Don't tell porkies = don't tell lies. Porkies comes from Cockney rhyme slang. So Pork Pies rhymes with Lies. so pork pies further turns into porkies. This is a collection of photos that i found on various cameras i have. my canon 40D and my phone camera.
Prince Andrew silver plated spoon i bought for bob for Xmas. This is at Covent Garden.
a BMX bike course on the way to Broadway market.
for a while Lucy was ordering and collecting tons of dolls from ebay. This is her childhood doll. creepy. She was doing a photoshoot with lots of dolls so for a while there were creepy dolls around the house and studio.
brick lane market.
brick lane market. jerked meats?
some game at brick lane market. it looks like finger hockey pool
Arnold Circus. I don't think this is a famous circus (roundabout) but its near bricklane and has this thing at the top. i can't remember the name for this thing.
irish stew (wasn't good but then again it was like 30 pence), the full monty (the works) which looks like beans, mushrooms, sausage, rashers, and who knows what else. Cheshire cheese is weakness. again its tesco cheshire cheese so maybe real cheshire cheese is good. but if you want a hearty cheese you had best look elsewhere.
clever gal. trees turned into giant carrots at spitafield market.
The sandwich barge moored in regents canal next to broadway market. This woman is so nice. great hand made tea blends. www.thesandwichbarge.co.uk/
my south african friends had a "braai" (Afrikaans for BBQ). there was tons and tons of meat. it was all about meat.
this girl marinated her stuff in homemade tandoori stuff for like 3 days. it was awesome.
The blind beggar pub on whitechapel road. It was infamously ruled by east-end gangsters back in the day and someone famously got shot in the back there. On 9th March 1966 Ron Kray walked into the saloon bar of The Blind Beggar and shot George Cornell in the head using a 9mm Mauser. Legend would have it that this happened because Cornell had called Ronnie a 'big fat poof', in public, to which Ron obviously took offence and sought revenge. This story seems highly unlikely according to reliable sources and it is more likely the shooting occurred due to a 'business disagreement' involving the Richardson Brothers. This wasn't the first murder in The Blind Beggar. In 1904 a man called Wallis who was a member of The Blind Beggar Gang (a notorious firm of pick-pockets who frequented the pub), stabbed another man in the eye with an umbrella. Its actually a cool place and has a great outdoor area.
The London Jazz Festival. I went with those girls I sketched at the bike cafe. They're friend was playing so we got in for free. Ilhan Ersahin's Istanbul Sessions. He owns Nublu on Avenue C in new york which i've been to a bunch of times
Don't Tell Porkies
Year of the Dragon 2012
Happy 2012! Here is my take on a Japanese new year's card (nengajo, 年賀状). Traditionally they feature the Asian zodiac animal of that year, 2012 is the year of the Dragon. Basically the bottom says Happy New Year and the top says 2011 and the final box below that is the character for dragon.
have i learned nothing? i am a fool and spent 4 hours working on that first color sketch and didn't explore the other compositions i had thumbnailed out. after thinking maybe i hadn't explored enough i fleshed out this 2nd color sketch. I spent like 7 hrs total on these 2 sketches. I forgot to mention that the dragon is probably the one card i was least excited to illustrate because it is so cliche and has been done by so many people and is kind of a symbol of bad taste and bros that love awesome dragons and yin yangs and nunchucks and have posters of scarface on their wall. We've all seen millions of images and tatoos of asian dragons twisting and looking awesome so i wanted to do a crop of a river dragon zooming along his river in a straight line instead of in the sky all twisty and turny. I wanted the feeling of if someone were to look out the window of the boat they would catch a split second of a huge dragon eye ball and scales zoom past the window basically at water level height. In japan dragons usually live in bodies of water like the ocean or rivers. i thought this was cool and interesting. Like that Miyazaki movie spirited away, that dragon was the spirit of some river in Japan. A huge dragon zooms by a japanese party boat, the kind i frequently saw on the sumida river in Tokyo. He is looking ahead (maybe to the new year?) and doesn't look like he is going to harm the boat at all. In fact they are the guardians of rivers and stuff. Dragons are also associated with spring in japan. What i wanted to achieve was to make it look like he is flying fast-ish, really close to the surface of the water. The shadow had to be created perfectly and the water movement had to be perfect too. I hate doing water movement and suck at it so badly, i can never get it right. The problem is that there was no proper reference for this kind of water movement. I know i've seen it before in some anime or movie where a missle is cruising 2 inces above the water or something. I even watched the scenes in a few Harry Potter movies where they fly close to the water but the special effects team always copped out and didn't show the water being effected by these wizards flying super close to the water. I even enlisted in the help of my fellow illustration collective to find reference but couldn't find any.
the shadow was super hard to get right and i never got it right. i even used google sketch up and taped together paper and a lamp.
had to cut this paper cuz I couldn't find the same weird size i found in china to match the other previous paintings.
gesso borrowed from Angel. you'll get it back some day.
background
i'll spare you the tedium of painting all the cherry blossom petals and transferring the drawing to the painting, so here it is after all that and inked in.
A Very Van Der Kock Xmas - Part 2
Sausage gravy and biscuits. A man's breakfast.
go on van der kock you know you like it. the recipe calls for a whole stick of butter melted into that gravy.
targets for the sportsman's club that my dad runs or use to run or supervises or something.
bob's behind a wall of his favorite beverages at Wegman's.
sushi time. it would have been a lot better if sushi grade fish was available at wegman's but it turned out ok.
Van Der Kock is from holland remember. This was his first waffle ever. at least it was homemade. Also it was his first time trying rootbeer and cream soda. come on guy, god.
my new Canon 24 mm f/1.4 L USM lens. wide angle, super fast f/1.4, silent USM motor, L glass, all comes at a hefty price and weight too. The photos out of this are so crispity.
the new 24 mm is fixed at 24 mm so naturally its image quality is better than my old 20-35mm zoom lens. The old 20-35mm is so much lighter though.
the lens hood that came with the new lens is ridiculously large and i never use it because it draws too much attention to the super expensive gear i'm carrying.
film crew on the hill.
hey ladies, are you into rugged, yet refined gentlemen with their domesticated beast against a back drop of earth-toned country goodness? Look no further.
I don't know which one of these i like better so i posted both.
please don't leave too many comments about how i look so cool and like the wong kar wai of my generation.
into the forest.
in another life me and bob have decided that we would be the Asian Coen brothers. And this would be a photo of us scouting a location for our movie that is not Fargo. But seriously we wish we could make movies but it is too late as we are in the twilight of the making a career out of something years.
This trail cam captured a bear and its cubs a few weeks ago.
Did you that we are in a bad Azz rock band with Van Der Kock though? We rocked a crowd of 2 for 4 days straight, 1 day and 1 night show. the crowd of 2 were not our fans though and the novelty a rock band wore off after 2 songs.
my pal Allen Ying started this new skate board magazine "43". this is the premiere issue, check it out if you can, they're rare these days. http://43magazine.com/
Our attempt at English tea time. We even faxed my mom this invitation that i made. We wore suits, mom wore a dress. Bob made scones, crumpets, and clotted cream cuz i had to work on a magazine cover. Do you know how hard it is to make clotted cream? it took a day and a half and yeilded almost nothing. But bob is a soldier. I made bunting (that triangle pennant cloth thing) and hung it up. there were many kinds of Fortnum & Mason teas and gooseberry jam. Then the power went 10 minutes into our "tea party". We pretended that this party was happening during the Blitz and that the scones and crumpets didn't suck, but we could only keep it up for so long. Please don't make fun of us. We're two full grown male brothers still trying to get mommy and daddy to play tea party with us.
