Artist John Howe (of Tolkien fame) will be giving talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday
August 23rd, from 8:00 pm to 9: pm. He says he’s not sure of the exact location but we hope he’ll manage to sort that out by next weekend. The festival site is here

It is apparently the very first time John Howe has set foot in Scotland (well he doesn’t actually live in the UK) so if it is your first time too then no need to feel embarrassed (although maybe a bit if you live in the north of England!)

This latest just in from fantasy artist John Howe (of Tolkien films fame):-

BEOWULF AND THE DRAGON

This illustration was done primarily for the FANTASY ART WORKSHOP,
though as usual with me, the circumstances leading up to it are a
little more involved. The original idea emerged for the Beowulf
Boardgame, but there was no room on the board for a full-size
illustration, so it changed and became a small vignette. After, with
the deadline running out for the Beowulf book, I decided to do it
anyway and include it in the Workshop book. (As it turns out, by a
miracle of deadline-bending, it also made it into Beowulf.)

Start the tour here

We’re not quite sure where the credit crunch is crunching because we’ve been rushed off our feet all summer with orders from our customers and various trade projects!  So busy there has been a substantial Blogbreak here but hopefully we’ll be writing a bit more over the coming week’s than has been the case recently.  If you haven’t visited our ecommerce site recently at www.artistsuk.co.uk then you might like to take a look as there are lots of new items all over the place.  Use the SEARCH function because not everything has found a home on the Updates Page yet although you will probably find a few things there you didn’t know had arrived.

With the recent admissions by the oil industries that oil supplies did in fact peak around 2002 and the gloomy outlook of increasing fuel prices as supplies decline how many people are wondering quite what we have done and how many are just madly fiddling away while Rome (ie the fuel) is burning? As was predicted by an astute man in the seventies, our nonchalant consumption of fossil fuels placed on a 10,000 year graph will look rather like a slim penis in the middle of the vast timeframe to either side. Is it nature’s way of telling us we’ve been a load of dickheads?

Okay, so there are other power sources and some 80% of the cars on show at the Birmingham Car Show this year were electric but so far nobody has any clue how we could fuel an airplane other than with fossil fuels. That means the same is even more true for a space rocket. It may be millions of years in the future but when our sun goes nova we have to leave this planet or mankind becomes one big fry-up. If by that time there is still no other way to fuel a rocket ship what will those last humans think of us as they watch the sun explode? There are plenty of poor excuses of course … you’re thinking about them right now … but isn’t it incredible that it took us until the fossil fuel supply peaked to even begin to take the problem seriously and recognise the danger of having based our lives on a non-replaceable fuel supply. To say that the last 50 odd years of the so-called developed nations has been governed by short-sighted selfishness is putting in mildly and even now people are saying, “They’ll come up with something” or “xxxx fuel is the answer” when what they really mean is, “I don’t really care because I’ll be dead by the time it gets really tough.” That is assuming we have any idea how much or how little time we have until it gets tough … and when the tough gets going there’ll be nowhere to go.

You might want to take a look at Greenpeace here

If you don’t know about the peaking of oil supplies then take a look at this.

There is also Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers here.

Or an in-depth review of George Monbiot’s book Heat here.

None of it is easy reading but it’s better than being an ostrich.