Illustration Friday - Pattern

Animals' fur, plumage, scales etc will often acquire a pattern which reflects their surroundings. The Loch Ness monster (depicted above) is particularly distinctive as a native of Scotland, and can be distinguished from other, similar monsters, like this one whose native habitat is further south.

Photographic identification may help ...

I've sent them this. Let's wait and see.

If you look carefully at the photo, you can see the blue sky reflected romantically in the pools of fuel surrounding the fuel pump (the yellow bit with knobs on in the middle). Luckily there's a lot less than there was, but I'm certain this stuff isn't good to breathe.

The Not-So-Great-Seal

The guy from the scrapyard said he'd send a seal. He hasn't. He's sent a gasket; it's quite a cheerful blue colour though. Right ... back onto them ...

Oriented in time, place and person

One of the things I like about this blog is that it tells me who I am, where I live (approximately) and what day it is.

Playing your cars right...

If I park my car on a slope, particularly if it's got fuel in the tank, I can create a pool of diesel with no extra effort. Sometimes I get concerned about the diesel atmosphere within the car itself. The culprit is a seal which screws onto the fuel tank just above the pump (easily located under the back seat). Mine's split. A garage doctor type I took the car to see could offer no assistance.

So ... I contacted a scrapyard. I even offered to pay for an entire fuel tank in order to get this seal (I suspect that this would be considerably cheaper than buying one for Peugeot. In fact if you added together the cost of all the parts from the maker, the total would be a vehicle I wouldn't be anywhere near affording). I explained exactly what the seal should look like, where it's located, all that stuff. Then the fuel tank arrived - without a seal on it!!!!

Well, I've been onto them, and they said they'd send one on. Let's see.

In the meantime, Bill Stott has sent me this:


And it helped, it really did!

I've just had an amazing piece of insight!

I have written an informative and interesting piece on how to make your beansprouts look like the ones in Chinese restaurants - to read it, you will need to get hold of Foghorn 41, which hasn't seen print yet and you'll have to wait to see it online.

However, as I produced this illustration to illustrate the article, I made a surprise discovery - my cross-hatched, water-colour, nit-picking style is ideally suited to depicting face flannels! I may yet branch out to include towels and bath mitts - watch this space ...

Illustration Friday - Infinite

Titus A. Newt was showing infinite patience with a barman, considering.

This is what I dun at the Big Draw ...

I was masterminding a workshop on the theme of 'There were Ten in the Bed', ably assisted by The Surreal McCoy, and there were some noble submissions on this theme. We started off by just drawing lots of pics to inspire people actually doing the workshop ...


until we were kicked off our table because it was going to be needed for the Battle of the Cartoonists. However, it was not long before the Real Battles started in earnest:


There were some absolutely wonderful bits produced during this time, e.g.


and:



(Photos courtesy of Gerard Whyman)

Meanwhile, another drama was unfolding as the Battle of the Cartoonists was raging ... I won't go into this in too much detail, as a fuller account can be read here, but the PCO were joint winners with the following masterpiece:



And here are our noble lads:



Reading from left to right, which many of us do, are Pete Dredge, Andrew Bunday, Nathan Ariss and Clive Goddard. And massive congratulations to them all!

If you enjoy the utter silliness of this blog ...

You might be interested in Foghorn Magazine - you can read it, for free, just by going to the graphic on the left - and clicking on it, preferably.

I've written a couple of articles for this magazine.

As of the current one, I write a gardening column for it. Not recommended if you really want information about gardening; if this is the case, a print publication on the subject would serve you much better. But then you get loads of adverts, and you won't with this one here!

Enjoy!

More naughtiness ...

Illustration Friday - Welcome

Albert's enthusiastic welcome to Maureen (aka Melissa with a cunning twister) did not meet with the response he had been hoping for.

Here's a bit more about the Saturday Events:

If any of you are in London next weekend ...

Come and support the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation as part of The Big Draw

as a fundraiser before the main events, which start in October.

The venue is:
Gallery at Idea Generation,
11 Chance Street,
London E2 7JB.

From 2.00 - 5.00pm, Saturday 12th September 2009

Organisers hope to close the street and use outside space too...

This artistic event will feature The Battle of the Cartoonists and also two workshops. Tim Harries will be running one on creating cartoon strips, whilst I will be running the other. To mark the 10th Anniversary of the Big Draw, the theme is 'Now we are Ten'; the theme of my particular bit of it is 'There were Ten in the Bed ...', so if you want to come along and draw nine people you'd like to be in bed with, or merely to laugh at people who are, you'll be very very welcome!

Illustration Friday - Strong

Colin and Betsy suddenly discovered that their bedroom ceiling was not strong enough.

Dear Agony Auntie,

My house has cracks in the walls. Usually when people say 'moving house', they are actually referring to themselves, rather than their dwelling place. Not so in this instance.

It's now got tie bars which have restrained its peripatetic activities somewhat, and now I'm trying to find someone to paper over the cracks, so to speak.

However, no fewer than three so-called craftsmen fixed an appointment to survey the carnage, and not one of them has actually materialised. Do you think they've fallen through the cracks and into a warp in the space/time continuum? Should I report them as missing persons?

Your advice is eagerly awaited.

Yours,

Preston Rumblestrips, CBE

Can anyone help me get rid of this wizard?

I can't wait until Halloween. He's driving me nuts. You remember I had a new hard drive a little while ago? Well, all's fine and dandy with that, plenty of house room and even my hefty potatoshop files have failed to consume all the spare space.

But ...

Every time I start the computer, this is what I get:


As you can see, he's really startled that hoopoe!

Now, I've been online looking for someone to exorcise this blighter. I've tried learning to live with him, and it's not going to work. Nor could I find anywhere online that seemed to have been visited by him. More specifically, nor could I find anywhere online that had been visited, and then deserted, by him.

Can any of you out there rid me of this turbulent dialogue box???