I've set up a shop on Spreadshirt specifically http://anchovy.spreadshirt.co.uk/shop/designs

already got a couple of furry pieces up already.

http://anchovy.spreadshirt.co.uk/di.....ail-I113707102
and
http://anchovy.spreadshirt.co.uk/fo.....mps-I113719205

Your chance to get hold of next season's big fashion sensation.

Having finished my first Exsample peice and being really pleased with it I'm now taking Commissions for Hand Painted T-shirts (Using Air brush). These take time so I'll only take on a limited number of thse jobs at a time.
Check out http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/sho.....acterportraits

For some reason the commissions page of my website ( http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/shop/commissions/ ) has always been a bit of a work in progress. I'm back working on it again. I've tidyed up the genral text to reflect better what I want to say and seem a bit more friendly (The list of things I don't do has always been a tricky bit to make sound good for instance.).

Also tidyed up the Full scene section. ( http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/sho.....ons/#fullscene )

Now to start adding other sections.

After much work I have enough of a commissions page to open it up to the public.

You want Marcony art go visit http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/sho...../marcony.shtml

*A poor strugging artists is looking at you with big eyes*

I'm completely re-doing my <a href="http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/sho.....gt;commissions page</a>* on the <a href="http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/">State of Anchovy</a> Website. At the same time I'm trying to establish a reasonable pricing structure. So that I can put up my work with what it would cost to have something similar done.
I base my structure on the time it takes to do a particular kind of works, but I don't have enough timed pieces to give as many examples as I would like (I would like at least three pieces for each category). So one category at a time I am going to take on free commissions so I will have examples.

In short I am offering this. for the first two people that ask** I am willing to do a free Full scene as described under full scene on my commissions page ( http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/sho.....html#fullscene ).

I shall be pimping this out elsewhere so if you get beaten to it by somebody elsewhere please don't be too disappointed. I expect there to be other Free commission offers as i continue work on the site.

*Still under construction but I don't mind you seeing progress so far.
**within my normal rules as per things I am willing and not willing to do (They are laid out on my commissions page)

Given that My sister was quarantined on her return from America on suspicion of Pig Flu I drew her a special card. It's not furry so it's not on FA but you can see it on the State of Anchovy site at http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/2009/soa-08.shtml
It later turned out that she just had a heavy cold.

For them of who don't follow the genral Lama parade that is UKFur board I'm attempting to put together a band.

I'm already in one but want a second for doing gigs at cons (Start with Scotiacon and see where we go from there)

Plan is to meet up once a month for a whole weekend are work out some kind of set. I'm based in Suffolk with Cambridge as My nearest Train station. So you would need to be able to get to here once a month.

I'm planning on fun rocky covers with no being held back by pretetuiosness about what is or isn't "Cool" or "Worthy" It's about fun. Some music will be of a furry nature and there may be some lyric changes but this will not be an obsession.

If interested reply here or join in the thread on UKFB

First off for those of you interested in my Non-Furry stuff I've just got round to putting up what will most likely go down as one of my more Controversial Strips at http://www.stateofanchovy.co.uk/2009/soa-07.shtml
if you really like it I'd probably appreciate a favoriting on http://marcony.deviantart.com/art/C.....lass-118993869

In other news I think I have plans to make it north of the border for ScotiaCon next year. ( http://scotiacon.com/ ) Defiantly the Con to be seen at next season.

Am having vague thoughts of forming some kind of furry rock band. This could however be an incredibly bad error of judgment as since playing joining Quaff as their base player (Yes I am in a band) I have developed a requirement for a certain standard with my band mates

As you may have seen in earlier journal entries This weekend is the East Anglian Art Exhibition at Needham Market and both Sangluna and I have submitted art. Not only have they got my name wrong in the Exhibition Catalouge, They have put me down as "A Marcony" (What?) But they have Managed to pick the darkest corner of the whole exhibition to put our work up and they have hung them all so low down bellow other works on that panel that they are very easy to miss, despite some of the works being quite outstanding under an ordinary situation. No other panel of the exhibition has work so tightly packed or going so low down and it's all what you might consider to be more Darkly alternative pieces (in terms of style rather than actual brightness). Our panel is particialy dark in comparison to the panel opposite which is bathed in direct sunlight from the skylight above which means the glass on our frames reflects more light from the gallery in front of it than let through light from our pictures. It's really frustrating when compared to last year where they gave good positions to my pieces despite them being far less good than this years work. I can't get over the feeling they have hidden all the dark alternative stuff in a dark corner.

