Hertfordshire Spinney

Things I have learned: 

A small stand of trees is also known as a 'spinney.'

Hawthorn is everywhere 

Bluebells are not

A footpath is not a bicycle track

Air New Zealand

I have never before had cause to feel actual affection for an airline, but of all the companies who've flown me to various locations around the world, I have to confess my love for Air New Zealand.  I'd always thought long-haul trips were something to be endured rather than enjoyed, but I now find myself looking forward to the flight and wishing I had an excuse to fly more often.  It is probably just as well for the ozone layer that I don't ... but regardless, well done, Flying Kiwis.

American Woman Journalist

Radio 4 Extra recently reran the BBC's most excellent radio dramatisation of Robert Harris' Fatherland, so I took the opportunity to draw Charlotte Maguire. Those darn spunky investigative female journalists, they come along and ruin everything . . .

The 2 1/2 hour dramatisation is, luckily, available for purchase, and I highly recommend it as fantastically produced and acted audio drama, much closer to a movie than to a play. Weirdly, the commercially available recording has slightly different incidental music to the radio one, but everything else is there, from the brilliantly-delivered dialogue to the masterfully atmospheric sound design to the perfect interplay of timing, acting, and editing which tell so much more story than the dialogue could do alone.

Lovelace and Babbage in a Physical Object

If you haven't seen The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a Steampunk AU webcomic about the pioneers of computing, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not follow that link. Artist/writer/researcher/all-round-brilliant Sydney Padua has landed a book deal with the exalted and discerning publisher Pantheon to put their adventures out in hard copy! I am very much looking forward to clutching the finished product in my hot little hands ... In the meantime, there's an iPad App! I do not have an iPad myself, but have had the opportunity to play with this app, and it is the only thing to make me sort of think about wanting an iPad. There are annotations, and primary documents, and authentic original visual aides, enough to make a nerd's heart flutter.

Doublet and Hose

One of the benefits of travelling in the off season is you get to see winter fashions that never really make it to LA. This seemed to have been the 'look' on my most recent trip: double-breasted wool coat, black tights, and brown shoes. (I assume there is a miniskirt or something in there somewhere...) I bet no one thought the doublet-and-hose look would ever come back. This comes so shortly on the heels of skirt-over-jeans and shorts-with-tights, things I'd have thought looked so ridiculous no one would ever wear them in public. Fashion is mysterious. Incidentally, it appears that listening to French-language radio has a beneficial effect on my drawing skills. Perhaps this is the secret of all those ridiculously talented bande-dessine artists?

Clarisse McClellan

It's impossible to say how much Fahrenheit 451 influenced the direction my life would take, or how much I was already a dangerous nonconformist by Grade 9 when I read it, but when I revisited the book for the first time recently I was astonished at how familiar Clarisse McClellan seemed to be . . .

Santa Monica Bay

Most of the time it's a monotonous concreted-over boxy dustbowl, but every so often Southern California can be so beautiful you understand what attracted people in the first place (who then built boxes, concreted it over, and made it as dull as possible).

Think the Unthinkable

One of the many nice things about radio as a medium is that you can think up your own visuals.  There is an old saying that the pictures are better on radio, but of course that all depends on the strength of your imagination vs the median talent of television production designers – at any rate, it at least gives the mind's eye some exercise.

I am not usually a fan of sitcoms but there are a handful on Radio 4 which I enjoy.  Old Harry's Game and Cabin Pressure top the list, but I will give Think the Unthinkable a listen whenever it bobs back up to the surface on 4 Extra.  I never had all that strong an impression of the characters, visually, but I tried my hand at the two ladies of Unthinkable Solutions and I thought they turned out all right:

The True North Strong and Free

Rarrr, gonna fight some wolves in the snow!

Enjol-lass

If ladies can indeed do anything, then surely they, too, can sing rousing anthems while leading a hopelessly misguided, ultimately futile revolution.

Westish Doodles

I've finally had the chance to sort out the pile of life drawing from the last three years at Disney ... in the process of picking out pieces to keep, I found quite a few doodles I'd forgotten about, including some of Herbert West and his unnamed narrator:

   

That is, the unnamed narrator falling prey to the rest of Lovecraft's canon ...

A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is my favourite of the books we had to read in high school. I drew a fair bit from it at the time, but who knows where those drawings are now . . . they're probably not worth sharing, anyway. BBC Radio 4 recently ran a new radio dramatisation of the story which inspired me to try my professional hand at the subject matter. Unfortunately I was short on time so didn't do due diligence in researching the costumes, but it was a bit of fun anyway.

Madame Defarge was not supposed to be a self-portrait, but she started coming out that way and eventually I gave up fighting it. Halloween 2012!

San Fran Sketches, Part 3

Any visit to San Francisco is incomplete without visiting the Maritime Museum.     

San Fran Sketches, Part 2

More sketches from Christmas vacation . . .

We took a walk down Crissy Fields to the pier at Fort Point, where there is a very friendly pelican. I picked up a marble-like jelly from the beach.

The 'aged' pages of my new sketchbook make my drawings look so much more legitimate!

San Fran Sketches, Part 1

I've fallen off the updating wagon, it seems – I've been working too much to draw anything on the side, and have run out of unpublished artwork. But I spent Christmas in San Francisco and did a bit of sketching, so let's see how far I can stretch that out ... Today's edition: People!         

Old Town San Diego

I've been trying to improve my watercolour skills but only get the time to practise intermittently . . . luckily one of those times presented itself while I was in San Diego for Comic Con, as I got to spend a day loafing around Old Town.

Turns out one of the key aspects of doing good watercolours is to take your time with them. Crazy! Each of these took about 90 min.

Cooking is Science

When the official cook was incapacitated by a fall from an iceberg in an unfortunate photography accident, other members of the crew had to step in and do his job. One of them was 'Atch' Atkinson, the official doctor and parasitologist, who was more accustomed to working in the lab than the kitchen.

 

This page in my sketchbook had a disappointing run-in with some coffee at CTN – this is why you scan things full-res the first time, ladies and gentlemen!

Trainventure

Because Comic Con happens the same weekend as the opening day at the Del Mar racecourse, it's always a bit of an adventure to take the train. At the best, you get to eavesdrop on some hilarious drunk conversations, but sometimes there are delays or cancellations. I quite enjoy taking the train, even when it's crowded or late, but even I have to admit this year was particularly bad ... nevertheless I got a couple of good sketches out of it. The train was initially delayed an hour, so I got to make a detailed study of some elegant turn-of-the-century architecture. We encountered a number of further delays until we were running almost three hours behind schedule, so someone managing the rail network back east decided to cancel the train entirely. They dumped us all off at the Irvine stop where we could catch the next train, which was apparently about 20 minutes behind us (actually more like an hour). It was a beautiful day, and the Irvine station is bounded by fields on one side, but no one else seemed to appreciate this ...

12 November, 1912

On 12 November 1912, a search party from the base at Cape Evans found the tent in which Captain Scott and two companions had perished the previous March.

Chicago

I went to Chicago for the first time this summer. What a wonderful city! I thoroughly enjoyed walking around taking pictures, and while I didn't do as much sketching as I'd have liked, I never do, so that's not unusually regrettable.

 

I'd seen pictures of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Millennium Park (or 'the Bean' as locals call it), but I have to say that you really have to see it in situ to appreciate it – it's entirely mirrored, and reflections are three-dimensional, so it does all sorts of weird things to your perception of volume and space as you walk around, under, and through it.

Of equal interest was observing how others reacted to it.  I made a catalogue of the selection of reactions – pretty much everyone who came by did a variant on one or more of the behaviours noted here.