Hello,
In case that title didn’t clue you in, you can watch the short film I shot last year online now here: https://youtu.be/T7L6856bthU
It’s quite nice that I’m sharing it with everyone today, as 10 years ago I handwrote the first draft of the script and did a sketch of the costumes too, so now you can see if my vision then matches up to the actualisation now!
Hope you enjoy it.
Owain x
It’s that time of the year wherein you are REQUIRED BY LAW to find the one greetings card that truly sums up your feelings of love and / or adoration for your significant other(s) / self and deliver anonymously into their love-starved hands no sooner than the beginning of February 14th and no later than the end of February 14th, or else there will no love for you for one whole year.
Well, luckily, I created three cards that are GUARANTEED* to get you loved like you’ve never been loved before (doubly so if you have legitimately never been loved before).
So, what are you waiting for? Buy one here, and then buy another one, and another, give them to everyone you know, spread the love, spread it like a fine non-dairy spread.
Ta ta for now! x
*Not a guarantee
For a super limited time Ohh Deer are selling a few cushions that I designed!
You can also VOTE for the cushions and help give my doodles a little nudge.
Here are the links:
Bum: https://ohhdeer.com/competition/bum-cushion
Cushion Cushion: https://ohhdeer.com/competition/cushion-cushion
Smoosh: https://ohhdeer.com/competition/smoosh-cushion
Zorbing: https://ohhdeer.com/competition/zorbing-cushion
Many thanks!
Hello!
Here’s the poster for my short film Adam Meet Eve:
It was designed and produced by Kitty Ate My Camera‘s Jenna Gold, visit her website here.
Follow the film on various social media platforms and keep up to date with all the latest happenings.
There’ll be a festival date announced very soon.
Hope all’s good with you?
Owain
Hello,
Here’s a short animation I made, it’s called Good Cop / Bad Cop.
All the best,
Owain x
Hello you!
I meant to blog about this quite a while ago, but this year got consumed with some rather exciting projects which I’ll be able to tell you all about very soon.
But first…
When I was a youngster I drew comics all the time, but as I’ve got older my love for drawing has sort of been side-lined into an “add-on-pack” to my love of writing and film-making. I’ve never really believed in myself, or my abilities, as an illustrator / cartoonist / artist / whatever.
However I’ve still occasionally entertained ideas of working on a comic book – based on some of my unseen writing – and have made tentative steps here and there at putting something together, usually falling apart after the first page or two.
At the beginning of this year a friend of mine told me that the independent publisher Good Comics were looking for submissions to an anthology called ‘Dead Singers Society’, the third volume of which they were due to publish in February.
So, I decided to give it a go and put together a one-page strip based on a deceased music artist that I was interested in.
I knew that recently departed musicians such as David Bowie and Prince would be prime pickings, and I felt somewhat intimidated tackling someone like Ian Dury – already depicted brilliantly in the film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – so I chose to dive back into my creative writing past.
I studied English Literature & Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University (2003 to 2006), and one assignment involved writing a diary for a someone either living, dead, fiction or non-fiction. I chose the innovative record producer – and occasional singer – Joe Meek.
As someone who loves making music myself – at the time this was a very private process, and the results were usually horrible – I felt a certain kinship towards Joe, especially in his desire to create bigger, stranger, more experimental sounds and often doing so in the most imaginative and low-tech ways.
His story grows even more fascinating, and tragic, as you begin to delve into his troubled personal life, his paranoia, his sexuality and the circumstances surrounding him that ultimately ended in murder and suicide.
I’d written a number of diary entries imagining his innermost thoughts, skipping across time, that tracked Joe from his early creative explosions, across his frustrations with the mainstream music industry, towards unexpected success with the smash hit single Telstar, and finally into his descent into darkness.
Adapting this into a one page comic was going to be quite a challenge, as I still wanted to give a sense to the reader of that journey.
So, I grabbed a piece of paper, sketched out four panels repeated over four lines, and went through my fictitious diary to find four incidents to fill each line.
I still felt like a bit of a pretender submitting my work to the folks at Good Comics, looking at the other issues the quality of the storytelling and artwork was so strong and individual that I couldn’t see my own work fitting in alongside it.
Surprisingly, a few weeks after sending my comic off I had a reply – my email had accidentally wound up in their Junk folder! – and, even more surprisingly, it was to say that my comic was going to be a part of their anthology.
It was really flattering and very exciting to see my comic in amongst so many brilliant artists in the ‘zine. It was doubly exciting to pop into Gosh! comics in Soho and see the ‘zine containing my work on their shelves.
Ultimately though, I’ll be honest with you, I still felt like a pretender, someone who had managed to sneak their way in despite not having the proper credentials. As with many things, it did make me resolve to try and work that bit harder on my drawings – hence the Valentine’s Day cards – and to try and be a bit more proactive with creative projects – hence the busy-ness.
You can pick up a copy of ‘Dead Singers Society Vol. 3’ here, as well as loads of other great work from Good Comics.
All the best,
Owain
I don’t really have that much to say about this card. It was something I said that I thought was funny, so I made it into a card.
You can buy it here: Owain’s Gubbins
Thanks.
