I’m delighted to have made it onto the cover of this month’s Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter.
‘This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator,’ writes editor David Haden, ‘who cleverly combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.’
My comic strip experiment for this month’s Dalesman didn’t make it into print – editor Dan Clare and I decided that Dalesman readers would prefer a more traditional format for the nature diary! – so I’m delighted that Vis News has featured the strip and the process that I went through in creating it.
Book Superheroes bursting into colour. Having familiarised myself with the storytelling suggestions in Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes, I can now let these characters return to their secret hideout and get on with my other projects.
I started a new A6 Hahnemühle watercolour sketchbook last month and now spring’s here, I’m making a point of carrying it with me in this Trespass A6-sized bag, along with a small box of Winsor & Newton professional watercolours.
At the Coffee Stop again, which is newly extended with some stylish hand-painted graphics and decorations.
Our lunch stop was the Ego Mediterranean, our first visit since before the pandemic and our first during the subsequent event, a pointless war in Europe.
As the library specially ordered in a copy of Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes for me, I thought that to try out his suggestions I should draw some library superheroes.
Carnegie
Troubled millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie himself came to Wakefield to open the Carnegie Free Library that he funded in the city, so each episode opens with him materialising at a secret rendezvous to deliver cryptic instructions for a mission impossible that will be a real challenge even for his astonishingly talented team (so his job description is very similar to that of the current head of libraries).
At the end of each episode he appears again to round off the adventure to with a suitably wise epigram, such as ‘Knowledge is Power’, a phrase incorporated in gilded Arts and Craft lettering on the iron gates of the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
So how does he manage to drop in to the present day? Carnegie also funded a Institute of Technology. Unfortunately course our understanding of the space time continuum was rather limited in 1900, so in his enthusiasm to try out the steampunk prototype, built for him in Wakefield by the illustrious Victorian engineering firm, Brown’s Comptometers (it was going to be the real life Green’s Economisers, but they’re very much still in existence, and I don’t want to hear from their legal team) he’s got locked into a chronosynclastic infundibulum so his corkscrew path through space time means he’s in sync with his superhero team only at odd, but predictable, occasions.
Stax
Arcane cult knowledge? Long lost special editions? Martial-arts trained hooded mystery woman Stax is a legend down in the archives deep below the secret library headquarters in a boarded up retail store in the city centre.
Every superhero has an Achilles heel and problems in their everyday lives and for Stax it’s that she classifies her friends and family in Dewey Order.
Bookman Bold Italic
The muscle-bound action hero is Bookman Bold Italic, in real life the van driver who’s developed his strength through lugging around those heavy boxes of requests and returns.
Thanks to doing the rounds, his local knowledge is extraordinary and no-one suspects that the local cheery van driver had a double life as Bookman driving the alarmingly powerful Bookmobile on daring missions. And causing a lot of mayhem along the way.
Stampa
When you return books to headquarters library, do you ever think that checking in scanner has a life and a character all its own?
Of course it does, because when the superheroes spring into action it transforms into Stampa, the Dating Agency Droid, providing comic relief in the story but also often saving the day through its plucky and practical ingenuity.
We missed out on Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival last year but they’ve been lucky enough to hit a rare spell of settled weather this weekend and the stalls on the precinct were busy.
I drew my foot – in a Vivo Barefoot shoe – this morning as I waited at the hairdressers.
For my latest card, a guest artist. My niece Hannah drew a Black Dog on the Beach story with me when she was 5 or 6 years old. She’s since gone on, via a year’s work experience at DisneyWorld, Florida, to work in the travel industry, so I thought that it was time for update her original artwork for her birthday.
Black-headed gull, wood pigeon and a small flock of starlings fly over Queen’s Drive, Ossett, as we have lunch at the fish and chip restaurant.
With less than a week to go before the start of meteorological spring, I’ve just started a new A6 landscape sketchbook, having just finished an even smaller pocket sketchbook, best suited to pen only. It’s good to be working in colour again.
