I miss writing

so here I am, substacking.

A frame from the film I’m making. This is Isabel. Or Isobel. I haven’t decided yet.

A quick précis of me: I’m an illustrator (the only thing I ever remotely trained as). I make my living illustrating, making motion graphics, designing and writing the occasional thing. I have written books about Portugal, I used to write a newspaper column, have done bits and pieces in and around telly, and was on the radio for a moment. I am British but have lived in Portugal for the last 25 years, in and next to Lisbon for the whole time. I have two grown up luso-británica daughters who are both in the arts and doing fabulous things out in their own worlds. I am 54 and have no idea how that happened. I have the attention span of a small elephant shrew.

So, I might write about drawing and illustrating. I might write about the tools I use, analogue and digital. I might write about the animated film I’m making in my spare time between jobs, or I might write the chapters of my next book I’m writing in the spare time between animating my film and jobs, or do my next graphic novel as a part work here or storyboard the film scripts I start writing and never finish because if it’s not a film I can make myself, I know it will never be made.

I might write about the new Lisbon or the old Portugal or language, or how we’re trying to move the hell out of Lisbon or being in my fifties, or what not to buy in Lidl (I bought some “Lemon Pepper” flavoured crisps the other day. DO NOT BUY THEM, they are disgusting and taste like someone dropped some crisps into a bath of lemon Fairy), or about films as, for the last five years I have seen more films than I had ever seen in my lifetime (for the last five years I have lived with the biggest film nut you can imagine and there is a at least one film a day on somewhere in our house. God love him, I don’t know how many more Ozu films I need to see…).

I most definitely won’t write about politics, because we all know where THAT leads.