O.x
I was born in 1982, the year of the dog, and I think that is – in part – to blame…
I had a fear of dogs, I would have recurring dreams about huge alsatians chasing me around a deserted church that I’d imagined existed on Claremont Road, Redruth.
I was chased by a dog once, some friends of my sister had a greyhound – or maybe a whippet, or just a skinny dog – and it took an interest in me. I fled, the dog pursued, and we started doing laps around the small circular garden path out front of their house, and I’m sure that my Dad, sister and my sister’s friend just watched us complete circuit after circuit. I have no memory of how this pursuit ended, which leads me to wonder if it might have been a dream.
Dogs seemed to perk up as I walked by them, as if I had biscuits in my pocket (I may have), but in my imaginative youthful mind I thought it was either because I was secretly the (bar)king of the dogs, or because I was a werewolf…
Though it may have been that they sensed my fear and thought it’d be fun to terrify me.
I can’t quite remember what my first exposure to the lycanthrope legend was, part of me likes to think that it was a cheeky, sneaky late night viewing of An American Werewolf In London, but, in actuality I’d imagine it was the children’s television show Woof!.
Regardless, sometimes when it was late and I was up I’d writhe around the front room pretending I was transforming into a werewolf, in much the same way David Naughton did as David Kessler in An American Werewolf In London (1981), and to a lesser extent Tom Everett Scott in Anthony Waller’s muddled sequel An American Werewolf In Paris (1997) that, for some reason, I have a guilty soft spot for.
This faux transformation would usually end with me scurrying upstairs on all fours to bed.
Since then I’ve managed to overcome my fear of dogs; probably because my Dad got a dog, so that foiled his plan to keep me out of the house. This has allowed me to discover a newfound appreciation for pooches, and I can see why people seem to like having them around, it was with this in mind that I created this Valentine’s Day card, available from my Etsy shop, exposing the truth kept secret in many a relationship about who might be the actual love of some people’s lives.
Thanks for reading!
Have you ever been convinced that you were another creature? Are you still convinced? If you could turn into any animal which one would you turn into and why? (I’d be a squirrel)
Owain. x
Hello you,
Around the year 2000 or 2001 I got a job working in a plastics factory in Redruth, Cornwall. My shift was midnight to 7am, my job was taking hot plastic lids – the kind used on a handy storage box around the home – and scraping off the jagged bits of plastic from around the edges. I had one glove to protect me from the hot plastic, and a strange little scraping tool. I worked on this machine alone, and that’s kind of how I’d like it.
What got me through those long nights working that job was – bizarrely – being able to run through the 1997 film version of The Saint starring Val Kilmer in my head.
I was a fan of the film when it came out a few years earlier, I was writing film reviews for my school paper and I think I gave it 9/10, which, in retrospect, was a bit too generous.
I think I’d become a bit of a Val Kilmer fan because he was in 1995’s Batman Forever – a film I was beyond excited about because I was a massive Jim Carrey fan – so he had a lot of residual goodwill left over from that.
Elisabeth Shue was his co-star in The Saint and I had something of a crush on her thanks to growing up with the film The Karate Kid (1984) and her amazing performance in Leaving Las Vegas (1995).
It was also the season when Hollywood was really mining the retro television show caverns for all their worth, and with each movie update you got a funky remixed theme tune, and Orbital’s spin on the theme from The Saint was proudly in my CD collection: https://youtu.be/LCVuIsw78yA
I think I loved the film because it was pretty old-fashioned, it took its time to develop its characters and it was more of a romance than an action blockbuster, which, to be fair, was probably why it didn’t set the box office alight in 1997, where it finished 28th of the year behind such classics as Anaconda, Dante’s Peak, and Flubber.
Anyway, I discovered, whilst working in that plastics factory, that I pretty much knew the entirety of the film off by heart – having watched it an awful lot on VHS, it was the perfect casual romp for a rainy Sunday afternoon, and, to this day I can still rattle off a reasonably accurate renactment of the whole film and will do so for a small fee at birthdays, weddings and Olympic opening ceremonies (get in touch if you’d like to book a performance).
It’s full of such memorable scenes like the one where he’s a flirtatious old man, the one where he’s a flirtatious German with curly hair, the one where he’s a flirtatious South African traveller in leather trousers, and, of course, the one where he’s a flirtatious old cleaning lady*.
Also, the 1984 spoof (and box office flop) Top Secret starring Val Kilmer is one of the funniest films ever made. #FACT.
So, that’s kind of why I felt it my duty to celebrate the actor Val Kilmer with this Valentine’s Day card I made – that and it’s a really silly non-pun – which you can buy from my Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/OwainsGubbins
Thanks for reading!
Also, what’s your favourite Val Kilmer film?
Owain. x
*Truth be told, this one doesn’t get much screen time to do any actual flirting, but if all his other disguises are anything to go by she’s probably pretty flirtatious.
Hello you,
I’m selling some very limited Valentine’s Day cards in my aforementioned etsy shop HERE.
They come with a guarantee* of 75% extra romance for you if you purchase them.
They’re all hand drawn (digitally) and come with a sexy red envelope to really up the heartfeltedness.
Owain. x
*Not a guarantee
owainpaciuszko.com 