So the 11 images I created for an exhibition in London are now being sold in A3 versions on my store (just click on the shop link above).  Hopefully I can sell these whilst I add finishing touches to a new series of prints and finish up my storybook (as well as go on tour with Johnny Foreigner thru October & November).  Busy busy busy!
 
From 2011.

Though Elspeth is supremely powerful, she is only too aware of the weakness that inherently comes with that.  A god will always be less real than the life it creates, and so in tending to this inbalance, Elspeth knowingly puts herself through periods of weakness, reality and submissiveness in order to retrieve experiences of a darker yet more powerful nature.

Achieved by temporarily trading her pockets to a benign ghost (in this case, the ghost of a volcano, seen in the print 'Elspeth & The Dreadnought Rising') for a tool of control, here she has traded her pockets for the Helioxical Head which keeps her tied to Savage Patter, the king of a measured restraint.  

Elspeth awoke on the isle and was immediately committed to the daily task of feeding waves and sharpening the whale teeth rocks that jut from the shore.  The flow of life in the sea that surrounds the rock is deeply tied to the tiniest of emanations from the typhonic memory of Patter.  His pirate wit and stone-cold drive honors the immediate environment and swamps it in sources of misadventure and yearnings for discovery, but he is a cruel and cold pebble, heartless in nature, making this is a boring, dull and yet necessary part of Elspeth's cycle.

The blessed skywhale is oft hidden from view a la deus ex machina and waits to release Elspeth from her toil at exactly the right moment.
 
An old picture but an important one for me.  It was a rarity at the time, in that it has only one character visible, and also that it sold out.

From what I considered to be my first proper series, it was the 23rd and last to be drawn.  Of those 23 drawings about 18 I liked enough to sell prints of, there are 5 lay dying somewhere.  One of which was called 'The Planopticon Idly Mourned'.  Maybe their titles will get turned into something else.

The Fox is an aspect of the familiar of all the characters featured previously and is heading (back) to the Mountain to collate the information and feed it back into the source (me).  He was my idea for a cosmic animal, one that all the other animals would look up to and revere, mainly because I think foxes are cool and probably a bit because of the cosmic coyote that Homer encounters in the Simpsons.  Oh and Grant Morrison's fox friend from Animal Man had definately cropped up around that time.

The mountain is in the shape of the Mortality Symbol, which has become my logo, and follows my name on all drawings.  It began life in an email conversation with a friend during dull hours at the office about patterns, apophenia, synchronicity and magic and stuck with me as my own alchemical symbol because I could pile so much meaning into it.  Meaning that I could then, and still do, use to come up with more ideas for drawings, hence the title.  The mountain is the heartbeat and the fox is the blood.  
I can't say much more about it without breaking something.

Soon after this picture Elspeth came into being.*  I like to think the collected effect of those 18 live pictures and the 5 dead ones was the birth of the theme of the next series, Elspeth & The Subatomic Dredge.
*born from a paper egg onto the steps of the mountain.
 
Elspeth finds it easy to manipulate the tools of gods.  This is of great annoyance to the demimonde and villains of the dark inventory who must undergo countless trials and record to memory vast amounts of arch-chemical, verb-symbolic and ink-laden magick for even a sample of her skill.

Here she is mastering the quasi-branched Sentinel Rot, much to Calavera's chagrin.  She later bestows this tool as a means of subatomic transport upon Ravel, giving him the ability to travel through worlds with ease via sprawling branches.  Calavera has become the epitome of a Want failing to find the Need and in the process burns the country he comes from to the ground in order to retrieve the treeskill.
 
The Cruciverb Knight (An Arathmetition) strikes up a chord-full and bilious tempest to renew the fading heart of the blessed Lord Speak.  Someone whispers "Yes, this is really happening.".
 
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The beginning/end of the paper ink war, started by brothers Leash and Bound.  All is made new.

 
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Here's Ravel again, unravelling his Subatomic Forestry craft to greet the Flow and present it some flowers.  The Ghost of a Bottled Fire is along for the ride too, to bring the gift of warmth, as they both owe a great debt to the Flow, for it's great and secure mastery of consequence and determinism.  It is probably wise to honour virtuosity, in whatever form it is wielded.  Looking on from the sky above, sleeps the satellite that we've all forgotten about, whipping hilarious batteries at us from up on high.

 
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For generations, the Hexalotl League have been the slaves of a dark clan of magicians known as the 3 Skrees.  These skeletal birds use noise as a vessel to create and collect.  Vast maelstroms of noise are pushed through will across landscapes, leaving wrecked cities in sonic ruins.  The act collects fuel and matter for building Skree palaces and territory in the shape of enormous junk trees.

These failing magicians are, however, very impressionable and the Hexalotl's freedom was eventually won due to an intrepid spell from a boy called Linus and the ghost of his great grandfather, the Great Hexalotl Oom.  Between them, they flummoxed one of the Skree brothers into revealing their only weakness, which was to be read silent poetry from a silent book.  

A silent book is a book with no words, but the chaotic spirit of a potentially epic story.  The power of a potential story is far more powerful than any finished story, so after hundreds of nights whilst the skree were sleeping, Linus would stare at the blank pages of a book imagining the epic it could contain, imbuing the air around it with a terrifying power.  

When finally read out loud, one Monday morning, it was astonishing.  So astonishing it caused the stunned skree to diminish perpetually and the Hexalotl to be free forever.  Here is an excerpt from that book:



 
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The prince of leaves lives in an enormous mansion on a puzzled moon.  His walls are steeped in references to all the places he's dreamed up that he'd like to visit some day, but he has no way of ever leaving his satellite.  His fantasies of other worlds have begun to acquire a presence in the form of fantastical beings that keep him company and he feels responsible for.  This is why the prince cannot leave his moon to find new people... who would look after his imaginary friends while he was gone?

 
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Kikuro stands in his spot in the sun nursing his blessed sprout, the scarecrow equivalent of a soul, or daemon.  One day, King Imp Torus floats by, already owning everything in the world an imp could possibly want, but sees the unique contentedness of the strawman and wants that for himself too.  He tries to persuade Kikuro in every way he can to get the sprout, offering palaces on elephants, inverted pyramids, golem prince powers, even parasaur mech-armour from the solar armada. He tries bargaining and trying to trade constantly but Kikuro will not give up the only thing he needs.  Without the sprout he would have nothing.  

Torus is there every day, perpetually trying his luck, running out of objects in the universe to trade, his empty kingdom long since crumbled and gone.