink.
39. Repeat 38 until 40 is achieved.
40. Wobble around the room and with the breath of a thousand breweries declare your love for everyone, even the cat.
41. Repeat stages 32-40 on Boxing Day and New Years Eve, deleting unnecessary bits accordingly
and putting the emphasis on more drink for New Years.
42. Return to work in January declaring that Christmas was rubbish.
43. January 5th join Gym.
44. July 5th, realise you have been paying for gym membership for six months without ever visiting it.
45. August 15th, Look in shops for the first signs of Christmas.
46. August 20th, you see a large box of Quality Street and get excited.
47. In September swear you will be more organised this year and it will be the best yet.
48. December 24th, rush around like an idiot through throngs of crowds swiping anything within grasp as presents.
49. Go to no.1 and start wrapping.
50. Explain for the rest of the year why you bought an iRon instead of an iPad and console children when they unwrapped a packet of Brussels instead of Moshi Monsters.
51. Repeat everything until you are old and you can sit back and let somebody do all of it.

*only handy for gifts that are perfectly square, using precut paper and wrapped by a professional. Not recommended for any other shape or cats. Guidelines only, no responsibility for individual interpretation or quality of Christmas suggested.

Hope that helps you with those last minute preparations, no need to thank me.

Anyway, today we are secret Santa's for the residents of Bunnyopolis so don't tell Aaran, Jura and Iona what they are getting if you see them.

We found three nice juicy home grown carrots, trimmed off the tops (they can have that separately) and carefully wrapped them ready for Christmas morning.

I'm sure they will never ever guess what they are, as a bonus they all get a rosette to wear too and some paper string to play with.

Wherever or whoever or whatever you are reading this rubbish have a great Christmas from all of us and the blog will return on the 27th with a New Year rundown of 2011.

Have fun!

Peter, Jayne and the bunnies in Bunnyopolis, Aaran, Jura and Iona.

Driven To Deliver

2011-12-23T12:43:00.002Z

I recently completed a commission that shows all the different stages involved in creating the latest Impossimal pieces and today I thought I would show you behind the scenes of this special piece.

The brief was quite simple, two characters interacting in a special way. To do this though, as with all commissions, you need to understand the client a little. Pretty soon I had a idea in my mind that was a little ambitious, but then again all the best are. Firstly I needed to build a car to match a photo of a car that was needed in the piece. Taking measurements from the car photo I replicated the dimensions in plasticine and modelled it's occupants. A light was angled at the right place to catch the shadow, then I placed a cut out version of the supplied photo in front and took a picture.

As you can see it now looks like the occupants are actually in the car even though the car is a 2D photo.

This was blown up to the size of the wooden board I had chosen, chalked on the back and then transferred onto the board.

It's looked awful and my heart sank, this was going to be difficult, so I started very simply with the heads.

Using the photograph I got everyone in place, this was the easy bit as Impossimals are now second nature to paint, but the rest of it required a more careful approach.

First I masked over areas of grills and metalwork so I could concentrate on the bodywork. I wanted a heavy sheen on the final piece so this had to go down first and get left to dry. A week of glazing later gave me a shiny body.

Then I could work on the details, badges, wing mirrors, headlights and such were all painted over the now pristine bodywork. A glaze was added to the characters and the flapping scarf gave movement.

The final touch was the background followed by another few days of careful glazing to bring out all the colours. Little details include a personalised badge and several key items in the distance behind the car. Notice how the making of the model helped me to get the shadow from the metalwork around the windscreen to fall correctly over the occupants.

A great piece that was incredibly fun to do and even better it's new owners sent me a nice e-mail after it's unveiling last night, happy times.

It's Crate

2011-12-22T15:35:00.000Z

Now that Aaran, Jura and Iona are a lot more grown up, although not quite at their full weight according to the manuals, the pet transporter we bought especially for transfers to and from the vets, an inevitable thing as they require injections against VHD and Myxomatosis every year, no longer supports their weight. After placing them in the medium dog transporter we purchased, the floor collapsed and the door popped out. Not ideal I assure you. I think it may have been Iona that tipped the balance as she does like her food.

So this morning I pulled out all the old bits of wood we had left over, dismantled a small gate and started to rebuild a new bunny transporter of delights.

It's not pretty, but it's strong, reasonably light, easy to load bunnies into through it's top opener, has sturdy handles built from an old crate so me and Jayne can lug it around easily and it's perfectly sized to accommodate the cover we use to avoid unwanted attention. Although lugging around a box the size of a chest freezer stuffed full of three bunnies the size of dogs does tend to create attention, wanted or not.

As usual, bunnies one, two and three, were suitably unimpressed and more interested in this Spring like weather judging by their binkies this morning. Although last night we did have synchronised bunny collapsing. For those that have never seen this it's a little unnerving at first, bunny will just stop then drop, just like they have died on the spot. A few seconds later you will see them wriggle a bit and smile. It's bunnies way of telling you they are so happy they couldn't be more happy if they were Mr Happy from Happytown, Happyland on planet Happy in the Universe of Delight.

Not sure if they will feel that way when they get to try it out though!

De-clutter

2011-12-21T17:44:00.000Z

I'm getting close to finishing the updated and simpler website, so close in fact that it may actually be up and running as we speak. I decided to do away with all the pages and bring it in line with the social networking sites so not only does the site look cleaner but it also has the same theme carried on through everything. One page, and one click to smoothly scroll around, completely uncluttered, and for the first time ever, no gallery to view my work.

Instead this little image above is from the small history area, each one you click on gives you a very brief run down of the major event of that year with a little photograph. 2002 is interesting as it shows the first ever Impossimal sketches I did at work all those years ago whilst 2012 brings you right up to date with the Lost Impossimals. I was quite amazed to see how the work had progress through the years and to think I have been working with the Impossimals for this long is more than a little amazing, the thing is, I still enjoy it as much, if not more so, than I have ever done before.

Just the Lost Impossimals site to complete, after deciding to redesign it yet again, although you will get a better teaser page tomorrow that hints at the enormity of the task it took to get it this far. To think I started work on it three years ago it's almost too unbelievable to think that we are so close to it's launch. Only today I have being working on the authentic look of the limited editions making sure every detail has been meticulously checked, which only made me more excited than ever and to think Santa is coming later this week too is almost too much. lol

Calendar Conundrums

2011-12-20T14:42:00.000Z

I know a lot of you are disappointed that there is not going to be an Peter Smith calendar this year, so I thought I would pile the disappointment on a little more and let you know it's going to be at least two years before we go back to publishing it. A couple of things prompted the change this year, the first was out of my hands and included the changing of the calendar publisher Browntrout, the timing of which made it too late for us to submit a selection of images to be included, the second, unfortunately, was the availability of mounted calendar prints that have been flooding auction sites over the last two years.

This year the levels have increased to become almost unbearable. I keep track of the auction sites quite regularly and at it's peak a month ago out of 265 'Peter Smiths' available in the art category 189 happened to be mounted calendar prints at an average price of £15 each, some were even asking for £40. That's a staggering 71% of the items listed. To put this in context the 189 divided by the amount of calenders needed to supply that market came to 16, or approximately £150 worth. If they all sold they netted the individuals just under £3000 for quite simply cutting out an image and putting a pre-cut mount around it, quite a return. Over the course of a twelve month study I noted a trade of approximately £28,000 worth of calendar mounted goods.

It takes a lot of time and effort to put the calendar together that requires thirteen originals to be created so it remains unique and apart from the limited editions. My idea was, because I understand that limited editions are expensive, that for less than £10 you could own thirteen of my Impossimal images every year. If you wanted then to frame them for your own personal use that again is no problem. I remain disappointed that the calendar has had to be withdrawn for a while and I hope that you understand, hopefully after a few years it will start to diminish.

On a happier note there will be a nice shiny new range of greeting cards, all with 'Not For Commercial Framing' emblazoned on the reverse, which will be difficult to ignore and at least gives me something valid to point out, that will see you through the no calendar months ahead. I'm still working on the entire range but it will consist of old favourites and some brand spanking never before seen images all on a new redesigned art card. 2012 may not have a calendar to tell you the date but I'll try and fill it with new Impossimals, a fantastic brochure, a great tour and at all the coming appearances, plenty of fun!

Eat Your Greens

2011-12-19T14:43:00.002Z

For this Christmas days meal I have decided to experiment with possibly one of the most controversial parts of the meal - the humble sprout. Love it or hate it the sprout or brussel, depending on how culinary comfortable you are, has been with us since the 13th century and possibly earlier if the Roman stories are true, so today after 800 years of history I thought I would have a go at sexing the humble sprout up a little.

It all started a few weeks ago when I had one for the first time in a curry at a friend house, I like brussels anyway but adding it to a curry was a new one for me. So, queue today and my experiments at using Indian spices to get some unusual flavours out of them in preparation for Christmas day, the only thing is we are not telling Jaynes mother about them until she has tried one, a bit naughty I know, but hey, it's Christmas!

I divided the brussels into three piles of four. The first was going to get fried in ground cumin and coriander seeds with a touch of chilli powder to give a little heat. Batch number two was to be fried in black masala, a coconut flavoured selection of spices with a little heat. The final batch I decided to do in panch phoran, which is basically a mix of whole seeds including fenugreek, mustard, fennel, cumin and nigella seeds.

I fried them all together in little puddles saving me washing the pan each time and drained them on some kitchen roll. Jayne joined me and we tried number one. My mistake was to use a very strong chilli powder, the brussel burnt it's way around my mouth before making a trail of a Back To The Future style flame down my throat to slowly simmer in my stomach. Wow. Bit strong that one, I shall call it the Brussel Bombe.

After cooling down our mouths we popped in Number two, a little more gingerly this time. I would have loved to say that coconut is the perfect accompaniment to a sprout but it really wasn't cut out for the job. The spicing was nice though, it just made you feel slightly queasy and prone to gip unexpectedly. Barf Brussel would seem appropriate.

Finally it was the panch phoran, the whole seeds had popped and fizzed away before launching themselves all over the kitchen so I wasn't expecting much from this. I was wrong, it was great, the oil had absorbed lots of the lovely spice taste and imparted them into the sprout. I shall proudly call this the winner, name it the Bengali Brussel and market it on a global scale. Well, actually I won't but I will be serving this one for Christmas dinner.

You never know, I might play a little Brussel roulette and pop one of the Brussel Bombe's in there as an ice breaker.

So if you find me in A&E on Christmas day with Jaynes mother then you know who won.

Can I Look In Your Drawers?

2011-12-18T12:50:00.001Z

I suppose most people have a drawer like this in their kitchen where assorted oddities collect, quite often willy nilly and often a little messy too but this drawer is the most commonly used one in our kitchen as it contains not only the keys to Bunnyopolis but other useful stuff as we shall see. When I was growing up I always used to be fascinated by what was in other peoples drawers, still am actually, over the years though I have seen a few shockers. Drawers full of utility bills, receipts and such whilst others I have witnessed have been filled with old mismatched utensils and broken light bulbs. Our's is a modest affair though, a single drawer, one of only two, the other being a large one that's neat and tidy holding all our cutlery and looks like this.

Here's our oddities draw, actually that's incorrect as everything in it has a use and probably nothing in it is particularly odd, well apart from that obvious Chicken Tonight pot.

Bottom right is the essentials, keys, notepads, sticky notes and a selection of pens for when you are on the phone and need to take notes, a couple of hand creams and lip balms, also essential when handling water and cleaning Bunnyopolis in cold weather. So bottom right is the everyday stuff. One thing we always have to hand is the little pencil case at the top right, it's a mini toolkit. Inside the pencil case is a fine selection of screwdrivers in various sizes, a Stanley knife, scissors and assorted screws, hooks, battery testers and fuses, everything you need for the simple jobs around the house.

Bottom left is a tin, holding in no particular order clips for both hair and food bags, separated of course, wouldn't want a hair clip to seal a piece of salmon in a freezer bag, likewise a food bag clip does not make for a stylish hair accessory. Assorted batteries, a slim calculator, tape measure, glue and a 'Chicken Tonight' pot from many years ago that has now found it's home holding an even bigger selection of fuses should we suddenly get the urge to replace every single on in the house at the same time. Above all this is a red handled gas lighter and twelve different packets of One Aromatics incense with a oval burner. It's not that we smell, it's just a delightful selection that we use all year, rotating different perfumes as we go through the seasons. As it's nearly Christmas we are currently using our favourite stick - Ambrosia.

And that's it. Nothing spectacular, just a selection of everyday stuff. I have shown you mine do you dare show me yours?

iFinish

2011-12-17T12:07:00.000Z

It's officially the busiest shopping day of the year today and probably the best reason to stay in the studio, last year we were on tour and boy was it busy. My alternative day was to complete my last painting before Christmas, a task I have just managed with the inclusion of this wonderful heart.

Every year I try and improve on them and I think this is probably the best yet and even better it's all from memory rather than using a model. You will notice it's perched on something, well, to find out what it is you are going to have to wait another nine months I'm afraid, yes, really that long as these paintings are destined for September 2012. Four down twenty more to go.

iBun - There's an hop for that

Christmas is hotting up in Bunnyopolis, they now have a nice Christmas wreath on the door and Aaran, Jura and Iona have started on the brussels early being the impatient bunnies they are, although Aaran looks less then impressed being used as a new iPhone accessory even though I have told him that Bunnyopolis has WiFi, he still refuses to learn to surf the net.

