Category: cartoon

The Foxes’ Ball

anxious fox
cartoon fox

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.

cartoon fox

The Watchers by the Pond

cut-out figures
speech bubble
First rough for a speech bubble.

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.

river artwork

Steam and Star Wars

Star Wars characters visit Grosmont

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.

Yoda and his 900th birthday cake.

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

cartoon

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

scale model

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.

rough sketches
steps sketch

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.

cartoon character
storks sketch

Brilliant idea, here’s me practicing my ‘interesting’ look.

Should work like a charm.

St Ignatius R.C. Primary, 1994

taff

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.

tea towel

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

Picnic on the Patch cartoon
snail mail

Note: Slimer & Shelley have now been relocated to the other side of the hedge, following their night raid on the climbing French beans.

snail cartoon

Butties

Butterflies cartoon
Roger hard a work

I thought that I’d give my laidback lepidopterist friend Roger a bit of a challenge with his birthday card this year. This is going to be difficult if you’re not familiar with British butterflies, so answers at the foot of this post.

And if that isn’t enough here are four bonus species – all different species of a group of small butterflies that hold their forewings at an angle above their hindwings, so they look a bit moth-like.

more butterfly cartoons

Answers

Top cartoon, back row, left to right: Red Admiral, Purple Hairstreak, Painted Lady
Front row: Small Tortoiseshell, Purple Emperor, Comma, Small Copper

Bonus species, left to right: Large Skipper, Small Skipper, Dingy Skipper, Essex Skipper (and yes, as Roger pointed out, Dagenham is no longer in Essex, it became a part of Greater London in 1965!)

I didn’t get around to including the Chequered Skipper, shame about that.

Brownie-gate

brownie cartoon

As it’s our council leader Denise Jeffery’s birthday, I couldn’t resist a homemade birthday brownie cartoon. Congratulations too to Tracy Brabin, M.P., who celebrated her birthday yesterday by becoming West Yorkshire’s first elected mayor. By the way, her ‘vote Labour’ brownies turned out to be perfectly legal.

And commiserations to a talented bunch of runners up. What a shame that all seven couldn’t get together like the mismatched heroes of a comic book series to pool their superpowers, perhaps mentored by a wise old leader, played by former Dewsbury Reporter journalist, Patrick Stewart, to ‘promote ideals of tolerance and equality for all’ in West Yorkshire, just like he does in Marvel’s X-Men movies.