Tales from Barcelona Part Four

On our Third day in Barcelona we planned to try and make it to the Rambles even though it was about a million miles away.

So we got a bit carried away going in the bars and made really slow progress home, we did walk it this time though, it was a trek but enjoyable!

The Rambles is great, there are so many strange characters to see, It took us ages to find an English/Irish looking kinda bar. When we walked in there was an arm wrestle going on with everyone shouting at the top of their voices, typical! Hard Rock Cafe was simply amazing, the highlights for me were seeing Brian Bell's guitar (From Weezer) and a Jimi Hendrix guitar.

Walking around the streets we saw a lot of graffiti, They seem to see it as more of an art form over there and actually commission people to do murals on their shop fronts.

I made a collage of some of my favorites.

You can read the other parts of Tales from Barcelona here:

Tales from Barcelona One
Tales from Barcelona Two
Tales from Barcelona Three

Finger Licking good

I haven't had time to finish the Adventure 3 comic for tales from Barcelona and i don't want to rush it so I'll upload it next week.

I do however have something interesting that I did.

While we were in Barcelona we ate in KFC and we took photos because I wanted to do this!

Now if that doesn't make you want some chicken, I don't know what would!

I've always found the advertisements in KFC pretty interesting, sometimes very controversial with mixed messages. I thought I'd have a go at making my own and also thought it would be funny to be in one myself!

Also, last week my blog was one of the #oneaday picks of the week, The #oneaday leader Pete wrote: 

'Pick of the “creative” posts this week, though, has to be Robert Malkin’s “Carl Ikbread” post, featuring a selection of weird and wonderful characters with food names, dreamed up in that spiritual home of creativity—the pub. It’s the third in a series, and a wonderful insight into how Robert’s brain works'

This made my day.

Have a good weekend everyone

Tales from Barcelona Part Three

We had a pretty busy first day in Barcelona, in fact by the time we went to bed we had been awake for 39 hours!

We woke up on our second day and the weather was much better.

Here's what happened:

The Barcelona FC museum was really great, we spent about three hours in there and sat through a whole video of 50 best goals. There weren't any seats so we just sat on the floor as people walked past, I think we spent far longer in the museum than the average person.

The department store was massive and I think we might have lost track of time in there. I didn't know what the Spanish woman was saying to me at first but i think she was telling us they had closed. I was un intentionally rude to her, I really didn't know what she was going on about, she looked cross and we were made to leave.

We were walking around looking for a bar to go in and really couldn't find one that looked inviting, We made a standard set of rules for choosing a bar to go in.

Etiquette for choosing a bar in a foreign country

1) The bar must have at least 5 tables inside (Tables outside don't count)
2) The bar must have at least 3 people inside (Including Bar man)
3) The bar must have at least one window (Not just a door)
4) Check for mirrored walls (They can make it look like there's more people and tables)

We found it very difficult to find any bar that met all these rules, it doesn't seem much to ask for, does it? The mirror thing caught us out a few times, we went in a bar that appeared to be massive and full of people. When we got in it was tiny with only 3 tables and one person inside, every wall was a mirror. BEWARE.

Going in hotels that aren't yours can be fun, but also very risky!

On the walk back to our hotel we saw another hotel called 'Mutual Cyclops' which we all found hilarious, it made me think of this.

Check back tomorrow to read about our third adventure.

If you want to read the other Tales from Barcelona you can read them here:

Tales from Barcelona Part One
Tales from Barcelona Part Two

Tales from Barcelona Part Two

Yesterday I did a comic about how we chose our beds on arriving at our hotel room.

Here is a photo of me and my choice of bed

We set off on our first adventure in the poring down rain.

We saw a lot that day, more than i can do justice in 6 panels. We got absolutely soaked to the bone but we didn't care. I cant remember the last time i walked around for 10 hours with wet shoes and socks, great efforts!

