“Advanced Drinking & Drawing”

February 3, 2026

A year ago today I took a hard left turn in life, risking my family’s financial and emotional stability to change jobs, from a government desk drone to a factory shift worker. Luckily the bet paid off!

This idea came six days later, and seemed very unlikely. Not miserable. Zany even. Some other intense ideas lapped past. But I made it the wallpaper on my phone and kept looking at it.

Partly inspired by the cover of the 2nd edition AD&D Monster Manual II, shaped by a crazy reference photo mockup, and finishing in a hot streak of days off during the brewery holiday shutdowns. I love the final work, one of the few full background drawings I’ve ever done, but there’s still something about the raw pencil that gets lost along the way.

By accident it was finished for this anniversary, and hopefully in time to be included in an exhibition at the venue…

the meaning of life

November 5, 2025

A few weeks back I did an overnighter at Rocky Paddock. There were a few tears but it was a great night, sitting by a fire at site 24 drinking beers.

Definitely time away to recharge, reclaiming the place and not needing to write myself off. Writing haiku and reminding myself to think about the good memories.

Scrawled at the end of the beer reviews, a poster slogan, not ironic or sarcastic. I had grand plans to do it as an elaborate hand lettered thing, set it up on a cliche poster mockup with wooden pegs and a cactus on the side. Funnily enough after the last two drawings also involved custom lettering I lost enthusiasm!

Working on the laborious scribble writing I remembered back to 1991, a visit with the Gover St crew to somewhere nearby at Mount Crawford. Tripping, I had crawled into a thorn bush and gotten stuck, had an epiphany and was writing down the meaning of life. Slowly. Scribbling out the letters, convinced that an out of control four wheel drive would come down a nearby track, would kill me before I could finish and reveal it. But didn’t write it any simpler or faster!

There was no ultimate neutral standpoint to contemplate from, but not everything after was crap.

Ironically I’m working on this while drinking heavy duty laxative to prep for a colonoscopy tomorrow. Shitting the past indeed.

“mendicant”

October 19, 2025

Quoted verbatim from the notebook…

“Inspired by the kintsugi reference in an over-elaborate “Midsommar Murders” episode, was an idea to do something to show the breaking / fixing of my world. Initially a wild dream to do something actual (porcelain skull, oops, been done lots of times!) to doing something simple with white and gold paint (skull or bust), to something elaborate (frankenstein statue on plinth, empty broken plinths on either side, lots of broken pieces on the ground. Even the name got wanky and complicated “Interstice”. A second car journey brought it back on target. Just head and shoulders bust, green + blue + white joined by gold.”

There are a bunch of things that I didn’t quite nail (textures, cramped head space) but it was one of those drawings that kept me excited to get back to it. First large format figure since Melbourne, and some on the fly decisions that worked well (making the wreath gold not white, challenging myself to paint gold not use gold metallic ink.

“drone #4”

July 20, 2025

A joy to draw, geometry with a bit of technical experimenting, combining two different ideas.

The first was definitely more angsty, the amp robot with a rotating set of heads, constantly headbanging, with a conveyer belt of beers, constantly drinking. This was at the end of last year when I thought my brewing escape plan had failed, listening to music of anger and despair and drinking too much.

The second was after the escape plan had succeeded, about my experience of driving late at night on empty roads or amongst streaming car lights, listening to spacey heavy music and feeling like a astronaut flying through space. (Shift work can get a bit spacey!) I only had a vague idea, inside the cockpit of a battered old spaceship, star fields blurring.

Serendipity was joining the two together, happy enough in life that I didn’t put indicators on the dials, my anger and despair tuned down.

Is it that the unhappy drawings are more meaningful that makes them more satisfying to work on, or are they cathartic? A test will be the next couple of ideas bubbling away, fun concepts. I’ve found the playlist for not being miserable too…

The original drawing, un-inverted

Drones #3, #2 & #1 and I just realised this should have been #5 after this one!

“midstream”

June 7, 2025

Funny that I don’t have as much to say about the pictures that make me happy. This one is about making changes in life, countering the old saying… the original idea had them standing in water but I chickened out at the thought of the upside down rippled reflections!

Inspired by seeing this old picture, the birth of the monkey/donkey avatar.

The drawing isn’t perfect, and it calls out some of the bad stuff, but it was great to work on. I cooked up a reference mockup using objects from Sketchfab which really helped, foreshortening is tough. (I cropped off all the selfie photos of me in underpants posing!)

Got a great idea for the next one too.

