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.
I’m the same age as you and was brought up in Bolton where every other child seemed to have cap guns. The strip caps were good for repeat firing but the single caps could be doubled or tripled for a mightier bang!
I’d forgotten that, it sounds like the kind of thing we’d have experimented with!