The Way He Is

He likes pigs. He doesn’t like frogs. If you’re a frog don’t take it personally, it’s just the way he is; he has an aversion to cold slimy things. When he wakes up in the morning he plays a tune on the thumb piano he keeps by his bed in case of the blues. He hopes it’ll cheer him up on dark November mornings but it rarely does. He sees life as being one cold, dark November morning, poor luv.

His favourite tune goes something like ha ha ha hee hee hee sung with a guttural thump and scrape cos he eats too much burnt toast. It has that kind of effect on the throat if eaten too quickly and without margarine. He likes the crunch so he can pretend he’s eating a crustacean from a million years ago. It’s the kind of fantasy he has whilst eating breakfast at 5am before dawn’s grey glow.

















When he’s older he sees himself as having a nippy black car that he can squeal around corners in trying to scare cats and kids. He’s quite indiscriminate as to which. Kids are an easier target though when dawdling to school with music welded to their ears, backpacks on. They are an especially easy target when their shoes have those flashing red lights & their bags fluorescent strips. Nice! He thinks to himself, imagining ramming his foot hard down on the accelerator.

He’s forgotten who his parents are. That was such a long time ago, longer than a giant’s mind span. Big brains & dawdling careful thoughts & a sense of time stretching to the moon and stars, that’s what he has. And a smile that’d never melt a woman’s heart; more likely send em through the nearest door they could bolt briskly behind.
it's just the way he is..., originally uploaded by artbysara.

Flowery Slippers

He had a friendly, poetic aspect. He loved words. He loved watching golf. He loved cheese & pickle sandwiches & a nice cuppa. & peanuts. & chicken...with chips of course. His favourite trick was to fit as many beetles between his lips as he could & crunch them in one go. He also liked balloons & planes & biros. & spider’s webs.

He lived by the park & you could hear him at night brushing his gunked teeth & howling with the effort cos it was a hell of a pain that shot across his jaw, down his back & straight to his big toe. Brushing his teeth was one of his least favourite activities. He only did it cos there was a hefty lass over the road he fancied who wore flowery slippers. He caught glimpses of them as she sat in front of the TV. Oh to be sat beside her he thought to himself.

But it was a good job she’d always avoided him on the street cos he could've squashed her in one fatal flop. He had ancestors from some northern realm & his grizzly frame was a genetic throw back & the reason his parents had abandoned him in 1979 in the supermarket car park.

& so he lived in his bedsit talking to the spider plant & answering the questions to quizzes on the radio. He would’ve been such an asset on a pub quiz team. But he was never asked. & if there was a happy ending to the story I’d tell it but there isn’t.

Toothache

oh life can sometimes be painful like toothache. like the wince you get when eating icecream with sensitive teeth. ow.

blankmediacollective & artbysara

Blank Media Collective's aim is to promote artists, writers & musicians in all manner of ways- with online portfolios, monthly events in Manchester, exhibitions & collaborations & an online artstore. So I am pleased to be featured in Issue 14, available for download from the website at http://www.blankmediacollective.org/.
This is how the editorial folk summed up artbysara:

Featured in this issue are the striking images of artbysara - bold caricatures that cover everything from fairy-tales to ‘the man down the street’. Her work draws together almost archetypal figures and drops them right into the modern era, and explores the places where the figure and the surroundings don’t quite fit. Unlike artists whose work hangs in galleries to be admired, the availability and accessibility of her work is part of the point, in terms of subject matter, presentation, and the formats in which her art can be bought and kept. We are delighted to be adding to that accessibility in blankpages.

& this is how I summed myself up:

Welcome to the world of artbysara peopled by feisty, finicky folk from the realm of fairytale to the bloke down the road...
I love scary women & men who look like they’ve just stepped out of some weird ancient fairytale & landed in this day & age with its mobile phones, street scenes, slang & woes. They’re a bit confused, a bit mouthy, at times timid, lost, pissed off...But that’s just the way life is...know what I mean?

Marmalade

there was once not so long ago a girl called marmalade. well, that was her nickname. and she relished telling boys off and frightening old ladies at the bus stop and being rude to whosoever crossed her path...the usual teenage stuff.
one morning she was shuffling down the road in her scuffed up shoes singing rather badly to the tunes blasting into her ears when a huge crow swooped down, sat on her head and started pecking at her eyes...
marmalade screamed and screamed and ran and ran til she ran out of breath and fell over and the silky crow sat on her shouder cawing with an eerie fatalistic croak. oh my god she thought, i'm done for!
then it spread out it's huge wings and enveloped marmalade in one massive swish and the girl with the red knotted hair disappeared...

well, not completely, as she has become a legend. to this day she is said to be seen loitering around bus stops where her spirit scares old ladies waiting for buses, and lads smoking outside pubs.

this story was told to me by a grandma who swears she saw her ghostly apparition last week whilst getting on the 177 at 9.30. and this picture is how i remember her before her mysterious disappearance. others say she's working as a waitress in spain and the bloke over the road swore he saw her down the supermarket at the weekend.

