Anne Hathaway revisited

A very patient client finally got this Catwoman sketchcover back, complete with Anne Hathaway's signature, nearly three years after I drew it!

And speaking of anniversaries, it's just over a year since I crawled out of hospital. I wasn't at all sure I'd last this long but thanks to some brilliant care from the NHS and help & support from friends & family (not to mention the power of pies!) I'm still here hoping that one day the chemotherapy-brainfog will lift sufficiently for me to get back to some decent drawing. You really wouldn't want to see my godawful attempts so far!

So I have nothing new to share but there's always my eclectic bunch of designs here on Redbubble to meander through if you're beginning to think about Christmas presents - there's 30% off everything at the moment.

You Rock Guitar software

Very off-piste here but it's the best place I can think of to post this with pertinent tags!

Anyone who's bought a YouRockGuitar secondhand with no software will quickly discover their website has disappeared and the company has apparently collapsed. Without the PDF manual and the Windows Control Panel (to make adjustments easier), it's very hard to customise the settings and alot of internet links seem to have disappeared, so I've dug out the files I downloaded a few years back and put them here on my googledrive for anyone to download. It's version 1.565 of the Control Panel (and no, I don't know how to help update your firmware!).

Hopefully this'll help one or two folks out.

Deleted post from 18 Nov 2021

I somehow managed to delete my Health Update post from last November, so here it is again, for anyone wondering why I'm an artist who hasn't created anything for 6 months or more...

Unfortunately, the health problems I've been suffering from this year have turned out to be far more serious than anyone realised. Rather than being the flare-up of my Ulcerative Colitis I'd been assuming, it was actually an aggressive bowel tumour forming. On October 11th I had to go into A&E and was then rushed into emergency surgery where they saved my life from the bowel perforation that had occurred as a result of the cancerous growth. There followed a couple of days in Intensive Care and ten days on a ward where the help, nursing and care I received from several different departments was quite simply brilliant - the people who work in our hospitals are frankly some of the best people you will meet in any walk of life; they're professional, hard-working, compassionate and self-sacrificing and in a nutshell, restore your faith in society.

I've since been recuperating at home for a few weeks, recovering from the operation. Like many others, I now have to face an ongoing battle against the cancer to fight it back as it has spread beyond the original site. As such my artwork is going on an indefinite hiatus I'm afraid, at least until my energy levels are back up to concentrating sufficiently long enough and deeply enough to produce anything decent. Chemotherapy isn't renowned for making you feel good, so it could take a while!

As a taoist, I am genuinely open to all outcomes so the following isn't meant to be a Big, Melodramatic Goodbye, but just on the offchance that things get a bit tricky a bit quickly, I'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone who's bought, commissioned, supported, encouraged and appreciated my art over the years. It adds an extra level of gratification to doing what I love and it's been great to get to know so many really nice people in so many different countries as a result (never let anyone tell you the internet is A Bad Thing!). I'll probably be back to bore you with some more work at some point, and I'll still be sharing random memes on Facebook occasionally I expect. In the meantime, be cool, and if you're British, please treasure the NHS for the true gem it remains, despite the incredible pressures it has to operate under.

 

Some signature covers

Yep, still here! No new art yet I'm afraid, but some of my sketchcovers have found their way to the actors for signing, courtesy of a dedicated Star Wars fan and all-round gent, so I thought it about time I got round to sharing them. Click to enlarge.
With a bit of luck I might get back to some drawing soon.