This afternoon I will be back in the studio tidying things up and photographing lot's of macaroons, real ones this time not the plasticine ones I made, for a painting along the lines of 'So It's Not Fancy Dress', not sure if it will work or even if all the macaroons will make it through the photo session. Probably not.

I can hear them calling.

Nom,nom,nom.

Shaker Maker

2011-12-16T16:18:00.003Z

After deciding to have a completely blog free day yesterday I carried on in the studio painting lots and lots of hearts. Not the big red kind but more of a gold kind and not a hint of gold paint in sight. I'm working on a shower of gold hearts, no sniggering back there and no mentioning of shower and golden in the same sentence please, this is a respectable blog. Keep it clean, there's a child's bike outside.

Anyway, the hearts have taken up most of the day as each one took around five minutes to get right, I even measured the distance to the shadow cast on the wall behind them to get it super accurate. The do look quite pretty, a little blob of pure titanium white just added that extra highlight flourish which makes them come alive. It's all part of a painting that at the moment is just called 'Celebration' which will probably change as I get further into it, having already taken a week to get this far it's proving to be a hard task master, forty hours was what I estimated, we are now up to sixty. Hope it's worth it.

This should be my last piece before Christmas, next week I return to the website to try and finally get that finished and up and running for the Christmas weekend. In January part of the Lost Impossimals will go live but there will be no images just a little teaser, the full site will go live the day the Lost Impossimals are unleashed, sometime in February for a guess.

More news to be added regarding many things including the new greeting art card range, the demise of the calendar for a while and more information about what's up and coming up in the Impossimal world during 2012 as everything is about to get well and truly shaken up!

Ride My Rocket

2011-12-14T13:46:00.002Z

Jaynes Birthday today so no painting and we get the chance to venture out into the big wide world for a nice day doing nice things. First on the agenda was a trip to a local market town for a little cake and coffee with a yummy buttered scone. Nom, nom, nom. The sky was blue but the wind was bitingly cold making the coffee even more welcome on this December morning.

The advantages of visiting a market town on a day like this is the excellent produce you can buy direct from the farmers. Would you believe there is seven oranges, twelve lemons, ten limes, a full brussel stem, twelve full heads of garlic, a massive savoy cabbage and thirty six large white onions for the fantastically cheap sum of eight pounds, a third of what this lot would cost in the supermarket. Bargain!

Even better was finding these little beauties. Macaroons! I know what we will be having for pudding a little later.

But now I need your help, whilst travelling along the A617 between Mansfield and Kelham at 9:40am we looked out of the window and saw this mysterious swirl of smoke in the sky.

As we watched, we as I watched, Jayne was driving you see, another smoke trail appeared looking just like a rocket had taken off. It gradually slowed and curled over plummeting back to the ground. Now I know it was Jaynes birthday but it's beyond me to organise a semi-military rocket display to celebrate and I'm sure we don't have any missile defence system around that like to occasionally 'fire one off' for a laugh.

As I watched though a few more took off, I took this picture as we whizzed along so it's a little blurred but you get the idea. They must have been going really high and where on earth did they land as they looked pretty much uncontrollable. My best guess is something to do with RAF Waddington that is over in that general direction, either that or it's our latest shot at putting a poorly named lunar rover on Mars (remember the rubbishy named Beagle Explorer? The Americans get Columbus, Apollo and Endeavour, we just name ours after a sad eyed dog) but it would be interesting to find out what they were. Any ideas?

iDla

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000Z

More dainty little details added to the painting today. It's just a suck it and see type of day with little to report other than 'I have been painting' which I suppose is what most artists days are like, unless of course your are Dali...

Thursday
14th January 1954

Got up and had a fine repast of lobsters and cheese. The donkey I had placed on the ceiling had fell off during the night and landed upon the pig I had dressed in a frock. Needless to say the pig was not happy and spoke to me in his usual way of blowing through a trumpet.

The studio door was ajar although I had closed it the night previous, I peered through expecting to see the usual flying cat and stilted elephants but instead I found myself looking straight into the back of a clock. I stepped through the door and made my way gingerly over the clockwork gears, avoiding where possible the swarms of ants around my feet. An egg slowly fried on the pendulum but I gave it not muster and blundered on.

I was not surprised to find another door inside the clock, which I opened, emerging back in my bedroom but this time on the roof. The only way I could find down was to slide down the light fitting,a difficult manoeuvre made even more so by the reappearance of the flying cat who pestered me for several minutes about the quality of his kipper.

Picking up my brush I began to paint music, wonderful colourful music that soon filled the air with singing rainbows, this distracted me somewhat and I spent a couple of hours directing them into a musical chorus that only ended when the donkey spontaneously combusted and the cat dive bombed Gala as she entered the room.

The watch on my arm melted letting me know it was time to retire. I whistled for my bed that bounded down the stairs and got in. I was asleep in seconds, I wish someday something quite wonderful and extraordinary would happen to me.

A Heart Of Gold

2011-12-12T15:24:00.002Z

Back to the painstaking task of painting fifty gold hearts on one of the latest pieces. The problem with painting gold hearts is making them look gold without resorting to gold leaf or paint. It's far trickier than it sounds, as my hearts are floating around and partly curled up too.

To get them accurate I dropped twenty gold hearts from a height in front of a lit white background and used my camera on high speed to capture them as they fell. This way I not only had the hearts but the shadows on the back wall. All this is then printed out for reference and added into my latest large cake piece with each one being painted in place.

Getting the shine to look right has been half of the challenge, I eventually opted for a 000 size brush and barely touched the edges with titanium white paint. This gave them that little twinkle I was looking for. I had just reached number 23 when I heard a thud on the door mat as the post tumbled through the letterbox.

My heart sank. It was a letter from Jack. Remember him? Mr Jack Daniels, this time giving me a free calendar. I won't bore you with why my heart sank I'll just point you here, (http://petersmithartist.blogspot.com/2010/03/mr-jd.html ) here, ( http://petersmithartist.blogspot.com/2010/07/oh-no.html ) and here ( http://petersmithartist.blogspot.com/2011/04/jacks-back.html ) to get the rest of the story.

I returned back to painting grumbling under my breath.

The WDYBMT Zone

2011-12-11T09:44:00.001Z

Hi, I'm Randolph The Rubbish Reindeer and I'm here to tell you about a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Why Did You Buy Me That Zone"

Picture the scene, a delightful Christmas morning, a dusting of snow covers the ground outside whilst a roaring log fire heats the room. 'It's a Wonderful Life' has just reached it's tear jerking climax on the television and a circle of unopened presents lay temptingly on the floor, sat in the middle is you.

Lets watch as you carefully tease the paper off the first present blissfully unaware that you have entered the The Why Did You Buy Me That Zone.

Well, I never. I have always liked fried eggs but I never knew they could be so sexy. I'll certainly be keeping a breast of things with this. Egg based hooters, whatever next, although I could do with a sausage to go with them so to speak. I wonder what the next present will be?

Oh, wow, just what I didn't want, the UGG version of Gary Glitters 'My Gang' boots. Now where shall I wear these? Unfortunately I shall not be attending any 'look like a complete pillock' event for a while so I'll just pop them somewhere safe. Like down the back of the sofa. #embarrassed

Ooo, this one feels a weird shape. What is it? Ahh, it's a handy soap dispenser, just what I always wanted, a foot high nose that snots soap, what could be better to greet me in the morning, all I need now is a tongue to go with it to wash my face and a backside shaped hand dryer for that complete unsavoury look.

This one looks fun, its a CD, I can feel the shape, what could possibly go wrong with a CD. I hope it's a chart CD, maybe Adele or Rizzle Kicks, just hope it's not Bieber. Of course not, nobody would buy me a Justin Bieber CD, at least it couldn't get any worse than that.

Oh, it has.

The only Black Lace I want is one to string these two up with. You do realise I will be humming 'Agadoo' in my head for the next hundred years don't you? And as for 'Do The Conga', well you can take your Conga and stuff it up your CENSORED.

That's got me in a bad mood now. Let's rummage around a little, ah, here's a book. Hope it's some clever comedy book or even a new best seller.

If I could express how unimpressed I am I would give it wings and make it fly past your window for the rest of your life so you could see every day how much of a flick I don't give for this. Shocking. Who bought me this? Quick, give me that big box over there, I need to unwrap something.

No, no, no. What are you saying? I'm dirty and need to clean more? You didn't even get me the optional snow plough and lawn rakes. Disappointed. This Christmas present lark is starting to suck. Cheer me up, hand me that small package, best things come in small packages.

A perfume for dogs!!! WTF! Nooooooooo! Keep calm, keep calm. Put that over there next to last years bacon toothpaste.

This feels interesting. Ooo, what is it? A designer butter dish? Hang on, what's this underneath. Batteries? Oh, I get it now, you think I'm that sad that I require a butter dish that always keeps the butter at spreadable temperatures do you? Doesn't that defeat the object that you keep butter cool to stop it going off? I ask you, really. This next one feels better, for a start it's small, feels slightly warm and a little leathery. I have been wanting a new wallet, I have certainly dropped enough hints, hope it's that nice black leather one I saw.

Gee, thanks a bunch. Now I can look a complete twit in M&S as I pull out a fiver from a slice of toast. Maybe you should buy me the custard yellow suit that goes with it. What is it with these butter obsessed presents anyway, give me something useful.

OK, admittedly it is useful should you wish to scrape fur from the back of your gullet, but a Kim Jong il tongue scraper isn't going to win you any friends is it pal, neither is your 'double whammy' present of wrapping two things together.

Cat food soap is so out of here it's practically in orbit. I'll think I'll spend the rest of Christmas using the tongue scraper to carefully carve the bar of soap into something more useful. Like the bin.

I'm getting scared now, I dare not open anything else. Hey, this one smells funny.

Nice. Now my car can smell like cheap food. Classy. Open wide Mr Bin, I have a present for you.

I speak from someone who knows their way around disappointment and consider myself a bit of an expert but even I didn't realise that I needed a clock to let me know if I should be at work or enjoying the weekend. Do you really think I'm this stupid? I give up! Next year just take your money and set light to it. No better still, save your money and set light to yourself.

Last present, please, please, please let it be either useful, beautiful or expensive.

Oh. It's a cake saw. Particularly useful if I ever need to cut a cake into floorboard lengths, I'm sure I will be the life and soul of the party when I whip this big boy out. No Black Forest Gateaux will ever be safe again.

Another year, another disappointment. A Christmas of crud. I'm left with three piles. One for the bin, the second for the charity shops and the third, well, the third I'm even too embarrassed to put it in either of the other piles.

And as for the wrapping paper. It's Christmas time, misery and whine, you should know that.

We leave you mulling over your Christmas disaster sharing your experiences with millions worldwide as collectively on the 25th December we all enter The Why Did You Buy Me That Zone.

What didn't you get this year?

Lights, Camera, No Action

2011-12-09T14:53:00.001Z

More model making today with even more sets to build out of assorted rubbish and off cuts of things. Take the above scene, it took around three hours to get right but I had to build the sink unit, craft the taps and carve out the details just so it could look pretty in the background. The towel on the edge of the bath is actually a paper handkerchief dyed in a weak acrylic solution, dipped in water and draped artistically. Again it's in the background and hardly noticeable but it's the details in paintings like this that make all the difference.

The scene I was working on today though had already taken six hours to build and involves a giant multi layer cake, two hearts and a few Impossimals. I had to cast the cake bases out of plaster to try and help with the stability, the whole thing weighs a ton to move so it pretty much had to be created in place on a incredibly useful 'Lazy Susan', which allows me to rotate the model without much fuss.

Once created I will light the model with one or two light sources and take around a hundred photographs, adjusting things if necessary, to get the desired look. The photos are then balanced in a photo editing package and cropped according to the desired size. If at this stage anything looks wrong back into the studio I go and take a load more pictures.

The time I have saved over the years learning new painting techniques have been replaced by the model making time so I suppose it's a bit of swings and roundabouts, the resulting paintings though are certainly a notch up yet again.

Pampered Pets - Bunnyopolis

2011-12-08T15:50:00.001Z

Bunnyopolis - Home of Aaran, Jura and Iona

It's been time to finish off some of the Bunnyopolis jobs that will prepare it for winter today. The awful weather with the promise of snow later this week made me quicken my pace a little as I dragged all my tools, wood and perspex into Bunnyopolis for approval. As you can see, Iona, Jura and Aaran decided to sort my wood pile out. I never thought a 26lb bunny could manhandle 2.4m lengths of wood but between them they managed to drag them everywhere and even pick them up between them. Strong bunnies.

They decided it was all too much like hard work though so they went for a big bunny huddle whilst I got on with the first job, double glazing the three windows with a new perspex frame.

Before long they had some new secondary glazing added, further windproofing Bunnyopolis and hopefully increasing the temperature a little.

Next, a little shelf above the heater to gently direct the heat away from the windows. This had an immediate effect, just holding my hand underneath the difference was quite noticeable, before the heat just went up and disappeared behind the curtains. Yes, they have curtains, carpet, window nets, lino, 5 inches of insulation, Security cameras and lighting both electric and a solar powered starfield for night time. Oh, and limited edition artwork. So if you thought the guy in the news today with his £10,000 hutch was mad, well, all I can say is you could fit ten of his in Bunnyopolis and he doesn't even have double glazing, or a clock. lol Hat's off to him though, it looks fantastic.

