Anyway, I grew to love these pictures.

I wanted to use the homepage so I can have my emails, calendar, to do lists and so I know when the latest hilarious dose of Charlie Brooker’s column comes out and I can steal some new acerbic descriptions of the iPad. The problem was that I like to have pretty pictures on my homepage so I can while away hours following links but it seems a bit like research. All of the available gadgets that made RSS feeds into slideshows looked clunky though and didn’t do everything I wanted. So I did as Google suggested and made my own, cannibalising an existing one that didn’t quite do it for me.

It’s got options to randomise the images, hide the image titles and resizes the images according to width of the gadget or the height you specify, whichever’s smaller, but it doesn’t stretch or pixellate anything. All in all it’s pretty awesome.

You can add it to your iGoogle homepage taking this URL – http://www.gregorymarkhannan.com/gadgets/RssImageSlideshow.xml – and pasting it in the Add RSS Feed/Gadget and ignoring the warning that it’s not an official Google gadget. I think I’m going to add it to the official Google gadget selection, if I feel like I can face getting abuse from people telling me there’s a bug in capital letters with too many exclamation marks.

I set to work in my own little world, as I am wont, and came up with something too cartoony, definitely not dark enough…

Sure enough they didn’t like it so I went looking for better reference, going a bit tribal and came up with this…

…which I decided was a bit too rough, so it turned into this…

…via this…

…and this…

But they weren’t fans of it. I was obviously spending far too long creating complete illustrations, these drafts taking a day or two to make at least. I’d clearly been spoiled by a lifetime of people liking my doodles during lessons. But I had a new direction. Looking at the Cirque Bezerk website I went for a far more photographic, realistic style website. And pulled out my trump card. This!

Which they liked! I was so pleased and followed their guidance, replacing the previous globe lamps with the more Moroccan feel you see above and darker, moodier lighting. I spent a long time on this one and I’m very pleased with it, my first real foray into photoshop realism. Except it’s got that rendered feel to it, right? Look at the wooden panels there. They’re not real! They changed their minds. This wasn’t right.

What they were actually after was a more graphic style, but with that macabre feel. So like an old circus poster, but dark and brooding. I came up with a little illustration with elements taken from a load of reference, due to be an illustrated, peeling poster on one of the columns either side of the curtain.

It was too cartoony though. I still think it could work in the way I was envisioning but maybe they were right. So….one last time after god only knows how many hours spent on the project thus far. It had got to the point where I just had to produce something they liked, for my own sanity. What was the other option? Take the money they’d given me so far and run?

So this came about…

I barely wanted to send it, though I loved it, and accompanied it with an email saying I was pretty much terrified of their probable response and that we should just get on with it, send the thing to the glue factory and move on with the simpler website we’d been touting as a possibility (and an illustration of my graphical impotence). But! I quote!

HORAAAAY! YES, Greg this is MUCH better!! we can work with this, the one with the light is great too, i like the colours…i reckon you can go ahead and start to program this one!

How happy was I? I programmed it right in and you can see it here. Pouring your heart and soul in, hours and hours spent getting things just right, it’s worth it in the end, right? Are you sensing a ‘but’?

Next email. Very official, from some guy I don’t know saying that they’d looked through the designs and it just wasn’t working. Please keep the money paid so far for my work but they were going to design it themselves.

Bugger.

Now I honestly have no ill feeling, some frustration maybe, but it’s probably most frustrating because it highlights the fact that it’s down to me to make the connection with the client. Who else is going to make it work? Ask more questions, make sure you’ve identified the proper areas to focus on. Write five words on the wall where you work if you have to, but don’t lose that focus.

I spent too long beavering away on my vision when the ratio of creating drafts to communicating with the client should have been far more even. At least I won’t bloody well forget that.

Fist there’s a sketch from a beautiful church in Italy, Napoli I think it was.

Next we skip forward to Berlin, where I evidently had some angst to translate…

Finally, a couple of illustrations to get things moving for a comic book I’m making with the lovely Rosie, called faux. They’re scenes that may or may not happen.

This one’s probably to be coloured…

…and that’s about it for now.

One is a portrait of my friend Arron.

Then there are the portraits that went into one of my Christmas Portraits I did last year. The last image is the final result, though not very well photographed. It’s my friend Laura’s mum.

Anyway, onto the new blog content. Some pictures!!! Mainly what I’ve got actually on my computer.

So this was supposed to be the splash page for a website. I was a mad artist, drawing all over the world of web design. Or something. But I went in a different direction…

Then I did a pic of Lola, Tank Girl inspired…

…not sure how her parents took the, er, cigarette behind her ear. I ended up doing another comic style portrait, for Kim and one of her workmates. They work in a firm of architects. Super architects presumably…

And most recently, a logo design for Soulfire, a classy restaurant that’ll be at the Secret Garden Party this year. I think my favourite is the one in the middle with the man with fire in his belly/soul, the bolder one. But they went for the top-right, which I sort of expected they would.

So that’s it for my first new post. I’ve got some sketchbook work I’ll try and put up soon, but otherwise most of my illustration’s gone into websites like this one recently so check them out on the site.

Consequently I haven’t been doing a great deal of illustration, which is starting to get to me a bit. Time for some intensive drawing methinks. I’ve got quite a lot of stuff I haven’t been able to show or haven’t got round to uploading yet though, so here’s a load…

I did some illustrations for KnockBack magazine, a comic strip and an illustration to go with an article about the effect of the internet on relationships and thus the relating evolutionary results.

Initial ideas…

eventually settling on a different idea…

and

and this is the comic strip, based on an anecdote I was given…

I was also asked to help out designing a logo for the delightful Pure Filth events party type company thing. But they didn’t like my ideas. I think because they’re not bad enough. Or something. They’re silly. Having said that, they might be better simpler…

Finally the background for a yard sale poster I designed gives me great pleasure (not so much the finished product though)…

and a little illustration I did to go with an email to try and get some work with a magazine called Bearded. It hasn’t paid off yet.

…the back…

Oh, and in the spirit of y’know, enterprise or whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing with my life, I now do custom t-shirts as well as sketchbooks. If you so desire…