Amber & Debs

Debs has just finished with her bloke so has some spare time on her hands. You could say she’s been getting a bit morose, dwelling too much on the state of the planet with its wars and conflicts and the fact we’re heading towards environmental oblivion.

And she has no one to cuddle up to now, poor luv…But at least she has a friend like Amber who can’t really be arsed with all the naval gazing but does her best, though it goes without saying she’d much rather be sat down the pub.

Delicious

Her slippers are scuffed by seven winters of shuffling. New, they were green and white, in case you were wondering. She likes boiled eggs washed down with loose leaf tea and such images frequent her thoughts. Cheese and pickle sandwiches are also her favourite which she shares with her cat Thomas. Mmm...delicious.

In The Beginning

Sometimes it can take a while to get going in the morning, like til midday even. Well, this bloke has that kind of a feeling most of the time. If I was going to be critical I’d tell him to get off his backside & go & do some exercise to get those endorphins moving around his body. It might perk him up a bit. But he likes to wallow in the inanity of his life so much so that it has become his main preoccupation, nay excuse, for inactivity. Best steer clear.

Giant Bolster & The Press

Giant Bolster has made it into the local newspaper! Which is a miracle as he is huge & hates having his photo taken. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital photography he looks about 2 inches high. 

It took a while convincing him the picture would do him justice. Giants can be vain, though some of course are very shy & hardly ever leave their mountain peaks & murky bogs.

Giant Bolster is of a cantankerous nature but the professionalism of the paper's photographer ensured the photo-shoot was a success. & I've even heard rumours down the pub that Bolster keeps a framed copy of the picture on his favourite crag.

Right place Wrong time

Just one of those days...
She mislaid the scrap paper scrawled with the details as to when she's meeting Jim, a keen angler and Formula 1 fanatic she has nothing in common with.
Just as well really.

Supermarket

I drew this a while back when I had the mother of all menial jobs in a well-known supermarket. It was the most boring, oppressive, brain-destroying job ever, & I had to get out of bed at 4.45am to do it.

But the whole deadendness & meaninglessness of it must've seeped into my very being when I wasn't looking, & I became a zombie, fulfilling the will of this multinational corporation that was tighter than Scrooge. (Time off at Christmas, Easter, weekends, no way!)

But one day I realised how bad my life had actually become & I escaped!

Prissy

This picture I drew when I moved to a place I'm about to leave.

I liked her attitude, but she did scare me a bit.

I'm glad I won't see her again.

Luv & Stuff

This lass had a stroke of luck in the love stakes....she's all loved up cos the door to door salesman actually was her type & not at all bad looking considerin he was wearing a creased grey suit & pink tie the first time she lay eyes upon him. Ok, so he wears white socks & his ears are like rashers of bacon, but she sees through such imperfections to the real inner man. Honest. & I ain't being sarcastic.

Betty Stoggs

Betty Stoggs has had a real ale named after her, that's how famous she's become. But few of the punters at the bar know her true story...and probably wouldn't want to if they had an inkling as to what it was about. See, Betty married big burly Jan the Mounster in the olden days and they had a baby.



But whilst Jan was out at work, Betty began to slacken when it came to doing the housework and cooking. Her baby was dressed in rags and her bread was like concrete. And to make matters worse she got in with the gin woman who went from door to door selling more than threads and material.

Then one day whilst she was nattering and knocking back the booze her baby disappeared. Betty swore she would change her ways just to have her baby back. As luck would have it, after a huge search, the bloke from the end terrace came upon the child hidden under a gorse bush, wrapped in a fine blanket and covered with flowers.

 See, the fairies had taken the child but dawn had come before they had a chance to whisk him away to the otherworld, so they'd left him til the evening when they would return.

Lucky Betty! And did she mend her ways?

Mmm.....

Cheese

Life grates on him. Life the grater, him the cheese.

Yellow Top

I couldn’t be arsed pretending to like him.
I mean, what’s the point of disliking someone if you can’t show it?

Squirrel

 A true story from a true woman, honest.

Beagle

He smells of crisps and beer.

She's in love.

Lorry

He came over with a grudge the size of a lorry, his face smeared with oil.
He’d been fixing his car he said.
This was not a good day to ask him for a favour.

strange bloke & a pirate...

there was once a pirate around these parts whose name has long been forgotten, though some remember him as being tall, some remember the bells he hung in his black beard and others remember the long green coat he wore and swung around to great effect whilst emphasising certain gestures especially when he was under the influence.

this story has nothing to do with this picture, alas.