Look

look look!

A Guardian Online Gallery about my books! With a commentary by me me me.

Abney and Teal Abroad

Here's the article about my show in Broadcast magazine that I mentioned earlier.

[Edit: Hmm, that article didn't require subscription when I first linked to it, but now it does, so my addendum won't mean much to anyone...]

Intricacies that I might add, since we're leaked anyway, are that it has been me, rather than the whole team, painting all the "individual blades of grass" etc. The team will be painstakingly collaging sets together from these hand painted elements, under the guidance of Steve Roberts and myself. Steve's own show Dip Dap is so far as I know also being produced by Chris Wood.

Last night I visited Tim Van Eyken on his boat, after a chance meeting at a concert a few weeks ago (with Tim, not his boat. I heard tones I recognized singing along from the bench beside me at Cecil Sharp House and jumped rudely at the chance to meet him).
Apart from being an incredible melodeon player, Tim until very recently sang the songs for Warhorse. It was Tim's singing (which you can hear there on that Warhorse video clip), and equally the puppets, that made the show for me.
We talked and played melodeons by the warm stove until late, and discussed possibilities for my show's soundtrack, amongst other things. Just a lovely, easy and exciting evening from which I learned enough musical tips to be going on with for months.

Do diddle di do,

Poor Jim Jay,
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday*

Today I did a short telephone interview for Broadcast Magazine about my show, and most likely baffled the poor reporter with intricate details of the weird and varied animation techniques we've been developing. I don't know when and if any of it'll go up online but I'll try to link to it later, if I can. Mind, I once went on and on about intricacies for an interview about my books and the article subsequently never appeared, presumably because anything of any interest was buried under the weight of what kind of paper or pens I was using at the time...

In other news I've been sick and working only at my home studio for some time now, and I also managed to injure my back at the weekend when I elected to use my heaviest accordion for some recording (I'm not built to be a fully fledged accordionist, and certainly not after several days of hardly moving). I'm hoping to get back up to the tv studio towards the end of the week, and back on top of things thereafter.

*Walter de la Mare

Autumn leavings

I haven't drawn anything not non-disclosure-agreed in some time, but if there were time I would have drawn the stray Jack Russell I saw today, stalking twelve haughty crows through autumn leaves so deep that at times only its nose was visible.

It's absolute chuffing bedlam in the studio, by the way. They're pile-driving the foundations for another horrible apartment block not six feet from my wall. Houseplants are dancing, tea is doing Jurassic-park impressions, I am wearing noise-cancelling headphones...

Look,
Autumn printed on the pavement: