Illustration Friday - Spring!

Well - spring's definitely here - it was absolutely chucking it down with rain today. But spring rain, rather than the winter stuff that creeps into your bones.

Anyway, here's a nice cheerful springtime picture showing the birds marking out their territories, and shouting abuse at each other. Nice abuse, though!


There are blue tits using my sparrow terrace, which I wouldn't mind, but:

a) Sparrow terraces cost about three times the amount that tit boxes do.
b) We carefully constructed a tit box, using specifications supplied by the RSPB, and situated it in the sort of spot that blue tits are supposed to go for. Evidently somebody forgot to tell them!

I've got a beautiful corkscrew hazel, which is covered in catkins at the moment. If it's not raining again tomorrow, I'll try and take a photo of it for this blog. You'll be impressed, but not if the lens of the camera is covered in a pretty pattern of raindrops ... we'll have to see.

Have a nice weekend everybody!

CAS

Illustration Friday - Monster

This is an illustration I did for a sweet little book called 'The Tale of Trellie the Troog' by Douglas Hill. Troogs are described thus:

'Old stories of scary monsters only tell about things like trolls and ogres. And while troogs could be scary, they weren't as horrible as trolls or as ugly as ogres. They knew, of course, that people were always frightened out of their wits if they saw a troog. But troogs just thought that people were a little odd.'

They're perfectly right, of course!

Anyway, enjoy!

Lots of love,

P xxx

Illicit recording in the news AGAIN!!!!

This is Sir Ian Bear, the Chief Police Commissioner (he was on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning). As you can see, he is one of our 'boys in blue'. He is in a lot of trouble for secretly recording his own phone calls with other people.

He can explain everything, though. 'I just can't believe some of the things I'm hearing. So I have to tape the phone calls so's I can play them back later to make sure I really heard what I thought I heard. For example, someone has recently tried to ban 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' on account of it being offensive. They haven't tried to ban Eminem, though. And recently the Chief of Police taped a phone call to the Home Secretary on the very subject of phone tapping. Can you believe that?'

In defence of Sir Ian, though, Puflet would like to point out that he has some difficulty in hearing at all, on account of having cloth ears. Very nice, furry cloth, but cloth nonetheless. And he likes to wear his helmet in the bath.

Puflet's ATC's

Just to cheer everyone up on a grey day like today (strictly speaking this is inaccurate because it's actually dark at the moment), here are some of the 29,000 floating ducks who sat there still enough for me to draw them.

I think these are much more cheerful than the previous lot. What do you think?

Anyway, I hope to go swimming again soon, to get in training to go and trace some of these fellas.

Lots of love,

P xxx

29,000 Floating Ducks

At the moment I'm working on a design for ATC's for the fellow members of the 29,000 Floating Ducks blog, and I thought some of you might be interested in the process. This is the start - draw out the thing in biro, and sort out the tones. Not just any old biro will do. It's got to be one of those see-through plastic bic medium jobs, or it's considerably more difficult. I'm glad that you don't need really expensive ones.

Then I will put this through Photoshop, and drain most of the tone away so as just to leave faint outlines. Then that means that I can sort out colours. In fact with a piece this size I wouldn't normally go to all this trouble because it's a fairly simple composition, but with the more complicated ones it's a good idea!

Then, having done that, I'll trace the design onto watercolour paper, put in the background colours as a wash, and then begin the laborious task of doing all the cross-hatching with watercolour. Again, this is a small piece and won't take that long, but some of them do ...

I hope you wanted to know all this. Sometimes people do ask!

And for those of you who haven't visited '29,000 Floating Ducks' yet, there's a link on the right.

Lots of love,

CAS