All of you on the Good Earth

 I'm not interested in the religous sentiment. It's the whole poeticalness of being 240000 miles away from home and looking back on it. Jim Lovell once said "We went to the moon and discovered the Earth." It is so true, I wish more people could understand that. It's hard to imagine there was once a time when nobody had ever seen the full Earth, the blue marble they call it, the whole globe in one big glorious sphere. In 1968 these three men became the first to do so. The first to gaze upon an entire full planet, the first the leave it, the first to arrive at another less welcoming place, the first to fly over and see how empty faceless the far side of the moon is. That is why, for me, Apollo 8 is so much more important than Apollo 11, the landing.

House Keeping

Pretty much off on Christmas holiday now, though this year I'm not doing Christmas. I'm staying alone in my student house, relaxing, and enjoying the peace and quiet. I did make a Christmas card for Merle though, as she insisted on getting me a gift even though I cant afford to return the favour. I think her for giving me something to open on Christmas day. Thank you.

 

Also, I've been making a couple Aum's for various people, here's one. Its ink n' bleach.

Assesment Over, Life May Continue

*Phew* The last few weeks have been hard, emotionally, physically, work-loadally. Know it's all over and done with and I'm oretty much released fro Christmas. My first Christmas out of home and I cant wait to do things my way :) Some assorted memories since September that have backed up on my camera: 

1. Merle and Beth head out into the cold.
2. My snowman. Plymouth knoweth no snoweth
3. Oscar, my housemates dog. We have bonded in recent weeks. He purs for me.
4. The Girls of the Secret Dinner Club
5. Merle took this picture of me making stuffed peppers for everybody in her kitchen
6. Rachel wrestles a Rubics Cube.

T Minus 59 Hours

 The big big module I've been working on since september is coming to fruition, hand in mindnight tuesday. I managed to work myself ahead of schedule so this weekend is just tightening up the screws, a slow comfortable cake walk to the finish line. Here are two out of six of my finals. I'm especiallyl proud of the last onel. My tutor felt I had gone stale and all my finals were labored and over-thought compared to my dummy and sketchbooks. So that last one is actually a drawing I did in my sketch book over 6 weeks ago, just redrawn over a lightbox. Definitley one way to stay fresh is to go back in time.

Catch Up

I like to pretend real people actually read this blog and are interested in my life, so this ones for you.

I havn't updated as often as I did a few months ago simply because I am bogged down with an incredible workload. Second year is so much more intense than first year. I've found myself improving in my art like it's nobodies buiness after stagnating in the summer. I feel like I've been on drawing steroids. I try to take time for myself to do the art that I want to do but its few and far between (the first man on mars drawing I featured in my last post being the most recent example of drawing for pleasure.)

I've got an incredibly heavy week this week, probably the most difficult so far. I have untill 10pm on monday to finish editing a video that his been in production for weeks. Its a puppet sow parody of Bill and Ted's Excellant Adventure in which Bill and Ted go around collecting examples of different illustrators interpretaions of fairy tale charecters. That has to be ready to be screened on Tuesday in front of the whole class. It'll either be hilarious and one for the histroy books or fall completly on its low-production value face. When it's finished I'll post it up here. Then on wednesday I'm taking the train to Exeter to chair a debate on Scientific Scepticism between two teams of 16-18 year old students for the qualifying round of the National Debate Competition of which I am an alumni. I havn't had a chance to swot up on the subject properly though I sense Helen the Alumni Organiser put me chairing that debate because I have an interest science already (she watched me two years ago blow away the opposition in my first ever debate when I convinced a room full of apollo era children that robotic space exploration was the way to go even though I felt differently at the time.)

Thursday I'm chairing the same debate again plus the age old Monarchy debate in someplace-I've-never heard of in Somerset, I'm looking at about 6 hours travel spread over the day. I hate chairing too, but I'm assured its something I'll get used to.

Then friday. My first evening off this week. I don't know what I'll do with it. Perhaps the negotiations I've been holding with a certain someone might come to head and we might actually have our first (re)-date. :D

In the meantime a series "photographs" which "I took". (They're actually a screen caps I took from live streaming  Nasa satelite feed from florida.) This is image was taken in the final day of what I like call "the week of FOR-FUCK-SAKE!" in which I had revved myself up to watch the final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery and the penultimate shuttle launch in history. Monday it was cancelled due to a fuel leak. Tuesday it was cancelled due to electrical problems. Wednesday and Thursday it was called off due to rain. Finally on Friday they progressed to the stage of adding the beanie cap (big orange cap on top of the big orange rocket in which the liquid ocygen fuel is pumped into the external tank prior to launch) which was promising. I watched the sun rise over the orbiter via live streaming satelite. I went off to a tutorial with professional illustrator Viviane Schwarz and 45 minutes when I came back I heard the voice of the public relations guy saying "Well thats it the launch is scrapped untill November 29th." And I let out an almighty roar of frustration. It turned out that as they were fueling the tank there was another leak. They went in for a closer look and discovered a crack in the foam insulation. If they had gone ahead with the launch then that piece of foam would have broken off from the tank and hit the wing of the Shuttle, leading to the distruction of the orbiter and the death of the entire crew. If that leak hadn't occured they never would have noticed and history may have been very different. It boggles the imagination.

