If I hadn’t become an illustrator, perhaps I could have had a career as a cowboy. This photograph from the mid to late 1950s of me toting six-shooters brings back so many memories.
The shiny new silver six-gun in my right hand fired the kind of caps that come in a ribbon while the old gold model in my left needed to be laboriously loaded for each shot with an individual paper cap, which wouldn’t be a lot of use if you were being attacked by a whole posse of baddies.
However, I remember that it was engraved with curlicue patterns, so I reckoned that if I ever got lost in deep in canyon country, I could use it as a map.
I can still remember the smell of gunpowder and metal.
I’m pretty certain that the holster was one that my mum had made from skiver, a thin sheet of sheepskin leather. Not sure if it really was green with red trim, but I did once have a waistcoat from a cowboy outfit in those colours. The hand-knitted Aran pullover was most likely grey but probably not the kind of thing that gunslingers wore in the Old Wild West.
My drawing was made as a way of getting familiar with Adobe Illustrator Draw, a vector drawing program, using an Apple Pencil on my iPad.