Working from home means being very close to the fridge. To keep myself on track, I distract my stomach with big mugs of tea. I’ve been borrowing the boyf’s Land Rover mug and that couldn’t continue, so the talented Coralie Winn, who works out of the gallery near Spooky Boogie, made me a big mug of my own.
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Now I just have to resist the chocolate.
Seen recently at the Canterbury Museum - real (though stuffed) Arctic animals.
Compare and contrast the real and comic strip polar bears, lemmings, snow hare/rabbit and Arctic tern.
Uncanny, right?
And of course there are no immigrant penguins in the real Arctic…
Last weekend was the Herne Bay cartoon festival. I think this may be the sixth time it has run and it's a great little event. It is organised by local residents Sue Austen and Steve Coombes as well as cartoonists like Royston Robertson and a lot of volunteers. Only about 30 cartoonists attend and the festival uses lots of little venues. It was great to go back to where I used to live as a student. Not much has changed apart from the type of people who live there. I think they will ultimately change this threadbare Kent seaside resort for the better. They have to contend with a lot of postwar ropey building stock and a pebbly beach that is strewn with litter, but with people like the cartoon festival organisers working on it anything is possible.
I ran a cartooning workshop at Beach Creative on Saturday and there were a lot of creative kids there. Toast cafe next door do fabulous lunches.
There were a lot of great exhibitions on around the town, Including the funny women exhibition at the seaside museum. Unfortunately no one knows who drew my favourite cartoon of that exhibition but I was happy to see Tove Jansson Moomin originals.
Some of us spent a blisteringly hot Sunday morning baking on the pier. We were painting and drawing big cartoon boards. I had one of the holey boards which was great fun to watch when I was finished and had got back from throwing myself in the sea. After a restorative ice cream we had a cartoonists carousel ride before I dashed for the bus to head to Canterbury and another trip down memory lane.
More photos of the event here: https://procartoonists.org/feeling-the-heat-at-yet-another-sunny-herne-bay-cartoon-festival
Taking the train down to the Kent coast today, Taking part in the Herne Bay cartoon festival. It should be a nice trip down memory lane as I used to live in Herne Bay when I was at Kent University in Canterbury.
I'll be running a cartooning workshop and swimming in a lot in the sea. England is actually having a hot summer for a change.
Our conservatory is currently serving as my studio. It is a good place to watch the weather come in over the harbour, especially when it is blowing a cold southerly like today. Billie has one of his beds in here and likes to keep me company until it is time to light the log burner in the lounge.
I love listening to podcasts when I ink. Playing in the background is my current favourite, Fortunately..with Fi and Jane (thanks to my unrelated friend Jane who recommended it to me).
Another month has whizzed by, we're well into Autumn and we have been busy working on the house and garden while the good weather continued. Fortunately, the veranda was replaced before the weather turned wet this week. I'm also happy to report that I no longer get seasick going off to bed as the house has been re-levelled and new piles put in to keep it level-ish.
This week, I have been working on the illustrations for Chapter 13 of the second FAB Club book. By the next Epistle the drawing should be finished, which will ease the deadline pressure somewhat.
I've also been busy running cartoon workshops in Lyttelton. The first was in the library with kids aged 7-12. They were enthusiastic and engaged and it was very rewarding to see how much their drawing developed in a couple of hours. The second was at a youth club that catered to 11-14 year olds. We started with about a dozen kids and ended up with four! All of them were the younger ones who weren't distracted by their peers. It was a good learning experience for me.
I think that peer pressure in the early teens is a big factor in which interests we take up. Most kids give up drawing at this point, believing that their drawing isn't good enough to impress their friends. I was lucky at that age to have friends who loved to write and draw and we created comics to entertain each other. Without that encouragement, I might have given up too, as I don't find that drawing comes naturally to me and I have to work at it. It is the reason I give myself deadlines in order to develop my work. Doodle Diary on gocomics.com forces me to to draw at least three sketches of my life every week, many of which debut in the Epistle.
This is an excerpt from my Illustrated Epistle, which goes out in the middle of the month. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a cartoonist (specifically, mine). I'd love it if you signed up at the bottom of this page, or here:
I ran a second cartooning workshop in Lyttelton this week. This time it was at the recreation centre, where there is a youth club. The age range of the kids skewed older and it was interesting how that (and having other kids and activities around) changed the group dynamic.
We started with about a dozen kids, but as they became more and more distracted the numbers dropped off. After an hour, there were four kids and they were all the younger ones. They were the only ones able to focus and produce a comic strip at the end of the workshop. I wonder if I would have stuck out a cartooning class at the age of 14. I think so.
