sailing

There’s no such things an original, is there?

They say that there are only six jokes in the world, and that those are just recycled and remade. I have no idea what the original six were.

It would seem to me that in what I do there are now no such things as originals, or perhaps I’m wrong. All my drawings these days start with a line drawing that is essentially unfinished. The drawing is then scanned and put into photoshop and digitally worked up to get the final. Which is the original? Possibly the initial line drawing can be described as the original, but it is not what I’d call finished. In the time before digital work I’d finish and faff with it until I was relatively happy and then that final flat piece of paper can rightly be described as the original. So perhaps that discounts this first drawing. May be those pixels in the mac are the original.

Anyhow here’s a first line drawing without any messing, apart from the scanning. It’s for a series I’m working on the British, although the boat could be a metaphor for the country ready to set off on its round the world trip, apres Brexit.

Please note the adventurer’s website address on the banner above his leaking boat. I wonder if that domain is taken?old-boat-finalsf

The British…what are they like?

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THE BRITISH CHARACTER
An innate ability to look forward with hope

My New Year’s resolution of “do some drawing every day” is being strictly adhered to. I was admonished the other day, good word that, better than being ‘told-off’. The reason was that I’d described my drawing as a rough, when the viewer thought it was finished. Well, in common with many other artists, one has never finished a drawing so they can all be described as rough. This is one such.

My journey for the year is to navigate towards a project about the British and I was inspired to start this by coming across a book about a cartoonist called ‘Pont’. His real name was Graham Laidlaw and he died quite young in 1940. A Punch cartoonist of some repute  he specialised in drawings about the British and their ways of looking at life and living. He’s worth looking up on Wickepedia, his drawings are just lovely.

I’ll be following in his large footsteps and hoping to bring his ideas up to date. Some of them will not need a complete revamp as they are still as true today as they were 60 plus years ago. This drawing is the first to be done and wether or not it makes the final cut will depend on production over the next few months.

I’ll be dropping them into my blogs over the coming months and hope that you enjoy them.

Rough seas again, eighteen days later.

So here we are eighteen days later and ‘Rough Seas Rough’ got a little more finished, but not completely. Sometimes there’s a temptation to over finish, and when does a cartoon become an illustration. For me they are always cartoons these days. I’ll work on this drawing and it will be interesting to see if it gets better or worse.

This drawing reveals my fear of small boats out at sea. I used to go on holiday to North Wales and could never understand the attraction that people had to set out to sea in what seemed to me to be extremely small boats. At least these two have their lifebelts on, but one suspects the motor has failed and he’s not making much headway with the rowing. Let’s be positive, someone in the lighthouse will have called the coastguard and ruddy-faced lifeboatmen will soon be on hand to rescue them, so that they can do the same thing tomorrow. Heave to!
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