Just come back from my lovely honeymoon and spent 2 weeks in Mauritius. I loved it and also had a lot of time sitting about on planes, at airports etc. It got me thinking about the wildlife britain has. Nothing here will really kill you. Nothing big enough to trample on you and nothing small enough (venemous) to sneak up on you and bite you.

It’s not sunny enough here to have things that are brightly coloured…if anything, everything here is pretty much brown, grey or black. For a while I thought it was rubbish, there was nothing exciting…nothing with risk. But having been away a while I really missed all the British wildlife.

The risk got annoying after a while, checking all the corners of the room before you go to bed…checking in your shoes in the morning. You get none of that nonsense in Britain. So with that in mind I started trying to think of all the creatures which sum up Britain.

First things first though this came from a website I stumbled over on twitter, colonel windpipes musical brigade go have a look it’s filled with loads of great artists contributions to a band made up of all sorts of creatures and characters. So here are my contributions. The best of british.

Albert the washboard playing badger…

Stockton the drum playing hedgehog…

Agnus the clarinet playing stoat

and finally Norris the guitar playing rabbit…The Britpips.

Also If you want to see it bigger it’s up on flickr

Been getting some questions of late as to my preferred doodle method so thought i’d share. Lots of people do things differently but I thought I’d outline my process it’s always good to share even if someone knows a better more efficient way. So i’ll Attempt to walk you through as best I can to get you to this…

I like to do all my drawing on paper, pencil first then use pen. My preferred pens are these mitsubishi uni pin fine liners, they’re real quick drying, come in loads of line weights, last for ages and are waterproof. Once the piece is finished it’s onto the scanner. Make sure the scanner is clear of any dust or fluff same goes for the drawing if you’ve used a rubber make sure all the wee bits have gone. First off My names rob johnson and I’m a PC but i’ll show the directory as well as the PC shortcuts. I do all my scanning through Photoshop which can be found File>Import >Twain…blah blah blah and the name of your scanner. Once it’s fired up I generally scan the piece in colour and at 300 dpi you can have higher if it’s for print but mine is just for general digital use. Once you have the Jpg into Photoshop the first thing to do is desaturate the image, this will remove all the colour turning it to black and white. You can use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U or in the menu Image>Adjustmens>Desaturate. Now what we need to do is sort the image to try remove some of the other noise around it to get a good solid line. To do this we’ll adjust the levels, this can be done by pressing Ctrl+L which brings up this window…

You’ll see that the levels window has three arrows pointing up just below the graph a black on the left, grey in the middle and a white on the far right. As a general rule you move the black arrow to the right to the highest nearest peak & the white into the left until you reach the first part of the graph. The midtones are controlled with the grey arrow in the middle this will be where you will see the big difference. Move it too far right you’ll see alot of mess, move it too far left it will wash it all out. So you’ll have to find a happy medium. Once you’re happy with the levels, ok that and next open up the brightness & contrast Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast… here you’ll probably want to increase the Brightness and The Contrast which should leave you with a nice clean line. It will take a bit of playing around with but generally if you’re going to play about with the levels & brightness try and get them right first time as if you do it over and over again information does get lost in the process.

Now comes the clever bit, separating the line from the white background. You’ll see in your layers window (F7 If you can’t see it or Windows>Layers) there only is one layer. Select all Ctrl+A or Select>All this will put a little dotted line around the whole image. Now copy the image Ctrl+C or Edit>Copy. Now find your Channels window if its not open you can switch it on here Windows>Channels this will have 4 layers in it RGB, Red, Green and Blue what you need to do is add a new layer to this which can be found at the bottom of the window just left of the bin…

This adds an alpha Channel. By default this will switch off all the other layers, then you paste Ctrl+P or Edit>Paste. This will paste your whole image in and make it look no different. Now With the Ctrl button held down left click the layer you pasted into. This will highlight the lines selected…

Now we have the lines selected switch off your alpha layer (the little eye to the left) and switch on the other 4 RGB, Red…etc return to your Layers window F7 or Windows>Layers here create a new layer Ctrl+Shift+N or using the little icon left of the bin switch off all the other layers. All you should see now is the selction over a chequed background…

What we need to do now is fill this selection, however before we do that we need to invert the selection, to do this press Ctrl+Shift+I or Select>Inverse , the selection will still look the same. Now select A colour And fill the selection with the paint bucket over in the tools or just press G. When you fill the selection you should now have just the lines on a transparent background…

We’ve done it…woohoo! all that’s left to do is add couple of layers underneath the lines layer and colour them in whatever colour you want…bosh…

I hope this was useful to someone, It may be basic to some and others may do the same thing differently, have fun & Goodluck.

It’s not looking good for my ye olde Ipod. The headphone jack seems to be playing up so I can only hear through one ear. My Ipod has gone deaf in one ear…he is old bless him. Gutted. It’s going in to get fixed and in the meantime will have to make do with my mini-disc player and old compilations from 2001 ace-ics!

June…nearly gone. Where has it all gone? Summer is well and truly upon us, everyone disappearing on their holidays, people out cutting their grass and realising you don’t own enough summer clothes. Here is this months playlist, a collection of music which has turned up through the month or randomly recommended by others. A little doodle that I quickly coloured up. I now have months worth of backed up doodles. Some of them in fairness don’t need colour, this one didn’t need much. I’ll get them somewhere useful…promise

There’s a bigger one on flickr, and here is the playlist…enjoy.

I’ve been looking for a new pencil case for ages. My Stationary collection has grown legs making it difficult to find something that isn’t a rucksack. So what did I do? chopped the legs off a pair of jeans that where a bit scruffy, sewn them up and added a zip. Creating not only a perfect pencil case bit a new pair of shorts. Bosh.