Oh well, back to work thought the buns and they cleverly mixed up all my wood for me with a two pronged assault whilst I had my hands full screwing so to speak. This was for the little bolt hole they run through to get from the main Bunnyopolis to the inside run. We noticed that even though the inside run is protected from the elements with perspex there was still a draught coming though the hole, what was needed was a detachable, interchangeable cloth bunny flap.

Once the frame was made, down went the tools and I reached for the sewing box. Pinning the fabric just how I wanted it I started to the flap.

My sewing machine skills are basic to say the least but I managed to cobble it together. I'll make someone a good housewife one day.

Once fitted and in place it all became a bit 'one at a time please' as excitement ensued and they decided they all wanted to go through it together.

Such an exhausting day this work lark, they all said as they gave me their best 'Where's our tea?' look. Dismissed for the day I obliged and left them tired and a little warmer.

Mission complete.

You have now reached level 17 - Awesome in Bunnyopolis and have opened up new upgrades.

Select your next upgrade

1) Garden with obstacle course
2) Garden landscaped with tunnel and fruit trees
3) Sound system and plasma screen TV

Glee!

2011-12-07T12:34:00.001Z

Now this has been exciting today, seeing all the final proofs for the 'Losts' and being blown away by the quality and attention to detail we have managed to retain. It's always a gamble with something new but these are looking really special, it's just a pity I cannot even show you a tiny bit of anything, it would spoil the surprise you see.

After carefully checking them for colour, texture and highlights we placed them unframed along the viewing wall as a final check to see it all holds together perfectly. It did, and once combined with all the support material I'm sorting out it's going to help make an awesome 2012. Just need to select the frames and finishes as a final thing and then it's all down to making sure I know the extensive stories for all the Losts before we hit the road next year.

I'm so excited!

Shockcrocshopdrop

2011-12-06T13:47:00.001Z

Looks like the standards have really dropped in the latest catalogue to grace my doorstep. Not content with the meerkat ornaments we now have a dog holding a storm lamp and sticking out his tongue. I still firmly believe there is not a market anywhere in the world that would sell these in bucket loads. Well, maybe one, a few miles away actually, but that's another matter.

Quick, look up! and you just might see the flying flip I do not give.

The biggest concern is not that these are for sale but more to the point is that they are in this years Argos catalogue which I read with the steady gaze of someone who knows his way around disappointment.

Bet you thought it was going to be in one of those free supplement things full of items that only people of a certain age and disposition would enjoy. Believe it or not they even have...

A meerkat light for the garden. Lit from beneath this must look awesome, as long as the dictionary defines awesome as...

awe-some /ˈôsəm/
Adjective:

1. Extremely crap or inspiring great intakes of breath at how poor something is.
2. See rubbish and shoddy.

Still, even more surprising was the addition of buying a Power Scooter from them, this one comes with luxury swivel and slide, which I can only assume is the power scooter version of drifting, something I have frequently seen around Mansfield. I'd like to see a monster truck version, pimped suspension so it bounces and wheel trims with blades on them for that Deathrace 2011 feel, albeit in slow motion.

They even sell these, a cassette player, but strangely no cassettes to go with them. For all our young readers, this was the iPod of the day, it took six batteries to give a two hour blast of music through mono speakers. Music came on little brown bits of magnetic tape encased in plastic called cassettes, that had a tendency to be chewed up at just the right moment when you was using the cassette player to record Top of the Pops on a Thursday night. As a sideline this also doubled up as the only way to backup your computer, seriously. I don't miss them.

This guy looks as though he is having heaps of fun. In fact he looks so happy that he got this for Christmas instead of a Rolex that he's taken to the garden to find an area big enough to bury it. That's actually quite a good idea, bury a metal detector whilst it's switched on and sit back and watch as people pass and the ground beeps at them. You can even record your voice on some of them, so getting it to say, 'Help me, I have been shrunk' and 'Over here!' would pass a few hours.

Here's something to try, walk up to a post box with plenty of footfall and peer in. Then take a step back and shout into the slot, 'How did you get in there?', pause then add 'Hang on, I'll go and fetch somebody'. Walk off and watch from a distance. You can add four chipolata sausages on the edge of the slot for that authentic fingers grasping look.

Don't fancy that? Well just stand still and look up. Occasionally wave until other people stop to look too. Then walk off. Pretty soon you will have a nice group of people trying desperately to see what you saw.

I digress, fancy these?

Probably the least owl like owl I have ever seen, it's new apparently, the pound shop obviously couldn't shift them.

Just the ticket after that big heavy Christmas meal, a nice pink inflatable chair to recline in whilst you drink your tea from these.

Don't tempt me Bieber.

Mutt

2011-12-05T15:46:00.001Z

The weather is truly horrible today, periods of weak sun followed by massive cloud banks full of sleet and snow mixed with a biting cold. Glad I'm indoors then for another session.

Todays painting is a large affair that contains two new characters, the one above I'm calling Mutley, but that may change, purely because he's very Mutley in his colours, plus he is a furry Impossimal who in this case is a little puzzled with his environment. Painting fur has become a firm favourite since doing the Lost Impossimals, I now have several brushes put to one side just for fur and hair, brushes that have also come in handy today when I also painted a wooden floor. I needed them to get the wood grain in the floorboards as light from a television, yes, a television, is cast across them exposing more of the grain.

So, as with all the painting days, not much to report and very little to show so I'll just have to content myself with showing you these little snippets for now.

Following on from yesterday, there will be a new range of greeting cards available in 2012, we are just sorting out the final images and look, so once right they will go into production with regular additions planned for the future.

I'm off to check on the Bunnyopolis heating as it's just started to snow again. I'm not really I just want to sit amongst the bunnies whilst they keep me warm. lol.

Countdown

2011-12-04T10:30:00.001Z

In celebration of putting up our oversized tree, albeit with a little sawing, trimming, cursing and mess, I have decided to open up the Vault for one week only. The rules are quite simple this year as we are opening the entire Vault, which means our personal collection of prints can be dipped into, so if you are looking any elusive Impossimal limited editions, maybe as a Christmas present from the last seven years let us know and we shall check our records to see if it's available. If it is,we will send you all the details. In addition this year you can pick up any prints directly from the studio before Christmas, you just might get to see Bunnyopolis too :-) The Vault closes tightly shut at midnight on the 11th December so send all your enquiries to impossimal@gmail.com

After struggling with the tree it's finally in place and looking rather trim too. Jayne decorated it and the rest of the house is adorned with mistletoe, holly and a few choice Christmas ornaments and such. Even the Impossimal pictures don't escape the transformation and have a festive adornment of a little tinsel. We did stop at decorating Bunnyopolis, although I'm sure little red bows on Aaran, Jura and Iona would have looked a treat. Instead the final ornament to be hung was a bauble that Jayne has had since she was very young.

It's actually quite apt and very cute too. A bunny bauble of many years, always the last to be hung and the first to be taken down and carefully wrapped. The Impossimals Christmas has begun!

Additional News - Greeting cards are back - More details soon.

Treemendous

2011-12-02T17:58:00.001Z

With hindsight maybe getting a nine foot Christmas tree was a bit over enthusiastic, for a start it barely fitted in the car and secondly it had a mind of it's own giving us one of those National Lampoons Christmas Vacation moments as the end decided to burst forth from it's net wrapping and flapped around uncontrollably slapping both me and Jayne in the process.

Things didn't get any better when we got home, the darn thing wouldn't come out of the car without a fight. Every branch hung onto every fibre of the car despite being fully wrapped. Even though it was a 'shed' free tree it still managed a valiant effort and left approximately 1,283,928 needles embedded in the carpets.

Fitting it into the tree holder was no mean feat, as usual it was way bigger than the holder so needed to be manhandled passed Aaran, Jura and Iona, who laughed and tittered from their Bunnyopolis viewpoint until a stray branch rattled the netting and they made a quick and wise escape, and on to the summer house for a quick trim. I say quick but even using my best saw have you ever tried to hand cut wet pine tree wood in freezing temperatures when ever few minutes you try and force on the tree stand only to find, yet again, there is another piece to cut away.

In the house our enthusiasm started to wane, it didn't fit. Nine feet is way too high, out came the saw and another 98,456 needles fell onto a pristine cream carpet. As soon as we loosened the netting still around the tree we knew we was in even more trouble. The tree creaked and groaned before casting it off like a flung away coat. Every branch decided to lash out at the same time taking ornaments, lamps and me and Jayne by surprise. It was like the day of the triffids, suddenly a sleek, now eight foot tree, suddenly became eight foot wide too. 64,827 more needles dropped.

All this is normal. Last year we had one tree that shed it's entire load of needles overnight, the year before that we had one topple over and pin me down, it's all part of the fun of Christmas, a Christmas for us that started today with the tree.

It's stood, waiting to be decorated, so I'm sure I'll fall back in love with it tomorrow.

Homebake

2011-12-01T17:44:00.001Z

I'm a bit too frazzled after starting painting at 7:00am and just finishing to type anything so instead for your viewing pleasure here's some new nightmare fodder.

Bread Celebs- You HAVE been warned.

Future Impossimals

2011-11-30T14:59:00.001Z

Back to Impossiland and a new batch of Impossimal paintings to be completed over the next month or two starting with this one at a more unusual angle. This is just the first underpainting so it's going to change quite a bit but you may notice the stripes actually angle up rather than down as per traditional Impossimals. The reason for this is the perspective I have used in this piece, the other five Impossimals all change from 'up' stripes to straight stripes and finally down stripes as you look up and across the painting.

It's all to do with the shadows in this case as the painting is lit exactly from the front casting a deep shadow on the wall behind, a bit like the shadow the light from a television would cast if you were facing it. The main reason to start painting this latest batch though is all to do with the style of the Impossimals. Regular readers will know that every year I change something about the Impossimals, sometimes it's small, other times it's a bigger jump, for next year though I decided to take the biggest leap forward yet, every Impossimal has been reshaped, recoloured, eyes have been adjusted and every painting will be of Impossimals in some kind of set piece allowing me greater freedom to explore oodles of stuff I haven't tried before and to give them a greater realism and all this on top of the Lost Impossimals, sheesh, it's going to be a busy 2012.

If Life Gives You Lemons

2011-11-29T15:10:00.001Z

A few years ago the idea that you could replace sugar in your diet with lemons made me laugh out loud, I mean, replace something sweet with an item as acrid and sharp as a lemon, it seemed as unlikely as all the worlds banks losing their money and the world going bankrupt. Hang on...

Three years later and not only has the world gone mad and is so far down in debt that it can look out of its own bottom but lo and behold I'm sugarless and consuming lemons at an alarming rate. OK, that's not really true, but a heavy dose of citrus fruit has really made a difference to everything I now eat for lemons are said to be a "flavor catalyst," meaning that it interacts with the taste buds so that the flavours that follow are more pronounced.

It's certainly true of spicy foods, try squeezing one on a curry both before and after tasting to see the difference. Just simply squeezed on a salad to enhance the flavour without resorting to that bottle of sugar laden dressing and you may be surprised. Gradually as I tried, gingerly at first I must say, adding lemons to dishes I began to wince less and start to enjoy the tart twang it gave out. Now they are a staple of my diet so today I thought I would go all Jamie Oliver and give you my Lemon Vinaigrette recipe.

OK, it's not really my recipe or even a secret as such, it's just a common method of dressing a salad that tastes rather nice. The traditional ratio for a vinaigrette is 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. Depending on the intensity of your vinegar, this tends to produce a rather subdued dressing. So I replace vinegar with lemon juice and use a 2:1 ratio but you should always taste it and adjust to your preferences.

Yields 3 tablespoons, enough for a great big salad bowl.

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon prepared Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
A pinch of sea salt to taste

Option 1: combine all ingredients in a small jar with a tight fitting lid. Shake vigorously for 30 seconds until emulsified.

Option 2: Combine the lemon juice, mustard and salt in a bowl. Drizzle in the olive oil while whisking continuosly.

There are two advantages to adding a significant amount of mustard to a vinaigrette. The first is obvious: it tastes good. The second is that it acts as an emulsifier, keeping the oil suspended in the vinegar. Taste and adjust the salt, and add more lemon juice or olive oil to achieve a pleasing balance of acidity, pour over your salad and mix thoroughly.

So, enjoy, although if you find yourself yacking all over the floor after consuming too much lemon juice, you got the recipe from another top chef, preferably one with money.

Rubbish

2011-11-28T13:24:00.001Z

I don't know why but painting today just didn't gel with me. When I start to paint and I make mistake after mistake I should listen to myself and walk away for a while, instead I ploughed ahead and nearly ended up scrapping a perfectly good piece. Hmm, not good. Wondering what makes me scrap a painting I sifted through my scrapped photos, all of the following have ended up in the bin.

I really don't know why I scrapped this looking back, I had done quite a bit of work on it but I think I just lost my way with the whole thing. Now I wish I had kept it and spent a lot more time on it, I'm sure I could have pulled it back. Still, I might have another go at 'Follow Your Heart' at a later date.

This one didn't get very far at all. Basically once I had got it to this stage I fell out of love with it and painted over the top. Originally called 'Stop The World I Want To Get Off' it was a land that was to have been filled with rings carry hearts and Impossimals, instead I turned this one into 'Revolution' a piece that formed part of the '*May Contain Nuts' tour in 2008.

Nice idea but the rain looked rubbish and as a piece it didn't work, it was repainted as the 'Great British Summer' and a second painting called 'Get Your Own', both featuring a red umbrella.