Note the sunrise. It's the most beuatiful webcam avaliable on the web.

First Man on Mars

My buddy Tim has gotten me into the habit of keeping a dream journal and illustrating it. This is one I had a few weeks ago but hadn't got around to illustrating. I dreamt I watched Chuck Anderson (my astronaut character) take man's first steps on Mars. It was very vivid, especially the orange ground and pink sky. I choose to draw this in my little 0.1 fine liner, that died just as I got to the sky. I realised later the pose is almost exactly like the famous image of Buzz Aldrn on the moon, ack, owell, un-concious homage! Click to enlarge.

 

And some disgusting photoshop work later:

I tried to update the traditional moon suit, make it a little more futuristic. Little up-side down touchscreen iPad thing on his chest so that he can look down and read it. A little screen on his wrist to replace the old check list. Knee pads because the Apollo astronauts were constantly falling on their knees and the jagged rocks of Mars are a lot sharper than those on the moon. And the patch. SpaceX. Not NASA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX It's sad, but they are the future.

Another Christmas Card

 

I have discovered the joy of bleach and ink. 

Two Sides of the Same Coin

CLICK TO FULL SCREEN
Something I doodled during a lecture, and one of many of my many entries to the Christmas Card Competition (it became a self portrait, I didn't intend it to).

I originally scanned this at 1200 DPI but the server couldn't digest it, so I had to demote it down to 300 :( . I get more pleasure out of badly drawn astronauts doing funny things than serious and more considered stuff. I don't know why.

An apple a day is a good amount of anti-oxidents

I've been embracing healthy eating with a passion, since I lost a bit of weight over the summer. I was never really interested in food, but now, mmm, the herbs, the flavours, the wonderous things you can make healthily from scratch. I guess its been moving out thats done it for me; I'm on a tight budget so I can choose between fueling myself with cheap rubbish or fueling myself with cheap goodness. Goodness won. I'm so dissapointed my whole childhood I never learnt to coook. My mum tried, I wasnt interested (partly because I wasn't interested in what she cooked) and also the school system. Shame on you Thatcher! Two (now nearing three!) generations of people who never learnt to cook at school. They feed their fat little thre year olds pizza and processed chicken nuggets in way bigger portions than they should have and counting chips as a vegetable, just because they were never taught any better at school. Lucky for me I skipped a generation (my mum was born in the 50's not the 70's hooray) so atleast my mum had her "domestic science" o level to feed her and her family. It seems as we all got older my mum didn't have as much time to cook from scratch as she used to, and it became the dark few years of ready meals. But Not I'm moved out, I buy my own shopping 60% of which is fresh veg. I cook! It's so much. I drove the change myself. I quit coke and oh my goodness would you believe it I don't miss it at all. Now I am ranting. Here's somebody who I know will teach me a lot in the future, but you have to make the change yourself.

Test Collage

 

 Acrylic paint on cardboard, charcoal and chalk pastel details. The bin is pencil cut out and glued on top, and the character is pen and ink on paper cut out and glued on. I was trying out an Oliver Jeffers type thing. Now I've decided my book will be landscape a4 but owell! It was useful.

Tentative Charecter Designs

 

 

For the narrative project we been 'a working on. I've been calling him Giuseppe, Joe and Tony, though he'll probably end up un-named, since its a silent book anyway. He's about 25 and works as a dish washer in an Italian restaurant in Plymouth, and adopts a lost little dog and lives happily ever after. 

When I get the money and the helium...

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

The new blogspot uploader is reeking havoc with my computer and it wont let me uplaod my own stuff, so untill I figure out how to go back to the old way, enjoy this video I cam across. It's so easy. I'm so totally doing that! In a couple of years, when I can afford to have a disposable iphone.

Narrative and Character Workshop - intoducing Chuck Anderson!

      Interesting day working with charecter, narrative and trying to figure out whether the macguffin in Back to the Future is the Delorean or the Doc. Session concluded with a quick sketch of a random character created right on the spot:

Random Narrative Creator

New technique new tutor Tom taught us. Create random blobs on a page and see what happens. I was dubious at first but then this happened...

