It’s still rather expensive to take a trip into space, so perhaps self-build is the way to go . . .
Self-build Starship
Category: cartoon
Bird, Man and Dog
A test for my new iPad Pro: a pencil rough of a cartoon walk drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Now that I’ve familiarised myself with the way it works again, I’ll go on to try something more ambitious.
Just one thing to work out is how to export the finished animation – it’s disappearing into a black hole at the moment instead of saving to a file – which is why I’ve had to show it in a movie taken with my iPhone.
The Foxes’ Ball
They brought us:
- one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
- three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
- two dead rats
In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.
The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.
A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.
The Watchers by the Pond
More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.
They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.
Steam and Star Wars
From a galaxy far, far away . . .
(Grosmont)
At first they welcomed the surge in interest but soon the good people of Grosmont began to regret that Hans Solo had told all his friends about the great time he’d had visiting Yorkshire.
Happy birthday to Iris (who fortunately doesn’t need as many candles on her cake as Yoda.
And I should explain that Hans Solo himself was recently spotted filming on the North Yorks Moors Railway. Although on this occasion Harrison Ford was playing Indiana Jones.
Glastonbury 2021
For today’s homemade card for my brother-in-law Dave, I was torn between a Bob Dylan 80th birthday tribute or The Wurzels at Glastonbury.
Ooh Arr, difficult choice.
Tankformers
Another of my homemade cards that you just can’t buy in the shops . . . probably because the market for road tanker designers celebrating their 50th birthdays is pretty limited.
Boxing Clever
At this rate I’m going to spend more time working on my scale model than on the actual exhibit in Horbury’s Redbox Gallery, but it’s better to sort things out at this stage, rather than hope for the best when it comes to installing it.
I’ve thought about using recycled materials only, but there’s a slight risk that, although the box is watertight, if we had a spell of really wet weather, it might get humid in there, which would warp the corrugated cardboard that I had in mind. Graham, from the Civic Society who maintain the box, suggests thin marine ply, but that’s going to be difficult to cut out when I draw my cast of characters and scenery.
So, as illustrated in my scale model above, I think that the most practical solution would be white foam board, which is very light, dimensionally stable and much easier to cut. Half a dozen A1 boards would be as much as I’d need.
Making and Exhibition of Myself
Or there’s the conceptual approach.
‘Will you just stand in it and (try to) look interesting?’ asked my sister on Facebook.
Brilliant idea, here’s me practicing my ‘interesting’ look.
Should work like a charm.
St Ignatius R.C. Primary, 1994
Mr Brooke was a stickler for pencil and rulers, Mrs Johnson was the school’s hedgehog wrangler, Mrs Manning was noted for getting in the groove on the school’s upright piano and Mrs Argent – in those pre-mobile days – apparently had the job of summoning teachers to the phone, but I think my favourite member of staff from St Ignatius R.C. Primary School, 1994, would be Mrs Claypole, cheerfully pushing the the school dinners trolley.
After more than half a century, our tea towel is gradually fading and getting thinner, so I thought that it was time to scan it, as it’s now a bit of a historical document.
It was produced by Stuart Morris Textiles of Hadleigh, Suffolk. It dates from when one of our nephews was in his last year there. Haven’t spotted him yet amongst the self-portraits.
Picnic on the Patch
Note: Slimer & Shelley have now been relocated to the other side of the hedge, following their night raid on the climbing French beans.