The castle is great and you can literally see the whole city from up there, well worth the trek. On the walk up there we invented a game which involved booting a pine cone into a skip, great game! we called it Piney-Skippy which later turned into Piney-Binny with a slight rule change.
 Also, some celebrities have really big feet.... that is all.

We seemed to always end up miles and miles from our hotel by the time it got dark and then have to find our way back using the bendy building. The walks home were usually one of the best parts of the adventure though, something random would always happen.


Like this

If you don't speak Spanish the writing translates as:

'Excuse me fine sir, could you do me the honor of lighting my cigarette?'

I'm pretty sure that in reality the Spanish chav dude didn't say that but I'd like to think he did. My friend Brad's reply is genius, part English, part Spanish and either way makes no sense.

'No Me gusta' means I don't like...

Needless to say the guy drove off pretty un-happy, this happened about once a day.

Check back tomorrow for Adventure #2 and more!

If you want to read Tales from Barcelona Part One you can do it by clicking Here





Tales from Barcelona Part One

I'm back from my visit to Barcelona and I return with lots of new material, drawings and ideas which is great and is going to keep me pretty busy for a while!

I'm going to dedicate the rest of this week to Tales from Barcelona and get everything down while it's still fresh in my head!

That means no Tuesday Trail this week, or people with food names! Don't worry, they will return next week.

Barcelona is a great city, there's just so much to see. We managed to go on a different adventure every day and lots of interesting and funny things happened. The language barrier was also very amusing at times and also just some of the strange characters we met along the way.

I'm going to try and structure things a little and add things in the order that they happened.

First of all to kick off the adventure! It is a tradition of mine that everyone must pose for a 'Home Alone moment' Basically this is the moment that Kevin realises he's sat on the wrong plane. Even though we were on the correct plane I still like to re-create it every time I go somewhere on one.


Home Alone Moment

We made it to our hotel which seemed to be in the middle of an industrial estate with nothing around. Our room looked to only have a double bed and a sofa until we realised there was a pull out bed hidden under the sofa.


But how do we decide who gets which bed?

What fairer way to decide! although I'm not sure I'd thought it through fully, it was comfortable though believe it or not. It took two days for us to work out that my bed actually had fold out legs to lift it up off the floor.

 In four nights I only woke up banging my head once with fairly minimal damage. I also fell down the back once when the mattress slid off leaving me trapped against the wall. Seriously great times!

With sleeping places sorted out we headed out for our first adventure, the only problem was it was torrential raining outside!

Check back tomorrow for more tales from Barcelona!

In other news, My T-shirt design 'Robot Love' won the All Tropical competition last week! weeeey Hoooo!

I'm super happy about this so thanks so much to everyone that voted! Here's the design if you don't remember.

 

This should be for sale on their site soon if you would like to buy it, it might also be for sale on Asos which is pretty cool.

There's some really great stuff on All Tropical, check it out www.alltropical.co.uk

New Commission - Vincent & Zoe

Today I have a picture of a recent valentines day commission I did. The drawing is of Vincent and his girlfriend Zoe and is on a yellow canvas as you can see. Vincent gave this to Zoe as a present on the day, apparently she liked it. Good times!

As always I'm open for commissions if anyone would like anything drawing, anything at all!

I go to Barcelona tomorrow  (Wahoooo) unfortunately that means I wont be updating my blog for a few days, on the plus side I'm taking my sketchbook so hopefully I'll find interesting things to draw for when i come back.

Trail and Food People will return next week. See you then!

Tuesday Trail #005

It's that day of the week again!

If you need to recap on the Trail Story you can read through the other pages here.

Tuesday Trail Archive
- Tuesday Trail #001
- Tuesday Trail #002
- Tuesday Trail #003
- Tuesday Trail #004

Here are pages 11 and 12

Another new character! Melvin!

Melvin features a lot later on in Trail and has become my favorite character so you will get to know him a lot better.

Check back next week for the next two pages.