Using an online random number generator to select 4 numbers between 1 and 60, the following numbers were chosen.

And those numbers match up to the 4 people below, so well done to you!

1. benoups.
2. spud.
3. fullproof.
4. Kes.

I’ll be dropping you 4 an email shortly and your signed copies of the awesome Vader Project book will be sent out asap. A big thanks to everyone who registered with the blog and took part. Will probably do more of this kind of thing from now on so if you didn’t get lucky this time, don’t get tear stains all down that nice new blouse you’ve got on, you’ll get another chance to put free stuff on ebay soon enough.

A long time ago, in a galaxy…well, this galaxy, 100 artists were asked to customize 100 Darth Vader helmets. You can see the results via the links at the bottom of the previous post. If you’d like to get your sticky little fingers on a copy of the project catalogue, I’ve got 4 that I’ll sign and give away if you can answer the following question.

Q: What’s one of my earliest memories as a snot nosed kid…

A: Discovering I had the Force when I paralysed next door’s cat with mind bullets.
B: Coming home to find my house on fire and my aunt and uncle burned to a crisp.
C: Being lifted out of my pushchair by Darth Vader when I was about 3 or 4.

Just leave your answer, A,B or C as a comment to this post and in exactly 1 weeks time I’ll randomly select 4 winners who will get a signed copy of the catalogue.

Good luck!

In other news, I’m pleased to reveal I’m planning something exciting. I seem to have stumbled through life being late to every cool party around. Never been entirely sure why this is, did I really lead such a sheltered upbringing in the grim north? Or have I spent most of my life going from day to day with my eyes to the floor, so lost in my own miserable little existence that everything I SHOULD have been into completely passed me by.

Whether it was music, literature or art, my eyes were only really opened when I first moved to London back in 2000, and even now, I’m still only just clumsily stumbling across things I wish I’d discovered years ago. Now, when I was a kid, I loved to spend hours making my own comics and magazines, writing my own fantasy stories and badly copying Frank Frazetta’s art to accompany them. But as I got older, a lot of that DIY mentality lost the great battle and was sent cowering to the caves at the back of my consciousness by things like girls, video games and horror movies. I still loved to draw, and that’s never gone away, but all my creative efforts began to be self consciously hidden away from the cruel world in sketchbooks, and so it was until I discovered the London street art scene back around 2002.

So it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I discovered something else almost completely new to me. Zines. I saw people printing their own little mini comics before but the penny never really dropped. Not only did I not realise that these small run, indie publications had been created by people just like me, in their own time, with their own dime, BUT this is also something I could do myself, just like when I was a kid.

So, late to the party as usual, I’m about to crash through the door with annoying enthusiasm, good intentions and a shit bottle of wine. My journey into the world of non-profit and extremely time consuming self publications is at hand, and I’m excited.

In the coming months I’ll get together the first issue of the Freak Show zine, and if all goes well will hopefully go on to release around 3 issues a year. Each and every copy will be a signed and numbered limited edition with screen printed covers and pull out posters, Gocco printed postcards, badges, photography, comic strips, illustration, stickers, mindless articles and anything else that seems like a good idea at the time.

The pages will be made up of new pieces created especially for the book as well as forgotten about scribbles and illustrations that have been liberated from the artists sketchbooks.

Here’s my contribution. A little freaky and far out but not a million miles away from the stuff I was drawing when I was a kid. I’m already looking forward to seeing how the yoof will customize the weird space guy.