Latest Arrival at Puflet Palace!!!

Introducing Gwendoline, who is a very elegantly clad pigeon who arrived by pigeon post this morning.  This was a lovely gift from Debbie Greenaway, aka Ladysnail, whose blog can be reached from the link on the left  - do go and have a look to check out the rest of the flock!

Here come the Morris Dancers!

 Well, if you wanted to meet the bungee guy, how about these little fellers?  Blues and greens are very bright to compensate for the fact that 4-colour process will lose some of this, but the toilet roll looks as though it's been lying out in the sun for too long!

Exercise bikes and things.

I was listening to a radio broadcast this afternoon about working from home; one of the guys they interviewed was describing his work room, where the furnishings included an exercise bike. This struck me as his way of cycling to work.

Then I went to the gym and had a go on an exercise bike. They have a thing on which tells you how far you've gone; I've always found this quite amusing as it reminds me of that bit in Alice Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen grabs Alice and they go racing away. The Queen tells Alice that it's sometimes necessary to run very fast just to stay in the same place.

But what particularly impressed me was another contraption where you can exercise your arm muscles via a cycling-type thingy - but it also gives an indication how far you've gone, in kilometres! I can't understand why, unless it's part of the training for people who go walking along on their hands! Very useful if you've got blisters on your feet, I suppose.

Coming out of the darkness

Well, here we are, with the bungee jumping and all the festive little characters living in colour!

Actually I'm going to have to play around with the colour adjustments a bit more, as these are much muddier than the original watercolour, which was nothing but sweetness and light.

This is despite the fact that I have only used process colours on this - yep, all the different hues are blends of process cyan, magenta, yellow and black. I once did a painting where I only used the pure colours, e.g. purples were made by overlaying red cross-hatching over blue cross-hatching. The painting is smaller than A4, but it took WEEKS. Haven't tried it since - had to be a reason why the technique's never caught on!

Illustration Friday - Buzz

This is based on my own back garden, and the only reason this really qualifies to answer the theme 'Buzz' is because of the beehive in the background.

In fact, the real life 'beehive' is a composter, and most of the buzzing that you hear in the summer comes from the critters on the pyracantha (not shown in the picture), which does get very loud at times.

But as far as I'm aware they don't make any honey in the composter, though there are some nice stripey worms in there.

I have, of course, produced an illustration to Aristophanes' play 'The Wasps', but I thought you might like to see something new.

Puflet Politics

Could somebody please explain to an unsophisticated small water bird why, in the recent execution of Saddam Hussein, it was deemed uncivilised to taunt him? While it was perfectly civilised to break his neck by hanging?

And why the News of the World describes him as a monster (yes, for sure, many thousand times over), but still deems it acceptable to gloat that they heard his neck snap?

Don't understand. Best get back to the sand eels ...

And while the morris dancers were hanging out at the back ...

Here's the final ruf (if that's not a contradiction in terms) for the front of the CD. You may notice certain similarities between this and the ruf I posted a little while back, but this one's more, well, crowded.

While I was drawing the new arrivals I was listening to a piece on Radio 4 about the latest bunch of immigrants to arrive on these shores.

It's funny the way this sometimes happens.

When I was adding the finishing touches to the infamous watercolour 'March past of the Kitchen Utensils', I was also listening to the book at bobotime on Radio 4, and the incidental music was, indeed, Vaughan Williams' 'March past of the Kitchen Utensils'.