P.S my sewing skills are awful

I’m a huge fan of silly cameras and follow a lot of people via twitter or flickr who share this love. I own loads of cameras, mostly film. I do have a decent digital SLR but rarely get round to using it these days. There’s something quite nice about not knowing what you’re going to get when you leave it someones elses hands for a few days. Anyway i’m waffling, I literally stumbled over this camera on some google meandering and was pleasantly surprised to see you can just get them on amazon (under toys & games ). It arrived and came in lovely packaging with a very simple set of instructions. The basic gist of the camera is nicely embossed on the back of the camera.

It takes 35mm film but only winds on half as much. Basically doubling the amount of pictures you get on a single film. This gives a great effect.

It’s very much a case of playing about with it. I use a holga, and know which conditions it likes and basically what works and what doesn’t, it is after all another cheap plastic camera…lens and all. The camera has 3 settings on the front. One for sunny conditions, one for cloudy and one for using a flash which shoes on the side (not got round to trying it out yet). My holga is huge making it not ideal for carting about day by day but this camera is great just t throw in a pocket or bag. The biggest difficulty was trying to remember which shot you had taken last to try and pair up a picture, thinking about it now there’s no way of knowing which is the first picture off the reel. This makes for awesome “surprise” compositions which look awesome.

Most of the photos I took on a MASSIVE walk home along the canal which runs from the centre of Glasgow all the way to Anniesland. The golden half loves the sun…as do I. Go get one…AWESOME. A load more up on flickr, enjoy.

I love owls! They seem to be making a bit of a comeback…not that they’ve ever been away. In terms of trends, Owls are the new wolves..you can quote me on that. This was a little pen doodle then taken into photoshop where I went a bit mad adding colour and playing about with brushes.

OWL FACT:Owls CAN’T actually move their eyes which is why they need to be able to turn their head (280 degrees if you must know)

Bigger pic up on Flickr here.

My beautiful wifes birthday today. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. And where is she? away on a hen weekend, hence why I can squeeze in a cheeky birthday blog. I’m quite rubbish when it comes to buying actual gifts so I did the next best thing. Planned a surprise weekend away somewhere good and random. My wife isn’t the greatest fan of public transport, She’s always been a driver where as I haven’t even had a lesson. So this was the joke, EVERY kind of public transport I could ram into the weekend.

I drew everything up separately scanned it all in the pieced it altogether in photoshop. This isn’t the final thing, I did add some nice grey shading and have the final thing mounted in a white frame. I can’t show you, as she took it away with her on friday and only opened it today. As far as I know she loved it and I’m quite chuffed with my first comic strip efforts. Happy birthday love x.

If you want to see it in more detail it’s up here to.

I love camping! not going to lie…been waiting so long for the opportunity but the weather had been so awful. As a note, this post should have been written nearly a month ago but busyness and lazyness got the better of me so i’m stepping up. The occasion was maccas birthday and the location was originally going to be Gullane beach just outside Edinburgh towards north berwick. Macca started off his saturday like any other playing a bit of football only to end up in hospital on his birthday getting stitches in his heel…HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Eventually our little Glasgow convoy arrived at Gullane only to discover the car park was no overnight stays and no camp fires…uh oh…not so good. Up the road to the next location yellowcraigs…same story…panic. Not to worry as we had an insider who knew another place just a bit further up the road Tyninghame to be precise, a lovely little place in dunbar to be exact. We got parked as close to the beach as we could and headed down the cliffs towards the beach to setup camp in this lovely spot.

We picked up a proper BBQ on the way rather than those rubbish disposable ones along with steaks, burgers and sausages. Just over a wee ridge that protected us from the wind was the beach itself. A lovely stretch of proper east coast beach where frisbee and kite flying was top of the todo.

Back round the campsite to get a proper fire on the go. All the time our campsite acted as a through road for a lot of people carrying drums and tents further up the beach. We had to ask to find out what was going on. It turned out just 10 mins up the beach from us about 80 people celebrating the beltane (basically a fire festival) were having a massive party. Sat round our fire the rain started, about midnight we made the decision to go investigate. Walking down the beach in the dark we could hear the drums, also out of the darkness a massive orange glow casting some seriously weird shadows onto the beach. We turned the corner and there it was…a huge fire with loads of people dancing semi naked round it. All up the cliffside candle lanterns flickered, it looked amazing. Anyone who’s seen the big lebowski, imagine that bit where he goes to jackie treehorns back garden to meet him. Was amazing all playing drums and dancing. We were welcomed and shown where we could recycle our cans and bottles (of course) and only one rule, please don’t take any photos…fair enough. Was great fun, had to take my top off…seemed rude not to, even had a shot playing the drums…turns out…I’m rubbish. Was really starting to chuck it down but all you had to do was sqeeze up next to the fire for 5 mins to dry off. I’d never seen anything like it and doubt anything like that will ever randomly happen again. I got brave and disappeared down the beach into the darkness to take a picture…knowing you couldn’t make anything out..otherwise..who’d believe me?

Happy birthday macca..was magic!

Well, another month has flown by and before you know it we’re in June! How did that happen? I’ve still alot of blogging to catch up on as a few regular readers keep pointing out. It’s all been busy busy, I’ve doodles literally fizzing out of me. I will get round to putting them somewhere useful, but for now here’s my usual (actually only the third) spotify playlist of my months best music. Whether it’s new music i’ve never heard or classic tunes that had come into conversation or one of the many twittering friends has recommended some music. It’s all here.

As for the doodle. I regularly doodle, Mostly on the train or in the station but of late i’ve been cycling into work. This has really thrown a spanner in the works. The doodle came from a phrase that was used in an episode of six feet under which I somehow missed first time round.

So please enjoy it’s a good eclectic mix of old, new and with a twist of madness. It’s here.

Also if you want a bigger picture it’s here.