'The Time Machine' was a very surreal piece of Impossimals toppling an enormous clock tower. My inspiration for this waned pretty quickly and I painted over it with this next one.

I tried several new techniques to create an interesting background, unfortunately they failed and the resulting mess congealed so much on the canvas I had to destroy the whole thing.

Has looking back helped me find out why I scrap certain pieces? No, not really, it seems the most common thing is a lack of focus, something that's not been too much of a problem of late as the last one I scrapped was over two years ago.

Looks like I just need to give my self a good hard pinch and stop being so over critical. Harrumph.

A Sign Of The Times

2011-11-27T12:39:00.001Z

I think this weekend Christmas is being taken seriously by a lot of people judging by the food and craft event we have just visited at Welbeck, it was absolutely rammed in places and the car park had turned into an endless train of cars all fighting for a space. The roads too were very busy, I wasn't going to mention it but I'm a little annoyed, not with the traffic but with the tampering of the speed limits.

This all goes back a year or two ago when I saw a news report that the government was looking to give councils the option to drop the speed limit on roads from 60 to 50. The news item was obviously a plant and they were not thinking about it they had already implemented it, for when we went out that day one of the main roads had dropped 10 miles and hour to the now common 50mph.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for road safety and such but this messing with speed limits has gotten out of hand and I wonder if it's getting to be just a sneaky way of catching motorists out. On our way to the food and craft fair today a road, which had been 60mph for as long as I can remember, had been tampered with. Along a stretch of one and a half miles we now have a 30mph to start, followed by 150ft of 40mph, then half a mile of 50mph which drops after a corner again to 40mph then jumps to 60mph, along the whole length the amount of road signs have changed from six or seven to, get this, forty-six. Yes, forty-six!

So, it makes me unhappy, I know there is probably a valid reason for it (ha!) but I have seen this repeated time and time again up and down the country with the same frustrating results. On a recent trip to Sheffield, a round trip of 59 miles, we passed through 98 sets of traffic lights and went through 28 different speed limits and was privy to over 400 road signs, I only know this because we repeated this journey for two weeks so I speak from boredom.

So as well as the 'new' varying speed limits, too much roadside clutter I'm sure also has an adverse effect on the driver, you either become obsessed and try to read them all or you become numb to them as they all blur into each other. Both are just as dangerous and I have a cunning plan that will never be acted upon but I'm sure would transform our roads for ever.

The department of transport current has these guidelines in place regarding sign usage.

1) Improve road user information to ensure that traffic signs provide information that helps all road users.

2) Ensuring that traffic signs contribute to effective enforcement by informing road users of the restrictions on the road network

3) Ensuring that traffic signs contribute positively to the environment - one of the key messages of the review is that local authorities should only place signs where required, and they should remove signs that are not necessary

Already you will find that point 1 and point 2 are pretty much the same as all signs should inform and point 3 has been broken so many times that it is essentially, pointless.

For my idea though you forget all the above and basically take a Highway Engineer, or the person that decides where to put road signs for a council, place them in a car, remove the satnav and give them an address in the centre of a town or city that they have never visited and tell them to drive there. I'm sure there will be plenty of frustration along the way and when the finally get to the address they must write a report regarding the signage and hand it into the town or cities council they are visiting. Get all of them to do this with each other and I think you will find they will realise just how frustrating it can be when the person putting up the signs either overcompensates or knows the area so well that information is clipped. If you have never seen a clipped sign allow me to give you an example. We have a small village near Mansfield called Clipstone but approach it from the centre of Mansfield and you have to follow the signs for, firstly C'STN and secondly C'PSTN, not exactly informative is it? I shudder to what they may have done to the approach of Scunthorpe.

Bit of a grumble today which I'm not normally prone too, just don't get me started on bin collections, VAT, fuel duty, half naked exploding penguins, giraffes on bicycles..... and on and on and on.....

In a Pickle

2011-11-26T15:32:00.001Z

I seem to have developed an unhealthy addiction to pickled eggs after buying a jar earlier this year on impulse after remembering how they used to taste. My love of this odd snack started when I was a small boy, behind every fish and chip shop counter there used to be an enormous jar, I dare say it was bigger than me, full to the brim of fat eggs marinating in lots and lots of spiced up vinegar. Chips and egg go so well together as does chips and vinegar, so a vinegar soaked egg with chips as an invention was absolute heaven. It all added to the experience, that along with batter bits (which were free) and another food of the chip shop gods the fish slice.

Now I don't know if this was a speciality of our local but what they used to do was cut a square slab of fresh fish around a centimetre thick and the same in potato, and bind them together with a little cheese and dip them in a beer batter. These were then deep fried and served hot at around the temperature of the sun. This, a pickled egg and a bag of chips used to be a regular treat. I seem to remember buttering two slices of bread and putting the slice between them too (I was a growing lad) woolfing the whole lot down with a can of Irn Brew which all fish and chip shops HAD to stock.

Anyway, back to the eggs. My obsession with these vinegary vaults of flavour has taken on a new dimension, I'm buying trays of eggs and pickling them myself on an almost industrial scale. Where will it all end? Will I be the first person in the UK to develop Eggypicklediction and have to be weaned off gradually. Will the withdrawal process make me cluck like a chicken and see phantom chips?

I must resist.

But I can hear them calling me.

Just the one.

After one.

Ooops, that slipped down nicely.

OOommmpf. Nom, Nom, Nom.

Anybody want a freshly emptied jar?

Work House

2011-11-25T13:55:00.001Z

Exhausting work is all I can say about research as I try and find Victorian stuff on the Internet for all the support material I need for the Impossimals. First I wanted a nice page border like the one above, this proved harder to get than it should be as Google now decides to promote paid imagery first on most of their image searches so unless I wanted an image with 'Shutterstock' written through it I had to trawl a little deeper.

On my way through the net I did come across a nice repository of newspaper clipart, not sure if it's quite the right era but it has a nice Victorian feel about it and it was also nice to see the catalogues of average consumables existed then as today, at least I didn't see any glowing meerkat ornaments or faux leopard skin chamber pot covers.

Now this is more like it, imagery that showed the science and advances of the age. The site where this came from had oodles of stuff so for the rest of the afternoon I will be knee deep in clipart putting together yet another large 'Lost' document.

Oldies

2011-11-24T15:12:00.001Z

'Letting Go'

©Peter Smith 2006-07

At the end of 2006 I was in a awkward position, during my two previous tours rumours began to surface that I was going to stop painting Impossimals, obviously this was not true, but what I was doing was experimenting with various possibilities before returning back to the traditional Impossimal, a natural thing to do when developing as an artist. Looking back I can see why the rumours started when paintings like this started to appear. It was a bit of a shock for my publisher, suddenly the Impossimal became only a small portion of the painting and the world opened up a little. You won't find any of these on my current website even though I toured with eight pieces as part of the 'Far Beyond Driven' collection in 2007 as I feel they don't fit in easily with Impossimals but I'll try and add them to an online gallery in the future as they really should be seen as a collection, especially as they number around the thirty mark.

What I was really doing though was trying out different techniques and storytelling capabilities, in the photo above several new techniques were employed, firstly the rock face is fully textured, secondly the clouds and light in the distance was painted in one session with dry brush work over the top instead of the usual glazing. The watch was one of the first props to be painted from life and not from memory.

'Hit The Brakes'

©Peter Smith 2007

Things progressed and I moved onto more ambitious pieces. This image was on a 48''x60'' canvas, a whopping piece that took several months to finish. It alters in the light too, the ring glows, the sparks sparkle and in the distance you see the mountains lit from shafts of sunlight that appear to fall in between the mountains.

'Perchance To Dream'

©Peter Smith 2007

I also introduced the walking house, a bit of a nod to Dali I'm afraid but these houses represented the feeling of belonging, offering comfort and warmth wherever you may roam. They were quite popular in certain pieces but the darker the painting got the less keen was the viewer. I painted my final walking house at the end of 2007.

Not sure if I will ever try anything like this again, it was a little too mind bending to pull these images out and give them a reason for being but I have shown these today to give you a little taster of what the Lost Impossimals will be.

Unique.

Off With Their Heads

2011-11-23T16:57:00.001Z

I found myself yawning and in the studio at 7:00am ready for another painting session. Starting with a little model making I carefully selected my Impossimals and built a scene to photograph, it took a few hours and by the time I had finished the light outside was sufficiently bright enough to tackle painting.

Sounds silly waiting for the correct light but on the painting I needed to colour match an area exactly and produce a very smooth gradient and that requires good light at the best of times, so armed with my softest brushes I carefully built up the colours and smoothed it back until the gradient was almost perfect. It will get the additional glaze of transparent white a little later to finish it off and make it almost flawless.

Third job of the day was to get stuck into a large Impossimal placed in a bathroom scene, again a delicate operation as the background had already been painted, this took me from 11:00am to 5:00pm. Six hours is not bad for an Impossimal I suppose even though it still needs touching up and glazing, making the models beforehand makes such a difference.

As you can see not really much else to blog about, nothing funny in the post, no unusual phonecalls, I didn't fall over or off anything and my paint stayed on it's brush rather than the furniture, walls or rabbits. Tomorrow though it's back to a little adventure with another field trip for research that involves high places, six miles of walking and a pointy stick.

Mr Mangle

2011-11-22T15:13:00.001Z

Peter is off on his Lost Impossimal expeditions and you are left in my incapable hands just for today and probably only for today after he reads this. Anyway, no time to chitter-chatter, where was I? Ah, here we go.

I, Mr Mangle, found out at an early age that many things are not what they seem, squirting deep heat in a bottle of coke for example will not create American root beer and the truest things are often said in jest is also false. After being told a joke about a six foot baboon going in a pub and ordering a latte I find it's a story, quite frankly, that I refuse to believe is true no matter how much it was said in jest.

And another thing...

Science lessons at school told us that when water freezes it expands, that's what helped to create mountain ranges and such millions of years ago during the ice age, the exact same process also causes pipes to burst in winter but with less possibility of creating mountains apparently. So along that line of thought water must contract when it thaws. Now this is why I'm confused, scientists would have us believe that the melting of the ice caps causes flooding and sea levels to rise. Come on scientists, you can't have it both ways!

And another thing...

The person who coined the phrase 'Cleanliness is next to godlyness' obviously didn't have my dictionary, there is 162 pages between the two.

And another thing...

I found a notice on the back of my cornflake packet that said, and I quote, 'We do not make cornflakes for anyone else'. Imagine my anger when my friends packet of cornflakes had the very same message on it. It's all lies I tell you.

And another thing...

If moths like the light so much why don't they simply come out during the day, instead of flapping about outside windows and crashing into car headlights all night long? Come on moths, sort it out!

And another thing...

Uh, ho, just heard the front door, looks like Pe,.asd bnasnbdv sgvg xc x x

Right, sorry about that drivel, I'm back and I think it will be the last of Mr Mangle for a while so ignore everything up to this point. Today has been useful, although I didn't find the cave of the Lost Impossimals however I did find this.

A rather spooky human face peering out from the rocks through the gloom 400 ft up, how freaky is that?

Tomorrow, back in the studio for a mahoosive painting session. Yay!

Not Mushroom For Manoeuvre

2011-11-21T12:33:00.001Z

As part of my ongoing reference studies I have turned my attention today to plants and fungi. The image above is from one of the Lost Impossimal pieces, whilst trying to visualize the world in which they exist I came across a problem, I struggled with the surrounding flora and fauna but wanted something vaguely realistic but strange non the less. Using modelling clay I made so many different models and photographed them to come up with what you see above but noting the damp weather this morning what better time to go hunting for real models to work from.

So, in the car we went and spent a few hours mooching about the wood with a camera and found some fantastic things.

Look at this one, the colour is just so bright it positively shouts don't eat me I'm deadly, a quick look up on the mushroom guide seems to suggest that it's from the Russela family of which most are indeed inedible or poisonous. Still looks great though.

Not so appetizing is this black and brown one growing on a fallen log, I do like the button shapes though, I did manage to positively identify this one though, Bulgaria inquinans or Black Bulgar. The brown casing around it was a gorgeous chocolate colour.

This one was massive and stuck out a mile away in the murky forest floor, not really sure what it is, I'd have a go at Inkcap but I'm probably wrong although I'm sure it's from the Coprinus family. It was really wobbly as if the cap was just balanced on the stem.

These were quite abundant and I have absolutely no idea what they are, there must have been hundreds though scattered around the woods.

Again, no idea what these are but this picture only shows half of the log that was covered in them, I imagine it's like flats for pixies. We rocked the log a little and everything wobbled like jelly and we ended up in fits of giggles. It must have looked a bit suspicious, passing walkers found us on all fours with a camera sniggering in the undergrowth, not something you see everyday.

The grass just begged to be photographed, it was so lush and full of mossy bits, more of a teddy bears picnic type of covering with speckles of autumnal colour dotted through it.

Having finished our brief walk we made our way back to the car only to find this unusual one attached to the tree behind us, some kind of Boletus I think and a little more than suggestive too.

Plenty of material, all of it has been added to my extensive notes which are growing by the day, tomorrow it's another field trip, this time for rock and the ultimate Lost Impossimal cave.

Chequered Past

2011-11-20T15:27:00.001Z

Not really much to blog about over the last few days as they have been spent painting and mostly converting the oil sketches I did earlier this year into real oil paintings. It's a methodical thing so I go into automatic to get this first stage of the process moving. I now have another four ready which will get their first coats of paint tomorrow.

