woodfolk

Some doodles from the last two days in the woods. This guy’s Katie Lee‘s Yorkshireman brother-in-law, Chris. I was fascinated by the jerry can (pictured) and spent a lot of time volunteering to make hot water for people. And I introduced the gang to American-style marshmallow s’mores, which are actually nicer in England because you can use chocolate-coated HobNob biscuits instead of graham crackers and not-so-nice Hershey chocolate. (Read the history of graham crackers, it’s rather amusing.)

Katie’s husband Alex Milway thinks Chris is great because he’s good with their baby and helps him make wattle fencing for his wood and practice general forestry type things. But I decided he was fab during the evening, when Alex told us about one of his yet-unpublished children’s picture books and Chris took the story and spent at least an hour turning it into his own nutty tale. The plot line wasn’t stellar, it mostly involved two fuzzy animals taking the Tube to different stations and going into pubs and making messes of themselves, ending with them joining the navy. And his accent went all over the place, not necessarily in keeping with the story, but his invented dialogue and voices had me almost paralytic with laughter. It must be something to do with devil-may-care confidence, but I haven’t heard storytelling that good in ages.



Some fireside sketches of Alex and Katie. Here’s their baby, and a funny Jack Russell named Tia who ran straight into a lantern and bonked her head just as we were leaving. Viv Schwarz was along and made some Tia sketches, maybe she’ll post them on her blog.

I’m leading my last Space Hop Summer Reading Challenge event this Wednesday in London at Church Street Library, NW8 8EY, from 2:30-3:30, so do bring any kids along who want to draw crazy aliens.

Links: The amazing Drew Weing drewweing is selling original artwork from his recently completed comic Set To Sea. You can read the story online until 10 Sept, not much time left! Details here. I managed to buy one of the pages but missed another one I wanted because they are selling fast! You can buy Set To Sea from FPI here.

Thanks to David O’Connell for his tip-off about nine remarkable pieces of landscape artwork by comics legend Moebius on the Hermes website. Details at the bottom of Dave’s post.

Thanks to my web designer Dan Fone for pointing me to some striking images by San Francisco based artist Ferris Plock. They remind me a lot of costumes and prints I’ve seen in the V&A and British Museum.

And fingers crossed for the film adaptation of Posy Simmonds excellent graphic novel Tamara Drewe. Here’s the two different trailers, the UK version and the US version.

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