It's Red Nose Day and to celebrate Why not visit http://www.StateOfAnchovy.co.uk
Not only have I created a Little animation especially for the day, but you will also find linkage (in the news section) so a special page of Prints that will be up just for the day. All prints are singed and of high quality, Furry and Non-furry, By myself and by Sangluna and available at a reasonable price with all profits going to comic relief.

To day is the day (Unless you#re reading this tomorrow) so go buy something Funny for money and for once the money will go to a good cause that isn't me.

Just a heads up now because I know some of you don't get online as much on Fridays.

For Friday only there will be a special page on my website selling some of the funniest State of Anchovy Prints with all profits going to comic relief. This includes work by both Myself and Sangluna.
All prints will of course be of the normal high quality and all signed.

More details here as soon as the page goes live.

I've been working hard on the revamp for my website all week. The annoying part is I can't actually put up any of the new stuff including the much needed re-design for the front page until I've created enough of the new sections for them to be usable.

The main part of this will be the T-shirt section I've just about got as far as the pages with the actual T-shirts on themselves, but before I do that I've got to finally get round to integrating a shopping cart facility in to the site. I've been using single buttons for single purchases for years but that's just not acceptable to me any more. It's really crunch time I have to decide. The PayPal site keeps talking about having some kind of shopping cart but frankly their site is as clear as milk.

I've worked hard on this all week and it's going to be a hard week next week. My head is now quite Bleh. I think it's time to stop for the weekend.

I am Very pleased to announce that Both myself and brilliant partner Sangluna will be exhibiting works at the 35th East Anglian Art Exhibition and Sale. This will of course include some of our Furry pieces. These pieces will also be up for sale at the same time so this is a real chance to pick up art by both Sangluna and myself and indeed pieces by many other brilliant artists from the region (I don't know if we will be the only one's doing furry art or not but for those of you with wider artistic interests there is much there you will find of interest

It's on through from Friday the 10th of April (My birthday If you see me there buy me cake) till Monday the 15th. It's on between the hours of 10am and 5pm and admission is £1.50

As you will probably notice as I start to get more recent work up on the site I'm curently working mostly in Pastel. I really love the look of pastel these days and would quite like the time to re-do some of the State of Anchovy Strips that I have done in other media but this time in pastel. Alas Tiem is money and I have so much to do, so here's an offer. If sombody wants to commision me to re-do any State of Anchovy strips in pastel I will for a suitable price. I'll only do each strip once and you would get the orriginal pastel work. IT will arrived framed in a plastic frame because this is really the only way I've found to safely send pastel work through the post.

The Price will probably work out about £10-£20 per panel, but each panel is likely to be on an individual A4 Sheet so this is really quite a bargain. I would retain reproduction rights.

If you're interested contact me here.

For thoghs of you that are interested in my Non-furry art. I've just put up a new piece on DeviantArt at http://marcony.deviantart.com/art/W.....hood-113904441

It's been a long time since I've had a chat program open on my PC but I've decided to try and be more sociable. I'm not much good at chat programs and never really seem to have much to say but maybe you lot do which will at least be far more interesting for me as I've heard everything I'm likely to say bouncing round my head for some time.

Any way The upshot of this is my hotmail is a .co.uk and is under the name Marcony . I'm on Yahoo as Snoozec . I'm not really anywhere else and don't expect to be as I really can't handle big chat room type places. all the same feel free to prod me at these places and say hello but do remember to say who you are when you do or I may just scream and run away.

I've put up the next few pages of Brave Little Cthulhu Next time brave little Cthulhu finds the cookies, But where will they be?

I'm also proud to announce that the brilliant Sangluna as agreed to do the art work for a new version of this story that will use a monster of our own devising as opposed to one who is still technically under copyright. This may lead to an attempt to publish.

OK, Doon't like this new thing with the thumb nails. They are all so small you can't actualy see what any picture actualy is in the first place. At least with the old system once you mouse overed you were given a big enough image to make some guess at to the picture content. Now the Latest submisions section on my userpage is effectivly useless as to see anything there you have to click through. Fewer bigger thumbnails would prehaps be reasonable if the popup thing is unworkable.

Some time back I wrote a piece on my LiveJournal about The Effects Of Proposed Age Certification Legislation On The Internet (Read it at http://hiddenpaw.livejournal.com/855634.html ) in which I raised two problems with the idea. They were that site certification would cost a lot and hence effectively make it impossible for anyone other than large corporations and rich organizations to talk to under 16s/18s* and also it would increase the rift between the generations by making it less likely for adults and children to be in communication on community sites such as LJ, DA, FA, Face Book or such like. It's all very well to complain when the wrong action is taken to deal with a problem but the problem still remains. Sometimes Inaction is better than the wrong action and I believe it so in this case but I think I have come up with a better solution.