This means I have finally managed to get ahead of myself, Autumn / Winter 2011 is done and out there, Spring / Summer 2012 is waiting and ready to go so these new ones theoretically are for September 2012, which makes me very happy indeed, plenty of time to tweak them into a strong collection of work.

Looks like I might be able to have Christmas off after all. :-)

Snuggle Closer

2011-11-18T15:45:00.000Z

Today's blog is bought to you from a field, yes, you did hear that right, I'm really sat in a field miles away from home trying this automatic blog posting stuff out. SO ignore the 'No dogs on golf cycles' sign this is not going to be about todays walk but instead about this...

I started out 'The Snuggler' with a simple idea, to create a piece that would give the same warmth during the winter months as a cozy fire, what better way to show that than with a loving couple sharing a nice woolly pom-pom laden scarf. Once sketched I quickly decided where the scarf would lay in preparation for the heads to be painted on top.

There, looks a little better now, I even painted in the snow using white, purple, blue and a little green in places, just enough to give that fresh snow feel.

The whole thing was finished off with a few sweeping brush strokes to pile the snow into drifts.

Paintine the Impossimals nose colour was a different matter though and required small bits of masking tape to cover up the locations of the nose holes whilst I used this.

A very soft flat shader to achieve the smooth finish I needed before glazing.

Additional details were added, such as hearts on the scarf and these dainty little pom-poms. Shadows were painted in and the whole thing left to dry before one full day of glazing began.

"The Snuggler"

Finally it was complete, a nice heart warming piece with a simple message. Stay close, stay warm, stay forever.

Do Not Feed Or Annoy Dept.

2011-11-17T16:38:00.001Z

Now you have made it this far and learnt about the Impossimals it's time for the Impossimalversity Entrance Exam. So to weed out clods unsuited for entry to this exclusive fictitious haven of higher learning here's your starter questions.

1. A tank holds 150 gallons of petrol. The first day Tom too 3 gallons of petrol away. The second day, Tom took 12 gallons of petrol away. How long will it be before they take Tom away for hoarding petrol?

2. A man takes 4 hours to write 3,000 words by hand. How long would it take him if he used a pen?

3. Before Columbus found America in 1492, how long was it lost for?

4. Samuel F.B. Morse once said ... --- -.. .. -, why?

5. Write an essay of 250,000 words or more on any three of the five topics.

a) Why I miss my appendix
b) The most disgusting day of my life
c) Spiders and shoes, the missing link
d) The shape of the last sausage you ever saw
e) Dancing dogs

6. Fill in the blanks

a) The Theory of Relativity means ____ in a nutshell
b) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were Melvin, ____, Morris and _________________
c) Jesuszilla is not _______ son
d) Alexander Graham Bell pushed a ________ in his slot making his bell ring
e) Turning your bellybutton anticlockwise makes your __________ fall off and ________ louder

7. Sentence this rearrange

8. If A+B=C and D+E=F what does A+D ( B x 2791.2344 ) -F x C ( D(A)) / 8327436.1 do to your brain?

9. John changes the price on a 40p tin of beans by 10p on a Monday. On Tuesday John changes the price of a tin of beans three times by 5p. On Wednesday the Beans are on special offer and John takes 2p off the price of a tin of beans. Where does John work?

a) Lescos
b) Basda
c) Tidle
d) Borrisons

10. Identify this image

O.K. so this bit is a blatant advert for my 'Snuggler', a special end of year Christmas release, available from today but there is only 95 of these so it's first come first served I'm afraid.

Did you pass the exam?

On the basis of 5,876 applicants who were recently given this examination at a leading institute I can reveal for the first time the results.

0.0001% Passed
38% Failed
15% Were in the wrong room
10% Forgot to bring a pencil
26% Made paper airplanes out of the test
42% Are still working on it
0.2% Thought it was amusing

Webby

2011-11-16T13:29:00.001Z

The website is in it's second day of a overhaul to bring together all aspects Impossimal under one roof. The biggest addition is the new Lost Impossimals website, a bit of a labour of love as I craft all the graphics to give a Victorian feel to them and display the new work in it's best possible light. Both websites will be one page sites, whilst that may sound a little odd there will be plenty of things to click on and move around the page but I have removed a lot of fluff that was cluttering everything up.

I'm also taking down the gallery from the main Impossimal site, although it will still be accessible from Flickr, to replace it with a selection of work and a proper display for each tour and style of Impossimal. The Lost Impossimals are absent on the main site apart from a button with an invitation to 'Get Lost, a simple way to launch the new Impossimals.

So when will all this be done? Well, I'm not sure, but the main Impossimal website will be first and probably sooner than I think.

Where There's Muck There's Brass

2011-11-15T17:01:00.001Z

As most of the weekend had been spent working we decided to go for another short 6 mile walk to blow away the cobwebs. This time we were setting off from Cromford Mill, a world heritage site where in 1771 Richard Arkwright began the construction of the worlds first successful water powered cotton mill earning him the title of 'Father of the Factory System' and a hell of a lot of money too.

The walk started along the canal that was used to take supplies and goods too and from the factory. Quite a nice steady walk but this all changed after a mile when a sharp bend took us up a 1:9 incline and under a major carriageway.

Spooky tunnel to walk through, Jayne dropped her glove and in the gloom it was incredibly difficult to locate.

At the other end it was even more spooky with a memorial to a mine cart crash of 1880, they had left the crashed mine cart in the exact place it had crashed killing miners from the works high above us in the hills. We were actually walking the rail link from the top of a 756ft cliff full of mineral deposits and plenty of stuff worth mining.

Ooo, getting interesting, we might get up to a bit of Indiana Jones rolling stone action. Knowing my luck though it would be half a mountainside that came crashing down leaving Jayne unscathed and me rolled out over half a mile of hillside.

The incline was incredibly long, again around a mile starting at 1:10 then moving onto...

1:9 and 1:8, but at the top the views opened up to give a wide vista that my photos really don't do justice and the sun came out which was nice.

We stood looking at this for a little while before breaking out the rations.

Nothing like a cup of coffee and an apple on a fresh November day. I bit into the apple and noticed something black move around my feet.

'Don't feed 'im apple, it's bad for 'im'. I looked around to find a grumpy old man. I had no intention of sharing my only source of food with his beloved mongrel that was now jumping up and down littering my legs with assorted muddy footprints. 'I'm sorry, I wasn't going to...'. 'But you might' he snapped and filed me under irritating little turd even before I spoke another word.

Just then to make matters worse two cyclists appeared and positively fawned over his dog, they were virtually rolling around with. These were people he could relate too and we stood eating our apple painfully aware that we were being glared at'

'He gets crystals in his urine you know? You should see the stuff I have to look at in the garden'. The cyclists looked on enthusiastically. 'You know, one of mine gets diarrhoea if he eats anything meaty' they added. Call me picky but at this point I suddenly lost interest in my apple and Jayne positively gipped in her coffee. We moved on, putting as much distance as possible between toilet tales and us, forward onto the ominous Black Rock.

Last time I came here I was that unfit that I could barely make it up the shale approach never mind climb the rock face. today though I'm a lot fitter and leaped up in a single bound. Well, not exactly, but it was pretty straightforward and before long we were at the top.

The views were stupendous and we set up camp a few hundred metres up and had dinner perched on the edge of the cliff face. Lovely.

Not quite sure though if this is a wooden sofa or a dumped sofa that has been reclaimed by mother nature. Hmmm.

Now for something special. On the way down we pass through Cromford itself, a nice little collection of buildings of which one as always caught my eye. It's a small bookshop on the opposite bank that looked interesting.

Bookshops tend to be of the Waterstones type or basically Amazon online so imagine our surprise to not only find this one open but it had ten dedicated book experts, over 50,000 books all scattered over an ecclectic house that positively oozed class and sophistication. I half expected to find Kafka hunched in the red room, next to the antique clock banging on about his novel 'The Metamorphosis' and Charles Dickens in the victorian 'Art Room' working under the light of the oil lamp.

Chairs were scattered around the place, really, really comfy chairs too, none matched but it didn't matter, this was the literal shabby chic. Even the small coffee shop was hidden behind secret book door three floors up and it had slider bookcases for you to move around as you please. As bookshops go this was heaven and I don't think I have ever been in such an enchanting bookshop with the most perfect smell and warm feeling about it ever.

I ranting on again, needless to say we left with armfuls of books and a lovely cuddly feeling at finding something that we thought was lost to time.

A nice day all round.

Parade

2011-11-14T12:04:00.001Z

More model making over the weekend to keep me busy, I had ordered a bucket load of plasticine which failed to arrive so had to make due with some rather limp playdoh for some of the props which tended to make things rather floppy. I did find out though that they are excellent to make model cushions out of as the weight of the plasticine pushes it out and about just like it should.

They are really getting complex, it took me nearly six hours to make one complete scene, admittedly it had everything from a sink with taps to a real reflective black and white tiled floor skilfully created from a chequerboard printout with spray mounted acetate for the shine. A bit of tissue placed in coloured water doubled up for a wet towel and I even made a window frame, curtains and blinds. I know this all sounds a bit suspect as if I'm decorating a dolls house but for the next level of the Impossimals I'm trying to bring them into a more liveable world whilst telling the story and retaining the innocent look and feel.

It's getting there. Slowly. To give you an idea of time scale, the work I'm producing at the moment is for winter next year and they are going to take me until July to finish. Shoehorn that into everything else I have got going on and 2012 is going to be a busy year indeed.

I must mention the Remembrance services held throughout the UK and add my voice of thanks to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian servicemen and women in the two World Wars and later conflicts. We were lucky enough a year ago to be present at the service in Norwich, a dignified, respectable parade that was quite moving and I must admit made me realise just how lucky I am.

Come Spank With Me

2011-11-12T15:20:00.001Z

8:30pm last night I was sat with a nice glass of wine watching a recording of Channel 4's popular program Come Dine With Me, at 8:31pm I was sat choking on said wine after witnessing 'Gary' swinging a pair of handcuffs stood in front of an Impossimal. Before I go any further look at the map above, this was the hits on my website at 9:30pm, a veritable slew of hits generated by one event. The spanking.

A couple of months ago I signed an agreement with ITV Studios allowing them to broadcast my artwork as part of one of the Come Dine With Me episodes, it's a standard thing when incidental artwork appears in certain scenes and thought nothing of it apart from the date of broadcast was supposed to be 18th November. I'm immensely pleased and entertained that they were featured so extensively, I just didn't expect the scenes to involve whips, leather and a good spanking for all the guests.

It all started innocently with this scene, a great shot of the now sold out '*May Contain Nuts', quite appropriate I thought for the episodes collection of selected 'nuts' which came from Luton where, battling it out over four nights were B&B owner Alison McGaw, fire-fighting action man Gary Salvage (with the whips and handcuffs), fearsomely feisty Polish mum Alex Lipa, and know-it-all fitness trainer Kirkland Hay.

If you saw it the evening quickly degenerated, much to my amusement, as each guest was given a polite spanking in front of my artwork, what a cool way to have it featured. I have included the video below if you want a bit of a giggle.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/come-dine-with-me/video/series-24/episode-16/s24-ep18-a-little-demonstration

Needless to say it kept me amused for the rest of last night. S&M Impossimals? Such naughtiness, I hope the Impossimals had their eyes shut!

Busted

2011-11-11T15:30:00.001Z

Here I was about to launch into a cavalcade of crud from one of the latest catalogues that dropped out of one of the TV listing magazines when one item caught my eye. An item that ashamed me. An item that made my blood run cold as I realised that I had seen one of those before, hang on, not one but two of those before. Rushing outside my deepest fears were realised, I had an item from the catalogue.

Although I will try and explain it away as a purchase to make our outside furniture a little more comfortable and it wasn't purchased from this catalogue I'm sure you don't believe me and you will still think I really did buy it because I needed to sit comfortably and stand up more easily now I am getting on a bit and needed welcome relief for my Shackletons high seat whilst sat next to my Tiffany style lamp which is placed on my companion table that contains all my remote controllers and old LP's whilst I sip my Bovril.

So maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on these magazines now I have been 'tainted'.

Hang on, what on earth am I on about? These catalogues need a good telling off now and again, I mean, the one I have in front of me has, and I'm not making this up, incontinence pants NEXT to the Sex for the Over 40's DVD's, how's that for product placement? It's even worse that it explains that these are *REALLY EXPLICIT* whilst in the next column we have discreet, hygienic, convenient and spill proof with an additional tip to always keep one in your car. Obviously they have split up the over 40's into ones with bits that work and others that turn into fire hoses.

So Mr Catalogue if you are looking for an easy ride you have come to the wrong place, this blog will always be your nemesis and tomorrow I may even expand on your unseemly selection.

Hmm, nice 'all day memory foam comfort shoes' on page 29... Ooo, and a soft toilet seat on page 26.

Today's Alert Level Is Code Red

2011-11-10T15:58:00.005Z

I nearly forgot to tell you about my little adventure a couple of weeks ago, it all started quite innocently with a collector contacting me from America asking if I would like to take part in the Combined Federal Campaign, a charitable event that uses the power of 15,000 federal, postal, and military personnel throughout the Chicago area to raise funds. Last year alone they contributed over $4,000,000 to charitable organizations, a truly great donation amount, so of course I decided to offer my support with a small limited edition that could be auctioned.

I duly wrapped the 'Keep Calm And Have A Cupcake' print in a sturdy wrapper and added the address to the front. Looking back I suppose our local post office is not used to seeing mail dispatched to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and that was probably the main reason she froze as I handed over the package. The word nuclear was written on her furrowed brow.