53

May 11, 2025

15 years ago today I took Michael to get his turtle tattoo for his birthday, his 40th. It was before we had fancy phones, and there are no photos of the day.

2 years ago he died, and I realised how few photos of him I had at all. The best moments of each year were spent with him, a rough morning selfie and lines of cans the only evidence they ever happened. The last couple of months were tough, with his 53rd birthday in hospital. He was my cousin on my mum’s side, my best mate.

They say everyone is unique, but maybe he was a bit more so. A rebel in the true sense of the word, subversive and destructive, with a burning sense of fairness and how everything could be done better. Happy to wait in the trees for his chance to throw a brick through the window.

He was definitely a contradiction. A perfectionist who wanted complicated solutions but a procrastinator who often couldn’t get started on them. Paranoid to the point of delusion about surveillance, he installed a tracker with a sim card on his motorbike, so that a company in eastern Europe knew his every move, to get the exact ride data he wanted. Loyal and generous to the point of going short of food to buy presents, but capable of flipping friendships into implacable feuds.

1 year ago my cousin on my dad’s side, Scott, committed suicide. We weren’t close, the last time I’d seen him had been a decade earlier at our nana’s funeral. He’d just turned 53.

Our dads, brothers, never got along, so the families didn’t meet up much. From a distance he always looked like a tough cool guy, plenty of mates, great at hardcore sports like waterskiing and kickboxing.

This year is my 53rd, and if I die I’m going down swinging. Not as an office drone, not wondering what those other paths would have been like. This tattoo is to remember Michael, but it’s mine.

Thanks to Jaya at XO Temple for his amazing work. And for politely bypassing my bad ideas!

bifurcation

April 29, 2025

There were a few birthdays back in the day that had meaning, milestones with parties, but now even the big round numbers seem redundant. This one just past was significant, for the excuse to get tattooed on the day, but that story is for another time.

The big moments in life never land neatly on those days. Some so gently you only realise afterwards when the seed has grown tall, and others like meteors that tear down what was standing.

I’m working on a drawing about the work switch from being an office-bound graphic designer to a high-vis-wearing brewer. A big choice made consciously, despite knowing the big changes it would wreak.

Looking back, it’s surprising how few real branches in the path there are in life. Some that seem momentous, like moving cities or having children, don’t actually change the track you’re already following.

The first I chose as a child, without knowing the weight of the decision. A teacher’s recommendation had won me a part scholarship to a prestigious private boys-only high school, to continue on the path of math prodigy. I’d hit puberty early, with a moustache and yearnings at age 12, and wanted to be around girls.

I’ve never regretted it, but I do sometimes wonder where that boy on the other path journeyed. Where they all did.

journals part 2

January 27, 2025

They say misery makes good art. I’ve had a great summer, finishing off with getting offered a new job while on holiday by the beach. I haven’t quite figured out how to draw that yet…

It’s been ten years and nine volumes since the last post about journals. A lot has changed in that time, the last two journals filled quickly with grief. Flicking through I found this in the first Moleskin, obviously bad sleep not being one of them!

“hubris”

January 1, 2025

I nearly did this as a wedgie drawing before the last was finished. The wheels fell off a few things and it felt like a reminder to not get ahead of myself.

But things have gone well since, maybe a reminder not to assume things will go badly either.

Bring on the new year.

“recursive”

December 26, 2024

Ironic that the most angsty pictures bring the most joy to draw. Or maybe just the law of averages, if most of them are angsty.

It’s been a slow year for drawing, but mostly for good reasons. Like spending 6 months doing a brewing course. It’s been a tough year for life, settling into a new normal that sometimes seems bleak, but fighting it and having some wins. Now there are no quiet Wednesdays on my own, to draw in peaceful solitude, I’ve learnt to carve out time and draw with the bustle of family breakfast around me.

I saw an old picture of the flower faerie growing out of the unnatural flesh, and thought about all the variations I’d done, about the layers of shedding, layers of renewal. Remembered an early sketch about confronting your own mortality, that a friend could only see as homoerotic.

This drawing had a slow and joyful gestation over a couple of months, with some wonky knees my only real gripe. I did at times wish for the freedoms of digital processes, to rejig the placement and colours without hard rework. But the accidents made it better, like starting the shadows with the wrong marker, making them way bolder and tying the figures together.

It’s about circularity, the possibility of regrowth, of new beginnings. But mostly about repetition, the seeds of the ending being embedded at the start.

Postscript: I didn’t get around to posting this until 5 days after writing the text… with a morning’s work experience mashing in, booking an interview for a brewing job, and a successful family Christmas in that time the outlook is a lot brighter!