 

A narrative just sprung up out of nowhere! Duuuude! Nothing to do with my original theme though. Maybe the Concerned Little Dog (as I call him) befriends a wisecracking moth and they run away together, dreaming of making it to the moon. Then they get taken in by kindly strangers. The end.

I'd rather spend billions on this...

I wish I could take credit for this beast of a captionm but unfortunatly this nugget of genius-ness comes hot off the front page of Pundit Kitchen. Still, it took the words RIGHT OUT MY MOUTH!

Moths

Finally back in the studio now that's up to working condition again after the summer refit. First it was super de-ja-vu but now I feel home again. These are some scans from the summer brief we were issued. I choose to explore gravity and ended up at moths: flying moths, trapping moths, dead moths. It started with finding a dead moth under some boxes when I moved out, so I kept it and stuck it in (image 1) then, when I got to my new student digs the place was COVERED in moths (image 2). I don't usually take cues from the universe but it got me thinking about the life cycle of moths, and moths that are trapped and unable to fly. Moths that are denied the ability to fly, thus the whole gravity thing. Also, I relate to moths. Butterflies are beautiful, everybody knows that, and every little girl has a butterfly on their clothes somewhere. What about moths? Moths are beautiful too, just marginalized because of their unconventional beauty. Thats me. I'm a moth. So anyway I was out getting to know my new student area and there were all these really pretty colored leaves...(image 3)

In my haste to scan this the glue I used to preserve the leaves is still a bit wet - on the right.

Photo Post- End of Summer

All moved out. That's a whole post in itself, but instead have some pictures from my Summer as I head into a frightening and confusing time. Click to make much bigger!

(I didn't want to destroy the flow of the post, so captions'll go here if anyone's interested. 1. Smokin' hot Tim at the BBQ. 2. The peacock from the zoo. 3. Brother Sam hugs his girlfriend Jess after completly his 850 mile end-to-end walk to raise money for Luekemia research, to which we lost our Dad. 4. London's South Bank, performance artist hugs a very unwilling man who then walk's off in a huff. 5. Photographer at the Debating Matters Final. I thought I might learn something by sitting next to him throughout my time off during thr 4 day event. I didnt. 6. A loverly couple who had been married for 40 years or so, a mixer event for the Disablity Action Network which sought to get opinions and suggestions from disabled members of the public regarding accesibility in the city. 7. Rachel reacts to her suprise party. 8. Not sure what was happening here, I was too drunk after the party. Fun times though.)

Some More Artwork

Finally went back to the studio for day to use the scanner. It's very weird being here with storage stacked up everywhere and no tables or chairs. Also, really major de-ja-vu of the first day of Uni.

Surprise, surprise, I been drawin' Astronauts again. Of course, traditional fabric rope freezes and shatters in space but whose counting.

Couldn't figure out how to rotate this, and Photoshop is being a big gay. Speaking of gay...

I'm on the planning committee for the next Plymouth Pride Event (me helping to plan a whole cities pride!? wow!) I volunteered myself for logo duty. I did like five different logos and they choose this one to keep working on. Apparently it's a competition, if I don't win then, well, screw em' and their drag queen contest!!!

Caturday

Well, moving out day is rapidly approaching. In seven days I will move all my earthly possesions to my new home (a tiny prison cell in a shared house of 10) and five days after that I will move myself there, to live for two years. What will I do for those five days I dont have my xbox, playstation, TV, dvds, musical instruments and telescope? *sob* I JUST DONT KNOW!

Anyway, leaving the family home for the first time, not sure if I'll ever return (Mum wants to sell the house) is causing me all sorts of stress and deeply damaging worry. Also, I'll be leaving my cats. Will I ever see them again either? If mum sells the house she has to find a new home for the cats. Having just lost one of them to old age I feel even more upset about the prospect of them going to live with strangers. Anybody in Devon or Cornwall with a nice big garden, no children or other pets!? Anyways, commence caturday, Rae-style:

Holly. The skittsh, gentle soul. Like's tummy rubs.

 Sally, the fat cat, although since Stripy died she's lost a considerable amount of weight. She was second in command and Stripy's foster sister, they were the closest so I think she's taking it hard.

Toby, the man-cat, spawn of Holly and mystery neighborhood sperm donor. For 10 years we though Tiby was a black cat but suddenly this year he started turning burgendy, It seems as he ages his mother's colours are coming out in him. He's running along the neighbor's wall to climb onto our balcony to roll at my feet. The late Stripy did the same thing: (for some reason Holly and Sally refuse to leave the house)