'Is this... is this dangerous?' she asked, quite nervously I thought. 'No, it's quite harmless, it's disarmed' I quipped and before I could get out 'Only joking!' she dropped the package and started to back away from the counter. 'No, no, it's ok, it's only a piece of paper, don't press the alarm!'. I really thought she was going to freak out, panic, press the mysterious under counter button so send seconds later an entire SWAT team could crash through the windows and pin me to the floor whilst sweeping me with Geiger counters.

Instead she called over her supervisor, which in some respects was a little worse as not only did he have 'jobsworth' printed across his head but he was also eating a sandwich, a sandwich which I knew was going to be part flung in my direction like some human flocking machine when he spoke with his mouth full.

'Is it dangerous?' he sprayed. I ducked the bits of spittle laden crumbs. 'It depends on your point of view I suppose, paper cuts can be quite nasty and if infected, so yes, they could be dangerous and a little painful too' was what I would have liked to have said but instead settled for 'Not really'. 'What do you mean by 'not really', it's nuclear isn't it? That's full of radio stuff init and radio stuff is dangerous'. As you have gathered my challenger was a little amiss in the vocabulary department although he had me on age as he only looked about twelve. 'It's not got anything like that in it, it's only papers, nothing dangerous, honest!'. 'You sure it's not radio stuff? I'll phone the police if it's radio stuff'

'Open it, here you go, open it and check', I handed him the package which he gingerly held by the corner. 'Can't do that' came the reply. 'Why? Your a post office, check some post'. 'Might be dangerous, maybe I'll call my boss'. It's about this time I started to bang my head against the nearest wall. Basically I'm stood in a local post office having a discussion on radioactivity, or radios as he preferred, dangerous packages and arguing the difference between sending something with the word nuclear in the address and sending something that says WARNING - RADIOACTIVE NUCLEAR WASTE.
Would you believe that I could not convince them to either open it, post it or believe that

a) It's not dangerous.
b) It's not radioactive, never mind radio.
c) It's not nuclear secrets either, this was another stupid question, as if you would answer that one anyway, 'oh, yes, it's the full schematics for a thermonuclear device created from two spoonfuls of bicarb, a packet of mintos, one large bottle of coke and an egg timer.'
d) I do not work for a covert agency.
e) I am not a spy.

I had to give up and retreated under the steely gaze of Mr Sandwich Spreader through the assorted postal queues which mysteriously parted as I made my way through them. They must have been listening.

The upshot of this is I went immediately to another branch where a little old dear took my package without batting an eyelid and away it went to raise a few hundred dollars for worthy causes. So if you are thinking of sending secrets or highly dangerous material through the postal system I know just the little old dearie to help you, she doesn't even mind if it has the word 'Nuclear' written on the front in black marker. How sweet!

Charabanc

2011-11-09T14:10:00.002Z

It's been a while since I have posted a step-by-step so here's one I don't think you have seen before. Originally called 'Boy Racers' it changed along the way but lets start at the very beginning with a quick sketch onto the board and straight in with a rough colouring of the background and blocking in the Impossimals main colours.

Next came the stripes and the eyes, notice I have flicked the ears to one side to help with the extreme cornering these guys are doing. As soon as I did this I knew it needed a different title, those eyes casting back to the purple Impossimal just begged this piece to be called 'Back Seat Driver'

Another day and you can see the wheels starting to go into place along with the axle and the lettering.

Once dry it was all glazed over the course of four hours, the white was improved using a better quality paint and then left to dry. You can see the lettering has tinted red due to the glaze so I used a hard edged brush to remove it and used the high pigment white to touch it up. Finished!

'Back Seat Driver'

Silly Season

2011-11-08T16:44:00.002Z

Found this on the back of a Christmas card today, just for the record the card was made out of cardboard and had no extra add-on bits to play with. Silly season has officially started. Actually it started in 1992 but that's another story that involves a toilet roll holder, seven dwarfs and a large tin of Swarfega.

It looks like full steam ahead with Christmas looming on the horizon, in anticipation I have signed a special Christmas limited edition today, it's small in size and very apt for this time of year, even more importantly it's my first Christmas release since way back in 2007 and 'Is That It?' so I'm quite excited. And what image am I releasing? Well, that will have to remain a secret a little while longer...

Squeeee!

2011-11-07T17:37:00.000Z

The thought of squeezing a squidgy substance from a tube that is wielded like a firearm uncontrollably in a confined space sounds quite appealing until you realise that the substance is a silicon sealer that smells heavily of vinegar and the confined space is a shower cubicle.

I hate this job, it's always a thankless task and one that seems to need redoing with alarming regularity. All was well for the first five years, the sealant in our bathroom shower stood up to the fiercest dowsing without as much as a hiccup but slowly a little tiny split occurred, a split that decided to leech water underneath this watertight seal until it seeped further down and onto the floor. It was at this point many years ago we decided to replace it. A process which involved a day of cleaning it all out, a day to dry, a day to apply the fresh sealant and another 24 hours to let that dry. In other words a four day bath regime and a house that smells like a fish and chip shop on a Friday night. We are now on our third silicon replacement, it's not without trying and it's not without doing it properly according to the instructions, just why, oh, why has nobody come up with a better replacement?

For those of you not familiar with a silicon gun here's one of the devilish things coiled and ready to spring, although this one seems empty as the bar to the right is normally pulled out to make it more unwieldy.

Applying the silicon is awkward, getting a smooth finish is awkward, working with an inflexible application gun is awkward in fact everything is almost built to hinder from the very start. First you decide how to cut open the nozzle, too small and you will need the pressure of King Kong to emit a dribble from the end, too big and your nozzle will dump the entire tube in one vinegar smelling heap. The trigger on the applicator either gives you a steady flow that takes you three hours to do a strip no bigger than a child's shoe whilst a hefty press and you are writhing around with it like an uncontrollable hose spraying silicon over windows, doors, pets and anything else within a ten foot radius. It just lacks control. Even when you get the stuff in the right place you then have to smooth it.

Suggestions of using the edge of a credit card to smooth the gloop normally means you remove more than you apply and end up with a big gooey dollop on a springy bit of plastic which as soon as it hits a corner catapults said bit over some part of your anatomy. Tools exist to help but all are rubbish and just variants on the credit card so generally you rely on your fingers and boy is this stuff sticky. I learnt very quickly that unless you make sure your fingers are wet as you smooth the silicon grips it holds on like a rottweiler, any thought of getting a smooth finish then goes out of the window as you fingers gloop up and stick to everything and your 'smoothing' motion turns the neat line of silicon into a finger painting episode.

Even when it does go right you find a tiny, tiny bit that looks a little messy and decide to have a dab, it's only small, you finger goes in for a quick smooth and before you know it the entire line has been destroyed with finger marks everywhere, silicon on the carpet, silicon up the walls and you in a heap crying pitifully over your vinegar smelling hands.

So standing in the cubicle, silicon in hand, earlier today I had the all too familiar 'It's doomed to failure' feeling and I knew with the first squirt my fate was sealed.

I'm a survivor, I have made it through they day, silicon did not beat me and I am now the owner of a smooth sealed shower. So let this entry be of hope to other silicon affected households who's dread of replacing that worn out bit of rubber or the leaky shower seal has caused pain and torment on an unfathomable scale, it can be done, silicon can be beaten!

This has been a public broadcast on behalf of the SSA, the Silicon Sufferers Anonymous, for those of you with a similar fear we meet twice a year in B&Q's bathroom department in shower cubicle no.7, 'The Dolphin'. Bring your own applicator, silicon will be supplied as required after signing the required disclaimers. Silicon application thrill seekers are not welcome.

Remember, Remember it's the Fifth of November

2011-11-05T17:50:00.001Z

If you are of a certain age this image of Astra fireworks should bring back memories. Some may not be very pleasant as fireworks in the early 70's tended to be a bit a lot more random and unpredictable than they do today. One particularly memorable one was the Jumping Jack, it was essentially one long firework that was pushed together in a zig-zag fashion very much like a caterpillar would look as it moves. Once lit it would randomly explode like a mini banger and fling itself anywhere in the vicinity, normally at me in most cases as my biggest memory of this one is running down the side of our house when I was five panicking, tears streaming down my face as the Jumping Jack banged and lunged at me in hot pursuit.

I suppose the more worrying aspect was the aerial fireworks. The worst I suppose was the aerial bombs, these looked like miniature spitfires and came with wings, each one with a painted target on them. You would expect them to take off like a rocket but oh no, these bad boys you laid flat on the floor and stood well back. About three miles was enough as they turned into horizontal catherine wheels that launched themselves vertically, well that was the idea any way, normally they again spun out of control and detonated around six foot from the ground with an ear shattering noise that has been compared to the destruction of Krakatoa. Quite often you saw small children either pass out from the noise or get instant nosebleeds.

It was a dangerous, but fun, age. Fireworks did come in boxes but our local post office loved the thrill of selling them loose. Yes, you really did walk along and pick up a selection from baskets or little cabinets and being the 70's a lot of people smoked too whilst they made their selection. Rockets were the only ones that were kept behind the counter for some strange reason.

As well as being dangerous some fireworks were also disappointing. I always loved and was swayed by the packaging and fell for the traffic light each year. It promised a light show that went from red to yellow then green, yes, thrills were thin on the ground in the 70's so this promised not only colour change but to do it with a ferocious ten foot high flame spouting sparklies. The reality was your family standing 20 foot away to avoid getting your eyebrows scorched staring into the distance at a two inch flame which you think is the ignition, it's only when it turns green you realise it's missed out the yellow and seconds later it goes out leaving a pile of black soot to clean up.

The best firework I can remember though was one that a neighbour turned up with one night, a neighbour that was off his trolly most days. It was as big as my dad and I remember them both digging a hole and putting in a drainpipe to launch it. It wasn't a display firework it was nuclear missile. I still remember the whoosh to this day as it unexpectedly launched before they could get a few feet away, they both watched in awe from their new positions on their backs as the rocket went high, then higher and then even higher still.

Just when it looked it was going to poke through the ozone layer there was an almighty flash that lit up the surrounding area like daylight. Birds started to sing and curtains were thrust open at the early arrival of the next day when the sky exploded. And I really do mean exploded. It was like every firework in a ten mile radius had been set off at once, the resulting sound wave from the blast rocked us on our feet and blew out our eardrums, babies started to cry, grown men atoned for their sins as the world imploded. Well, maybe I exaggerated a little but it was truly awesome and second only to a nuclear explosion I'm sure. The best bit was at the end though, as we regained our sight we motioned to each other, for we couldn't hear very well, to look in the distance. Floating down was a little parachute, attached to it was a rope of colour changing fireworks very much like my beloved traffic light one of old only this time as they drifted down they were much bigger flames, that became more apparent as it dropped into a line of trees in the distance and started it's own forest fire.

It came to be known as the 1974 Night Of The Big Light locally and remained an unexplained event shrouded in mystery that was passed from generation to generation. Well, no longer I guess.

Before I go here's another firework disappointment. Indoor fireworks.

A selection box of magical items like 'Snow Blizzard' and Secret Surprise which essentially hyped up the dramatic effect of watching the equivalent of striking a match. Even though you got around thirty items they tended to be classed in categories, they either were a cut down sparkler, erupted a mysterious brown emission that stained clothes and looked like dog doo or consisted of a match that was coloured either red or green. Apart from one it though, the smoking monkey. Not very politically correct but this little plastic monkey could hold it's own with it's miniature puffing cigarettes, yes, they really were crap.

Twister

2011-11-04T16:45:00.000Z

Today has been all about commissions and a nice stint to tackle two at a time, the first being a macarooned based painting (now complete, yay!) the second one of the most complex I have ever tackled, a car with all the trimmings and Impossimals.

When I first started this one the board looked like a mess of lines, there were so many things to include that I went on meltdown and sat blubbering on the floor searching for a startpoint. Things came together though as I slapped the paint on and got my first light in place, suddenly it didn't seem as daunting as it did early this morning. SO thats pretty much my next three days sorted, making around 30 hours work for the car alone but it should look pretty good when finished.

Next on my agenda is the button I posted a few days ago. If you didn't find it I had placed it on my website (www.petersmithcollective.co.uk) tucked away on the blog and news page. It's still there if you want to look and click but what you will find is this...

The only thing you will see of what promises to be one of the biggest things I have created. A full website has already been completed, smartphone wallpapers ready to go, a book full of stories stands on my desk and the paintings are all safely with my publisher. All that I need to do now is keep things shrouded in secrecy and wait until next year for 'Lost Impossimals - The Complete Twistory'

David Guest

2011-11-03T15:53:00.001Z

I'm sat drinking my tea in the studio whilst painting, well, thats not really true as all the painting is being done by David 'Piggy Chap' Stanier who has popped into the studio to try a bit of model making, photographing and ultimately painting. Oh, and of course and obligatory trip to Bunnyopolis for a bit of fur therapy.

As you can see David's cracking on with his first attempt at a true 3D Piggychap using the model, oil sketch and a printout of the photo which allows him to see exactly where all the shadows and colour transitions occur, always a tough thing when working on paintings that include items from your imagination.

As we are sharing the load today the rest of todays blog entry can be found on http://davidstanierart.blogspot.com/ a little later today.

Did any of you find the hidden button? No? Well it's still on www.petersmithcollective.co.uk if you can find it :-)

Do Not Press

2011-11-02T15:22:00.003Z

It's hidden.
Find it for a secret.

