A few years ago (that's 2005 by your counting) I suddenly had a burst of creative energy that can only come through procrastination, through having lots of medieval essays to complete and many very late nights. It was the exact same burst that started this blog, and was (possibly) inspired by the recently begun (and now defunct) "creatives anonymous / blank page" group that would meet periodically, talk creativity, drink recreatively, and create very little. I started drawing again, out and about with a blue pen, writing new songs, painting with acrylics, teaching myself photoshop, sending political cartoons to channel 4, diarising in video and generally putting off writing about st.aelfheah and his danish friends. 

My biggest - if brief - obsessive burst came when I finally figured out a way to make short cartoon animations, and I chose for my experiment to recreate (or rather, pre-create) reported scenes from the upcoming star wars movie, revenge of the sith. I was pretty much walking blind with techniques, using what simple scanned cartoons I had drawn with a chep black pen, and coloured and layered using photoshop, then transferred across to image-ready to make very short, soundless animated gifs; the quality of the images deteriorated in the rendering process, they were never really long enough to be substantial, but then the computer itself was old and not powerful enough for anything more complicated. I taught myself a lot in a short month-long period, and while the first one I did was a simple three frame thing drawn on lined paper, the last one I did (the lightsabre duel among the lava) was a lot more elaborate.

I intended to continue doing more, and improving all the way, I had all these grand plans for sad, painted animations about a fox lurking around in the snowy dustbins outside a semi-detached, but those papers really had to get done, and then of course I did a most startling thing and moved to america, and I never again did any animations.

Here is what I produced:

and below is the last one i created (and i would have done more if it hadn't been for you meddling kids) 

I want to do more now.

march 24, 2008: and so it is. Below is my newest sketchimation (there's a nice new word, i think i'll use that), still lightsabre based as ever, but starring the cartoon pete in his trademark polar neck jumper. The second one (made a couple of days later) is of lord harrow, who cartoon pete will duel sabre to sabre.

March 31 2008: the first sketchimation of the duel by the thames; check out the fancy footwork...