Garage on market for £50,000: "situated in the heart of the bohemian Hanover quarter, near the seafront and nearer a plethora of fashionable pubs". That's just 2 grand less than what i paid for my house in 1987!

Wind farm vision for West Pier: what a good idea!

Great set of linocut stamps by Chris Wormell, the award-winning creator of the children's book An Alphabet of Animals.

Hulk creator biffs Marvel for millions: Thwack! With one mighty blow the comic-book creator Stan Lee took a swipe at Marvel comics this week. Ugh! A judge in the United States awarded the 82-year-old deviser of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men a 10% share of the profits from films and television productions based on his characters. Kapow! Lee now stands to receive royalties of at least $10m (£5.4m).

Music venue gulped cash: the Dome is in trouble again -- will this affect the Brighton Festival, I wonder?

I'd rather face jail than lose my chickens: Linda Turvey's Hen Heaven bird sanctuary is turning into hell as bailiffs threaten to seize her property. Linda has been rescuing battery hens and turkeys and giving them a new lease of life at the Hen Heaven sanctuary in Henfield since 1996.

Added an RSS site feed to my blog, courtesy good 'ole FeedBurner - Point your feed here. We'll do the rest.

Letter: A sad end for this grand old lady

I really should be making a start of the rewrite of my 1990 opus Drawing for 3-dimensional design, sadly out of print, but about to be revived as Drawing for designers, a much more apposite title in my opinion. So, this website – Back of the Napkin Sketches – came as a serendipitous surprise – research! Meanwhile, work has started on the Time Team website for Channel 4 tv. We're into the third weekly build now and this will keep me busy until the end of March (and beyond if they add on Specials and repeats).

What's it worth? Everyone has an opinion on how much art is worth, what's good or rubbish, time and effort, etc. Ruskin probably started it when he said of Whistler’s 'Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket': 'I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face'. Whistler brought a libel suit against Ruskin, claiming damages of £1000. The jury found for Whistler, but awarded a mere farthing. Then there's the (probably apocryphal) Picasso story – punter asks how much for drawing he just did on a napkin. Picasso asks $30,000 (or whatever), punter is shocked: 'what? it only took you 2 minutes!' Picasso replies: 'no it took me the whole of my life'... I like this fable told by Dave Morgan, quoted on the Freelance Journalists' discussion List: It's a bit like the story of the factory boss who notices that they're paying good money to a maintenance man to look after a machine despite the fact that the machine has never gone wrong. In the end, they make this chap redundant and replace him with a school leaver. Within days the machine grinds to a halt and in desperation they call the old chap back in. He tells them he can fix the machine, but it's going to cost them £100,000. They decide to ask him to itemise his invoice, hoping that in doing so they can find out what's wrong and replace it themselves. He breaks his invoice down thus: Replacement washer - £1.00 Knowing which washer to replace - £99,999.00

Beyond the Level - Artists` Open Houses, Brighton -- just updated the Beyond the Level art trail website, ready for the May Brighton Festival.

Well, I've been on the (water) wagon for a day now! Tho I did manage 4 alcohol-free days before New Year's Eve! Don't think I'll break Nick's record tho -- he usually makes it to march at least.