Romp

2011-11-01T16:24:00.001Z

Such a lovely day for a stroll, which in our case was a 10k romp around Matlock Bath with a few hundreds of feet ascents and descents down slippery slopes into the bargain. It all went wrong at the very start when after following the printed route instructions we failed to find the, and I quote, 'a steep path'. Hardly specific and after following a road for a while a friendly local shouted down from a balcony after watching us turn a corner into a dead end. It's felt like he was waiting for this exact moment, just as the penny dropped and we realised something was wrong. Bam! he was in there.

'Don't want up there, dead end you see. You using a walk off the t'internet? cause if you are, it's wrong. Been like that for years. You be wantin' back down there.'

We looked back gloomily at the steep hill we had climbed, with further encouragement from our new local friend we made our way back to the start. It was an odd beginning. The falling leaves had completely covered the three small steps that started the route and even more beguiling was the fact that the path looked like it led straight to someone's front door. Just before I knocked and asked to walk through their house Jayne looked behind a bush and found a marker for the footpath. At last!

A few steps further and it veered off a little straight into a group of pirates. I kid you not. The day was not going to be a normal one.

The climb was quite a hefty one as we made our way up on the edge of wood by means of a very muddy path studded with various obstacles along the way. A Victorian lampost, something that looked like a prison cell, an abandoned house and hundreds of metal rods driven into the ground to stop erosion all mad the going interesting and slightly more challenging.

At the top though you had a spectacular Autumn walk with lots of colour and a three hundred foot drop to you right into somebodies back garden.

The further we walked the more open it got until finally you got to see this vista of Matlock and atop the hill is Riber Castle. Not really a castle as it was built in 1862, it's actually a 19th century Grade II listed country house and closer inspection will only reveal the castle to be a shell. Looks kind of convincing today though.

Further on down the west side the whole walk suddenly goes all Bavarian and you come across this peculiar Victorian, Bavarian looking church tucked away. I half expected someone to appear wearing lederhosen and cramming weisswurst's in their mouths to appear at the windows but as we tried the gate it was unfortunately locked.

Reaching the bottom we geared our selves to do it all again on the other side, this time looking back over the route we had just taken. This view reminded me of Postman Pat, I don't know why, it just looked like a place that a little post van would have great fun in.

Things were getting serious though. Very high, windy and more than a little unnerving as you looked over. Even bees were scared. I'd better explain that hadn't I.

As we sat eating our lunch looking down on this view a bee idly made it's way around us and ventured off the edge of the cliff. I'm sure I saw a look of panic on it's face when it realised the drop beneath it. Like some comedy cartoon fall the bee went into buzzing overdrive, trying to get back to closer land when it's buzz gave out and it suddenly plummeted.

Do you think this happens a lot? Imagine your a bee or a wasp and you have been idly making your way across fields, in an out of trees, sleeping in any comfortable place for many days unaware that you are gradually climbing a slope that suddenly ends in a screaming drop. You would think with wings you would be suitably equipped but seconds later another bee came along and did the same thing.

Now I could have this all wrong, It may be the bee's way of fooling us, for all I know the two bee's could be just under the tip of the cliff buzzing away, sniggering and waiting for me to look over, at which point they sting me. Anyway, I digress. What REALLY made my day was this fine vehicle we saw when we had returned to the car and was driving home.

How cool is that? I wonder if he has a fleet of them? NO2 POO, or maybe YU2 POO, or my favourite for his sideline business K9 POO. Tee-hee!

Totty

2011-10-31T12:26:00.000Z

Don't you just love the colours of macaroons? I love them that much I have been inventing my own combinations for the commission I'm doing at the moment. Although there are a few more on this piece from top to bottom we have banana and chocolate ganache, a berry delight with raspberry and blueberry, indulgent dark chocolate and pistachio with the final bottom one white chocolate and strawberry. Balancing the colours was very important to make sure the whole painting feels right together, the Impossimal has purple stripes to help and above this shot is another macaroon, this time in a lighter brown with white filling, Oreo cookie style.

Again I have made them out of plasticine as sourcing macaroons easily online is at best difficult and in some cases massively expensive too. Now that I use this process on a regular basis I have cleared an area in the studio to hold the models whilst I light them and photograph the plasticine sculptures, don't know why I didn't do this before as it's made life so much easier.

Before I go I just remembered something from yesterday, you know how I always get placed in weird situations? Well, yesterday afternoon we decided to cut the conifer hedge around the back of Bunnyopolis. Everything was fine until I got to Bunnyopolis, we found the ladders a tight fit, so ever resourceful I clambered onto Bunnyopolis roof and carried on cutting away.

I had just finished and handed Jayne the hedge trimmer and sat waiting for Jayne to return with the ladder. From the top of Bunnyopolis you look down on a public foot path, it just happened at this time a guy came by walking his dog. He was dressed a little extravagantly I will admit but the last thing I expected was him to look up, beam a big smile, toss his hair back and say 'Are you OK handsome? Do you need a hand?'

I nearly choked, only managing to stutter out a 'fine thanks' before I made a fatal error. My next words 'nice dog' I knew was a desperate 'I'm stuck on a roof with no escape' reply to fill the embarrassment hole that was steadily growing, it apparently only excited him, 'Come on over here dearie and you can touch him' he replied followed by, get this, a blown kiss.

Get me down!, GET ME DOWN!

Even Jayne agreed that you are invited to stroke a dog not 'touch' a dog.

Boom Bang

2011-10-30T17:20:00.002Z

I have spent this weekend doing two things, first working on two commissions and secondly looking at bangers. No, not in the Keith 'I wouldn't mind bangers going off in my face' Lemon way but more of a fireworky sparkly way.

Anyway the commissions have taken up nine hours on Saturday and seven today and look like they have barely been started so I guess I'll be at them all week. Last night though for the first time in a very long time a popular local park held a firework display and accompanying entertainment, as it was within walking distance it made it even more attractive to go and watch on such a nice night, so off we went.

From a distance it looked inviting. Lot's of lights, music and movement which turned out to be a mini funfair with fortunately no dodgems, although it did have this piece of machinery...

...the Earth Shaker. Quite a claim and I wondered what they meant until I saw an ample bosomed young lady attempt to ride it without support. Black eyes all round if I'm honest, it became mesmerising as gravity was defied in a rather inelegant fashion. Imagine carrying two water filled carrier bags, now slowly rotate the one on your left, then begin to spin the one on your right very much like a policeman would spin a whistle on a chain. Got that? OK, now twirl the left one above your head whilst with the right one repeatedly spin and smash it into your head. That's what it was like.

The fireworks started off pretty slowly and we thought after paying for a ticket we were not going to get much of a show. Everything seem to be being lit one by one by a chap with a sparkler. A few minutes in and it felt a bit of a let down. Then...

It kicked off and seemingly they had got their act together and after the slow start managed a reasonably respectable display, which for a first ever event and something which has been staged to make sure the park gets some use, was quite good.

Berry Hill park, for that's it's name, used to be filled with events every year. It even held BBC's It's a Knockout complete with Eddie Waring and Stuart Hall, a annual camping show, miners rallies, had a minature railway, bandstand and paddling pools. Since the mid 80's though it went into a bit of a decline when the local mines closed, at one point it ended up as a bitter battleground between Police and the Miners which was the final nail in the parks coffin.

It's always been used for dog walkers, and nice little strolls but the events that used to make it so popular dropped away until this year, when threats from developers spurred the local community into action, interest in using the park again to entertain was spurred on by the local Rotary Club. So may it continue, may it get bigger and may it once again be reborn, just leave out the camping show eh?

Hot,Hot,Hot

2011-10-28T12:25:00.000+01:00

It's always a bit sad at this time of year when we venture for the last time into the greenhouse to cut down the remaining plants and move the more frost susceptible ones inside. At the beginning of the growing season we tried a variety of peppers and chillies, all using seeds from supermarket bought peppers and chillies, we just kept the seeds from the ones we cooked with.

They came on a treat and although we have been picking them for a while now there was still plenty left on the six plants. We had already stripped the peppers so today it was just the chillies. This one was a reasonable heat, more of a tingle unless you had the seeds, then it did get a tad hot but again still manageable.

This on the other hand, the habanero chilli, scores a massive 100,000 - 350,000 on the Scoville Heat Scale. If you didn't know the Scoville scale is a measure of the 'hotness' of a chilli pepper or anything derived from chilli peppers, i.e. hot sauce. The scale is named after Wilbur Scoville who developed the test in 1912. To give you an idea of the heat of this chilli and to enable you to not experience the pain I did when I tried it, normal Tabasco sauce is around 2,500 on the same scale, pepper spray incidentally is around the 2,000,000 mark. Boy is it hot. Measuring around 1-2cm I only need one in anything to raise the heat level of a dish to just under painful. Still no pain no gain. lol

We have ended up with loads to get through though, not bad really for this year which on the whole has been a poor sun year and to still have chillies ripening at the end of October is great.

Word Up

2011-10-27T11:34:00.002+01:00

The Word document that holds all my blog entries now contains 1540 posts making a total of 924 pages with 1,643,931 letters all forming 373,799 words. Over 3000 photos litter the entries and I have used the world 'lavishly' seventeen times.

It all started way back on Friday 28th July 2006 with a rather uninspiring 'Well back in the studio, ready for another big painting session, the hot weathers really having an effect on the paint... but the ideas are really flowing!'. Not really a great start for something which has gradually taken over my life. The idea is eventually to put the whole document together in a book, a sort of Adrian Mole style thing combining not only my points of view and random entries but also Jayne's vintage blog, or as she calls it, her diaries.

Jayne's diary shows you the other side of the fence so to speak and gives more of an insight into the everyday running of the Impossimal way of life. I certainly didn't think that I would keep it up this long though, looking back I got quite bored quickly and for the first year only managed 4-6 posts a month of varying quality. Finding things to blog about doesn't get easier though unless we are having a pretty hectic week as I'm very selective and only blog about 20% of everything that happens in any given week.

Looking back, on this week in 2006 I was working on the 'Pile High Club' and answering a few questions about myself, by 2007 I was working flat out on a two piece commission called 'I Want That One' after cataloguing photos and talking about squirrels. 2008 in the same week I was in Stratford-Upon-Avon and Chester as part of the '*May Contain Nuts' tour and in 2009 being chased over a hill in the blog entry 'I Ain't Afraid Of No Goats' and working on 'I Like Cake'. 2010 I was on tour again with 'It's A Stripe Thing' this time in Kingston-Upon-Thames and Trentham Gardens for two rocking shows and I rambled on about teeth and meerkat ornaments.

Wow, it's incredibly weird to look back and see the photos, especially pre-2009 when I mysteriously gained an extra five stone in all the photographs.

So with entry number 1541, which coincidentally is the model number of a Commodore 64 disk drive, and breaking the 100,000 visitor in just over 18 months I look forward to many more years of blogging and feeding my addiction writing this drivel and hope you still find it as entertaining as you first found it.

Please keep off the grass and look with your eyes not your fingers. Thankyou, please call again!

Peter Pumpkin

2011-10-26T13:53:00.001+01:00

Would you believe it, awake again, this time at 1am with the feeling I was being choked as my cold took on a more sinister grip. I tossed and turned, propped myself up on the pillows and threw them out again as I struggled to get comfortable and breathe a little more comfortably. Mr Cold though was having non of it so by 2:10am I was sat in front of the computer *again* catching up with work on the new website and all the other things I couldn't fit in.

I couldn't let a small thing like this spoil today though as it was our first day off from not doing some form of work for many months. We were visiting a small market town to have a coffee and cake, buy fresh produce from the farmers market and generally mooch around doing nothing in particular.

The stalls were full of Autumnal fare, pumpkins abound, with massive ones only £1.50. We came back with a sackful of onions, plenty of fresh cabbages, carrots with carrot tops for the buns and other assorted purchases made on this very pleasant blue sky day. One peculiarity of Newark, the place we visited today, is it's, well I don't know what to call it, basically it's an assortment of stalls that sell everything from second hand paint (I kid you not) to hundreds of rusty and abandoned children's bicycles. There was even a stall selling planks of wood and bedding plants, not normally two things you see together.

The auction side is even stranger. All the 'lots' are laid out in lines. You inspect as much as you wish then at the appointed hour the auctioneer walks down them and rapidly fires prices into the crowd. Muted responses return and apparently the sale is complete. All fine and dandy if you know what's happening but everything that was being sold was, how can I say it, essentially rubbish.

So if you are looking for a table with three legs and half a top or seven lego bricks, two DVD's of Russ Abbot and a bicycle wheel (lot 23) then you have come to the right place. I'm forever fascinated by it all so this is my third visit and it just gets better and better. I saw a bloke today beam the biggest smile as he walked away with two crutches (broken) and a hairdryer with no plug. Another got his kicks from a box of rusty nails and twenty used video tapes, and I'm not talking the ones in boxes we used to buy with films on, I'm talking the ones you used to tape on. Weird but strangely compelling.

Anyway, another weird but strangely compelling is our local supermarkets decision to house the stores smoking area in the trolley park. I went to put my trolley back and nearly run over a chap trying to light his roll up by crouching behind the seating (yes, it has seating!) to avoid the draught.

Some days you only need to go out the door to see the most strangest things.