The problem is that the government has been looking at the wrong people to solve the problem The ISPs can't be expected to rate all the web in a fair meaningful way for free without leaving all the web that they have not got round to inaccessible (And pages on the web up date by the minuet in some cases). The people who can rate make sure a site is rated appropriately is the sites creator or management.

It would be very simple to create a system by which sites could rate themselves. I believe most sites on the Internet would be quite happy to do this. Most porn sites want to be seen as reputable businesses and not corrupters of children. Most would say loudly that they sell to adults and do not want children looking any more than anyone else does. Sites like LJ, FA and DA (Especially DA) would find their lives much simpler if they could just put a meta tag in a page saying
&lt;meta Rating="18"&gt; and be sure that children's browsers would not show these pages.

The system would be very simple. As shown above a new meta tag for rating would be officially introduced. Browsers would be programmed to search for such tabs in downloaded pages and if the parent has turned on the child lock (Which would need a password to turn off) then it would only show paged with rating PG or U (Parents choice). It would be a simple solution. The UK government said they would be willing to work with the US government. If they were also willing to work with the EU government I am quite sure that the body in charge of formulating the official standard for HTML would not be at all hard to convince and could have their side of things done and dusted in under a month. It am also quite sure that once the official standard for the HTML had been agreed Microsoft, apple, the makers of Firefox and all the other makers of browsers would have updates out within three months for parents to use. even ISPs could run a blocking service if parents felt that their children were likely to hack the home PC's browser to easily.
The beauty of this is that it can work page by page Sites such as LJ and DA could have safe pages open to the young allowing their users to mark a single piece as adult whilst allowing younger viewers to still see the rest of their work.

I commend this idea to the house...erm world


*Which ever age group they decide upon

The Artist I am about to commemorate will most likely mean little to any of you from outside the UK, He will perhaps mean little to some of the Younger UK furrs about the place. But to people of my generation and perhaps a generation either side of me (Certainly the Generation before mine) he will probably been one of the most important formative influences on their art and possibly what bought them to art in the first place.

Today the death of Tony Hart was announced. Through Programs like Vision On, Take Hart and Hartbeat (The Proper hart beat not the one with Nick Berry) he drew many of us in to art inspired us with ideas and concepts and taught many of us lessons in the use of materials that are still relevant.
By the time I took up pastels Tony hart was no Longer on TV and was a year away from Illness induced retirement. I'd not seen him wild a pastel stick in a decade and I still use ideas of how to use pastel in my art to this day that I learned from watching him on TV back in the 80's. That I make much use of the colour of the paper and create shadow by leaving space on black paper and that this is so frequently used in my art is down to him. That's just how he influenced me. I have heard testament already today from other artists who Like me learned so much of art from this man. He was Art teacher to the nation. Others have come and gone but none as able as Tony Hart 1925-2009 R.I.P

Here's a new plot idea I've had for a story which I will no doubt try to flesh out when the opportunity presents it's self:

Anyone who has ever watched engaged in the ancient hobby of Cat watching must have at some point pondered the possibility that cats tails are in fact not part of the cat but an independent alien being that has grafted it's self on to the back of the cat and is secretly planning to take over the world (Along with all it's tail brothers (and sisters) of course. Well it's true. That's why Manx cats have no tails, The aliens simply can't think of any practical use for the Isle of Man.

The tails are just waiting for the arrival of the Tail Queen. A far bigger tail that needs a far bigger host (Preferably with opposable thumbs). Consequently when the tail queen comes to earth she homes in on a cute 18 year student. Unfortunately for the tail race they discover that unlike cats they can not entirely take over the mind of human subjects being as we are just to damn weird and the Tail queen ends up under her control. But they can control her just enough that she now has an over whelming desire to take over the world and the ability to command her tail subjects (and their cats) who will follow her every whim blindly and with out question. However The student in question (named Alison) is a really nice person she is constantly distracted from her quest to become supreme ruler of the world by her desire to help people in trouble.

She may in the end despite all her cunning schemes become ruler of the world by being nice to so many people that eventually everyone thinks she should be.

Here I am at last. Despite all the protests about another website sucking time out of my life I figured I'm back on the fur scene so I may as well have my art in the appropriate place.
I guess I'm going to spend some time uploading all the furry art I concider worth showing. A lot of it is from the <A HREF="http://www.stateofanchovy">State of Anchovy</A> Website but watch out for one or two other things.