Garstang & Flock

comic
Tweets
The Twitter feed: I stuck with the text of the original tweets.

My thanks to Suzy Scavenger and to her hen Garstang, the chicken with the twisted beak. This is the latest assignment in my Mattias Adolfsson online course, The Art of Sketching. We were asked to draw a comic featuring the self-portrait comic character we’d created.

The dialogue is taken from directly from an exchange of tweets between Suzy and I about the removal of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue from his plinth overlooking the harbour in Bristol. What could have been a serious discussion of whether it’s acceptable to destroy works of art has been somewhat undermined by Garstang, who has overacted in every frame she appears in.

Roughs
Roughs: ‘Pencil’ blocking out (drawn on the iPad); colour rough (iPad); final rough (pen on paper, real paper)
Garstang

“Marvellous!” said Suzy, when I explained what I had in mind for the comic strip, “Garstang deserves some recognition.”

As you can see for my Clip Studio iPad cartoon (left), all this celebrity could easily go to Garstang’s head. In my cartoon, she’s standing on a copy of the popular Victorian magazine Tit-Bits (which I remember still being in print in the late 1950s). A copy dating from 1895 was discovered hidden in Colston’s plinth.

studies
Garstang drawn from a photograph Suzy sent me. Yes, hens do sometimes have long wattles.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.