Atishoo

2011-10-25T16:34:00.000+01:00

After seven days frantic activity and oodles of hours of painting the last Lost Impossimals have been safely delivered for selection. Not only that but I also managed to do a bit of signing to keep up with the demand for the September releases and tried to visit a retail outlet on my way home only to find it full of half term shoppers. I was in no mood for half term shoppers today because I have a stinking, pigging, snotty, throaty, cow of a cold that found me sat working wide eyed and runny nosed at 3:30am this morning. Shivering and sweating in equal measures.

I am not happy shaped. So this is today's short entry, please read it with your nose covered (or wear one of the above nose protectors) and wash you hands after using the keyboard as I don't know if my cold is catching and even these very words my bring you out in a sniffle.

Dodge This

2011-10-24T16:16:00.000+01:00

The travelling fair has just visited Mansfield after breaking up from the massive fairground event that is Nottingham’s Goose Fair. I used to visit the fair as it’s only a short walk from where I live but it’s steadily lost it’s appeal ever since the dodgem incident.

For a start, the dodgems for a travelling fair were insanely lively looking like a cross between erratic supermarket trolley and a welder’s yard as twenty foot long sparks bounced around above your head and the cars caromed into each other. Something that was supposed to be forbidden but as the guy in charge of the ride looked like a mass murderer I guess he was almost willing it to happen. I swear once he turned up the electric that high my hair stood on end and the dodgems went that fast that I couldn’t comb my hair forward for three weeks after.

Admittedly I used to watch out of grim interest to see if it set anyone’s hair alight but after a while when I realised this wasn’t going to happen just took my thrills from participating. I say participating but normally what happened after I gingerly made my way to an empty car and tentively touched the accelerator was thirty other drivers to immediately hit me from every possible angle and my body to suddenly move in every direction at once until my face acted as a cushion on the steering wheel. If my memory serves me correct the steering wheel normally had the centre removed which left a large nut exposed, I still have the imprint on my forehead should you wish to see.

Anyway, the thing that put me off dodgems for life was a friend of a friend called John. John wasn’t always the brightest tool in the box, come to think of it, John probably was the box. Or a tool. John liked dodgems, it gave him a tremendous amount of power and he prayed on young kids like a cat plays with a mouse, gleefully knocking them about before a head on smash would render the other occupant unconscious. Thinking about it he played dodgems like a demolition derby without the derby.

John’s dodgem suddenly ground to a halt with some kind of fault you see during one of his demolition exhibitions. There was already ten unconscious eight year olds slumped in their cars littering the dodgem arena and the chain of thought that went through Johns head was ‘Dodgem stop. Must get new dodgem’

Now one thing you should never do is bale out whilst the ride is still running. Our murderous attendant was attending to some busty females queries about his tattoos as far as I remember so the electric remained on. I swear that as he set his foot down on the metal floor a six year old, who had been biding his time, decided to exact a little revenge and hit John head on. John flew six feet into the air and grabbed the metal conducting rod as he flew over the car Matrix style.

Approximately 22,000 volts surged through his body as he lit up like a paper lantern. You could see his organs and everything it was so cool. With a crack that sounded like a horse whip he was catapulted over 100 feet into the stubby grass where he laid twitching, smoking and smelling of BBQ ribs. The hands of his watch were forever frozen at 8:32pm.

That is the reason I don’t do dodgems and also the reason John went on to become a successful electrician in later life.

From Small Beginnings

2011-10-23T14:18:00.002+01:00

I remembered I have not posted a step by step for a long time so today I have chosen one of the popular releases from September, 'Under New Management'. It didn't start very promising as this forlorn plasticine sculpture shows but it had helped define the basic shape and also gave me a reference point for the cigar.

First things first and get the basics down, the shape was pretty soon achieved and whilst it was all wet I swirled in the first layer of smoke ready for the cigar. The stripes were a bit numbing as they were painted wet on wet too so I could capture the shading without resorting to glazing later.

The tie came next, this was far too many stripes so I underpainted in acrylic first, let it dry then glazed ove the top to get the shading. The shadows went in and I concentrated on the cigar.

Working from photos and a real cigar I was brandishing I managed to get the colour just right and even made the end of the cigar glow in the print at night due to the associated colours around the corona.

Detail, detail, detail. A pocket full of money was the final flourish followed by 24 hours drying and a days worth of steady glazing to give the vivid finish.

All nice and neat, looming forward in a gallery near you.

Impossisaurus Giganticus

2011-10-21T15:53:00.002+01:00

Would you believe that it has taken me all day to write and research four new Lost Impossimal stories? Where does all this time go I wonder, it seemed only five minutes since I was sat in my chair at 6:30am pondering where to start.

Admittedly over the course of the day I have had to find out information on everything from circuses, paper clips, tea, the history of dragons and a whole dollop of stuff about tornadoes but surely that doesn't warrant nine hours of writing with only four pages to show for it. Or does it?

Looking closely I can now see where all the time has gone, I have been editing and re-editing the stories and working the through a real historical timeline. As I have made each connection I have had to check the information source and confirm dates, details and locations.

I also found out Wikipedia is not always right, but then again I bet you knew that already.

Even old newspapers have come in handy after finding an online repository. I have also used my 1899 Punch annual and lots and lots of encyclopaedias and social history reference books. So thinking back I now know where the time has gone and why it took me four hour alone to come up with the story for Barnum's Bar Bending Ringling Clipperwhip. Sheesh!

Down

2011-10-20T15:50:00.001+01:00

Hi Daddy, we know you have been working hard painting so me and my husbun, Aaran, thought we would make you something in the garden. Come and have a look, I hope you like it.

We started to dig this nice little hole for you to lay in but the going got tough when we got down to the concrete you poured in to stop us, so not wanting to disappoint we started a new one for you.

And we got on very well indeed, around a foot deep and under the patio. See how clever we are, I knew you would like it, we can always tell by the way you fill it in six times a day. Tomorrow we are going to dig an even bigger one for you because we love you very much.

Thankyou Aaran and Jura.

Two Soups

2011-10-19T17:05:00.001+01:00

Things you do for painting. Today I was modelling craters and armadillos as part of a bigger scene which also required coloured water, always a problem when using plasticine as invariably you always fail to seal everything before pouring it in. My first attempt ended in disaster as a gooey orange liquid filled the recently created landscape and stained everything a peculiar colour in the process.

After remaking the damaged piece I tried again and held my breath as I filled each crater with a different colour. Phew, they all held out so I carefully placed my armadillo in the scene and switched on the spot light.

It took a bit of faffing but I eventually got my scene photo to work to with all the shadows intact and the extra reflections in the water. I used a dropper to add little droplets for realism before trying to capture water ripples when I dropped my water rippler (a screwdriver) into the nearest crater splitting the sides and causing a new flood of pea green liquid. Still I got my picture even if I had to clean the kitchen up twice and launched into the painting for the next seven hours. It's mow standing proud on the easel complete with craters and coloured water, just got to add the Impossimal and then we are cooking on gas!

You've Been Framed

2011-10-18T15:15:00.001+01:00

Getting Bunnyopolis ready for the winter was the task of the day with a delivery of six clear acrylic sheets, oodles of wood and 400 screws, the only thing it didn't come with was instructions.

It's a mammoth task like all things on the supersized Bunnyopolis, the idea was to create window frames for all exposed areas in the run so it can still be accessed in the depths of winter and will be protected from rain, snow and wind. The first panel has taken me nearly all day though, it's big, heavy and required lots of cutting of wood, splitting of acrylic and lots and lots of holes to be drilled.

It did look pretty good when it went up though, it's fully removable and fastened in place with six screws, the wood blocks are there just in case. During Spring it will get removed and bunnies can enjoy the clement, or rather inclement weather again.

Just got the other side to do....

Change

2011-10-17T10:22:00.002+01:00

Way back in 2003 when I first started on my arty journey I really didn't have a clue on where to base my studio. First choice was the conservatory, plenty of light I thought and large enough to accommodate the canvases, paint and everything else I thought I might need. In hindsight it was a bad decision, too much light, heat in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter made it a nightmare to work in.

Still, I managed three years in there but my set up was pretty basic to say the least. A few brushes, kitchen roll and assorted chemicals took up part of the space and paint the other.

All neatly laid out just like I didn't know what I was doing, which for a while was true, even though I have painted all my life suddenly trying to take a hobby and make a living out of it everything became so much more scary. Organisation was the key I thought but it also stunted creativity in places.

By 2007 I had moved indoors and taken over the dining room. A small room which I quickly replicated my setup in, I still hadn't learnt to stop being so meticulous with the paints and I made little racks for them to be displayed on. It took another year and the purchase of three large easels to turn the room into a real studio for the first time.

At the beginning of 2008 it looked like this, a proper easel, table to the left and more importantly the paints no longer on display but filed away to my right.

In these drawers along with all my chemicals, brushes and sketchbooks. Neat and useful.

2011 and it now looks lived in, everything is where I like it for ease, brushes and palette to my left even though I am right handed, don't ask me why, and to my right a laptop for reference, loads of brushes sorted by type and my colour charts above. The easel is now covered with as much reference material as I need and also includes a potted history of releases so I can track individual stories and make sure they work together.

Comfy and very workable, yes, I would like a bigger studio eventually but for now it's the centre of the Impossimal world and also my home.

Walking With Impossimals

2011-10-15T11:30:00.003+01:00

I looked down at my collection of porcupine spines in the same way Mr Benn did in the popular childrens program after each adventure, you see yesterday we were invited by friends to visit not only their home for a delightful meal and company but also to share some time with their fabulous animals, a double bonus for me as it was just what I needed, a break from the studio and a chance to study 'Lost' Impossimals first hand.

We were not disappointed. After a warm welcome from Sallie and John we were introduced to a beautiful Tamandua, or anteater, called Claude. Wow, fantastic and such a gentle animal with a coat that felt so bristly with a powerful body to match. Even though Claude's mouth is only about the diameter of a pencil his tongue can reach between 35-40cm, with Claude blissfully unaware I started to sketch.

I only need the basics, so I concentrated on the details such as eye and face structure and a quick sketch of the skeleton underneath, these notes and the photographs will be transferred into another sketchbook when I get back to the studio.

To further distract me Sherman, the resident armadillo decided to join us, curled up in a little ball this chap is a dynamo, once unfurled (he actually fits together like a rather clever puzzle) he motors round like a demon.

Here's a shot before he clatters away on his high heels, there is no off button so Sherman just goes and goes...

It's a different matter with Kinkajou's though, extremely powerful and very inquisitive as Jayne found out rather quickly...

Oh, Hi! It's nice and warm in here I think I will stay for a while and wriggle about. Tee hee.

Raccoons with their inquisitive nature and perfect little dexterous hands are one of my favourites, I mean how could you not fail to fall in love with a face like this...

Big eyes, cute stripes and a never ending quest to discover everything about their environment with their fantastic mits. Even their touch is quite delicate as they use their flat palms and tiny fingers to check your hand for goodies. Lightening quick and intelligent their striped mask makes them excellent cat burglers, I can imagine them stealing out at night to perform jewel heists that you read about in the news.

Having a chance to get hands on with all these exotic animals is a rare treat, my mind was already in a whir of activity when we came across a pair of porcupines. You really have to see these close hand to believe them. Their spines are divided into two, the swish warning and display type with the more lethal tougher spines at the base, a porcupine turns and reverses to attack when threatened. I for one would not like to be on the receiving end, especially as they cannot just be removed but need to be snipped to let the air out first.

Their spines are truly mesmerising though and I can see them appearing in a painting pretty soon.

Jayne meanwhile seems to have attracted the attentions on Bertie the Coati, he obviously thought Jayne was lacking a bit of grooming so proceeded to sort her hair out whilst Jayne was in fits of laughter.

Meanwhile we had found Timon the Meerkat who you may remember was our host during our last visit in February, quite happily he decided to accompany us for the remainder of the visit and decided to use me as a nice high vantage point to warn me of any problems.

Not that there was any as Oreo shows, after expending quite a lot of energy sorting coins in a water filled bowl and opening drawers whilst eating a plum.

It's about this time you sit back with a meerkat on your leg, a tamandua under the cushions to your right, a kinkajou looking at you from the pillows in front and a raccoon dancing around your back that you realise you are very lucky indeed.

Thanks to John and Sallie for another great day with fine food, company and another memory to cherish.

Should you like to experience some of the exotic animals first hand then visit http://www.oreoandfriends.co.uk/ for your animal encounter, you'll never forget it!

Tomb Teeth

2011-10-14T06:16:00.003+01:00

I wasn't smiling yesterday, this one painting has taken nearly 100 hours to complete with a final push that saw me paint from 8:00am-8:00pm in my quest to get it all completed. I say completed, I mean to say the first layer is in place ready for the extensive glazing, another few days work at least before I'm happy with it. Grrrr!

Its a worrying trend, paintings used to take two to three weeks in 2004, as I gradually increased in speed and learnt new techniques I had got it down to around a week and a half in 2009, now I find I'm starting to make everything even more complex and I'm pushing the two and a half weeks bracket again. On the positive side though compared to the 2009 stuff that are looking awesome, that's not to say the 2009 was not very good, it was, it's just like everything, it improves with age, unless of course it's memory, ah, and hangovers, or even both. At the same time.

My next two paintings are lined up and ready to have a marquette made so I can accurately judge the shadows, another day taken as I photograph and pose them but the extra realism you get means it's worth the time.

Not today though, today is a special day, we are visiting a place that will help me see the next stage of the Lost Impossimals, for that you will have to wait until tomorrow when we revisit the wild side.