Category: cartoon

The Farmer and his Pig

farmer and pig

These two could have auditioned for the latest series of All Creatures Great and Small but they’re appearing in one of the folksy fables in Yes it is. I like the pig – just need him to tilt his head on one side as he listens to the tale – but for the farmer I need his expression to be flummoxed rather than irate.

ball and kite

Although Yes it is has a retro children’s story setting, it deals with themes that are all too contemporary, like the loneliness and isolation – in this case the loneliness of this green ball. The fact that the author has specified the colour makes me tempted to go for a spot colour, perhaps backed up with blocks of neutral grey, to hint at the style of children’s book illustration in the 1950s and early 60s; I’m thinking of Dr Suess and Gene Zion’s Harry the Dirty Dog, illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham.

ball and window

Margaret Bloy Graham uses a textured line which reminds me of conte crayon with a soft watercolour or gouache wash. With this in mind, I tried bamboo pen, to try and deliberately simplify the line (left) and dip pen (above) but inevitably, as I use it every day, I’m more relaxed drawing with a fountain pen, as in the farmer and his pig drawing, which was drawn in De Atramentis Document Ink with my Lamy Vista with an EF nib. That gives me more of the energy that I’m after, but without getting the particular vintage graphic look that I had in mind.

Yes it is

rough cover

Being an illustrator gives you a unique insight into the author’s mind. Scary stuff.

Published
Categorized as cartoon

Lift-off

robot card

It’s all systems go for Henry’s Robot Wars card as it dawned on me that, for a symmetrical pop-up shape, all I needed to do is fold down the middle of the card and cut both halves at once. Yes, it really did take me two birthday cards to work that one out. But how about asymmetrical pop-ups? There must be a simple way for working those out . . .

One detail that doesn’t show up in this photograph is that Henry’s command module features transparent windows (cut from the packaging of Sainsbury’s Deep Filled Mince Pies. Of course, I had to eat the mince pies first). And, yes, Henry is wearing his pyjamas rather than the traditional space suit, so I guess that he’s planning on going into suspended animation on his interplanetary journey.

Out of the Box

pop-up
pop-up card

My birthday-card technology continues to evolve: with this card for our great-nephew Ralph, I’ve done some out-of-the-box thinking and burst into 3D, which is appropriate as this card is based on a real-life incident.

No, his parents didn’t actually transport Ralph in a box when they moved house shortly before Christmas, but with so many packing cases around, he did enjoy trying one out for size.

Doll making

dolls

Another Tier 3 homemade card, this time for my sister Linda who has been crafting away through Tiers and Lockdowns alike, although I have noticed a gradual change in the bespoke dolls she makes.

Doll making must run in the family: yesterday I posted a photograph of our great-grandma Sarah Ann lining up homemade dolls to raise funds for the wartime ‘Save-a-Penny-a-Week’ fund which raised money for hospitals.

So apart from my sister knitting woolly witches and me concocting treemen, stonemen and wheelie-bin robots on my Monday morning walks around Illingworth Park, we haven’t been too badly affected.

Royal Gala

Royal Gala
king

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the throne.”

W. C. Seller & R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That

Another fruity character, this time a Royal Gala, so I’ve gone for an apple-shaped monarch suffering the after-effects of a Tudor banquet. This was as far as I got with him, as he didn’t have the same a-peel (see what I did there?) as Cavendish the banana-inspired butler.

Cavendish

fruit and cartoon characters

The Cavendish banana accounts for 47% of world production and makes the perfect name for a butler, especially as the Cavendish originated from the hothouses of Chatsworth House, the ultimate setting for a country house murder mystery.

I try to catch the individual character of a fruit as I draw it, so how would I bring that out as a cartoon character? The Royal Gala apple made me think of an overindulged Henry VIII character, the lemon of Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon but it was that last banana, with a deferential hunched stoop and a slightly over-ripe seediness that made me think of an imperious but dodgy butler from a creaky 1930s murder mystery.

His colours are taken straight from the banana my watercolour sketch, using the Photoshop eye-dropper tool. Only the flesh tone needed lightening.

Robo-Clip

Robot
pen knives and pencil sharpeners
bulldog clip

When I’m busy, it’s great to be able to turn to some state-of-the-art technology for a bit of help. Unfortunately this robotic illustrator’s helper isn’t yet available in the shops; I’ve concocted it using Photoshop on my iPad using pen knives and pencil sharpeners from my plan chest drawer. I found that coloured card worked best for selecting the background and cutting it out to isolate the shapes. Masks proved useful again in fine tuning edges but I haven’t yet worked out how to retain the masked effect when I copy and paste an element multiple times, as I did with the ‘Waverley Clip’.

The lens blur on the background image was added in the desktop version of Photoshop as filters aren’t as yet available on the iPad version.

A Taste of London

London veg

As you can see, I’m really missing my occasional trips to London. Just before lockdown we’d been planning a Thames-side walk from Bushey Park to Greenwich Park, meeting up with friends at various stages, including Alistair, who celebrated his birthday at the weekend, hence this card.