friday in black and white

I found today’s sketch in Greenwich Park terribly frustrating. I’ve been drawing a lot of close-ups of trees, which is pretty much the same thing as doing a life drawing of a person. But I’ve never been good at landscape drawings where I step back from one big foreground object (unless I draw it highly stylised, like this picture), and today was no exception. I really need to keep working on this.

On an interesting note, you see that little ball at the top of the tower on the left? That’s Greenwich Royal Observatory, and ships on the Thames used to set their clocks when that ball dropped on the hour. It’s where we get the expression ‘on the ball’.

Speaking of stylised landscapes, I love seeing those made by comics artist Darryl Cunningham. The Comics Bureau has just posted an interview with him that I’m bookmarking to read on my tea break.

Another bit of news! Brilliant DFC colleague Jamie Smart just announced on his blog that he’s going to spend much of next year drawing for a new Dr Who magazine coming out next spring! Gary put him up for the job, and for awhile, we had lots of amazing pictures of monsters coming into the studio, but we were told if we breathed a word about them to anyone, they’d have to kill us. (Then a lot of time passed and I kind of forgot about it; these kinds of publishing announcement really DO take forever!)

Speaking of top secret, Gary’s working on an amazing project right now on his drawing board. I keep stopping my work to walk over, look and say, ‘aw, maaan’. But he’s got his Beano slingshot on the ready in case I even THINK of breathing a word about it.


James Harvey’s been tagging drawings from one of his Hourly Comic Days, and vain gal that I am, I was super chuffed to see myself popping up in them. (Thanks, James!) Have a look at his Harvey James website. (On LiveJournal, he’s harveyjames.)


Guess… which one’s me?

…Yeah, okay, the really tall one.


James says I didn’t look that didactic in real life. But it was a comic about something horrific that happened in a jail cell, I think with Hitler and a unicorn making an appearance, and I wasn’t sure I could really give it the right kind of editorial assistance.

Speaking of hourlies, here’s an Hourly Comic I did ages ago, about the day in the life of an illustrator (before I had a studio).


Click here to read the whole comic

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