[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":11},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-weekend-catch-up":3},{"_type":4,"body":5,"bodyHtml":6,"excerpt":5,"featuredImage":5,"publishedAt":7,"slug":8,"tags":9,"title":10},"blogPost",null,"I've been doing LOADS of drawing today for my upcoming Scholastic book, but I'm still waiting to hear if they'll let me post sketches as I go, or if I need to keep it under wraps. This was my first weekend at home in more than two months, so I tried not to go anywhere near the Internet, and mostly succeeded. \\r\n\\r\nBut I got this really lovely drawing from \u003Cb>Simon Tofield\u003C/b> of the \u003Ca href=\"http://www.simonscat.com/\">\u003Ci>Simon's Cat\u003C/i>\u003C/a> animation and books, as a pat on the back for winning the \u003Ca href=\"http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/347146.html\">Sheffield Children's Book Award\u003C/a> and just as a general encouragement sort of thing. Our studio are big fans of the Simon's Cat \u003Ca href=\"http://unitedagents.co.uk/simon%27s-cat-ltd\">team\u003C/a>: \u003Cb>Simon, Mike Bell, Nigel Pay \u003C/b>and \u003Cb>Daniel Greaves\u003C/b>. (And the cats, of course.) Thanks, Simon!\\r\n\\r\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://images.jabberworks.co.uk/lj/simonscat_nov10-5c5a149480.jpg\">\\r\n\\r\nHave you seen, writer and illustrator \u003Cb>Alex Milway\u003C/b> has started up a new blog! Be sure to bookmark it at \u003Ca href=\"http://www.alexmilway.com\">AlexMilway.com\u003C/a>. \\r\n\\r\nAnd I can't remember if I've mentioned it, but fab Seattle-based comics artist \u003Cb>David Lasky\u003C/b> (\u003Ca href=\"http://dlasky.livejournal.com/\" class=\"lj-user\">dlasky\u003C/a>) has posted a bunch of photos from my sister's \u003Ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlasky/5109126978/in/photostream/\">first solo show\u003C/a> of paintings.\\r\n\\r\n\u003Ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlasky/5109126978/in/photostream/\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://images.jabberworks.co.uk/lj/maryshow-3f77e85f17.jpg\">\u003C/a>\\r\n\\r\nDavid pops up a lot in my head as my alternate universe buddy, that place where I never moved away from Seattle and am now sharing a studio with him and my sister. In that place, I've just done a series of paintings and sketches of those massive orange \u003Ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/87602558@N00/370762157\">loading cranes\u003C/a> down by the docks, the ones you pass on the way to Alki Beach. I love those things, every time I go back to Seattle, I wish I had a few weeks to do a project around them. They're a bit like the \u003Ca href=\"http://01varvara.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/kuzma-petrov-vodkin-bathing-of-the-red-horse-1912.jpg\">big red horses\u003C/a> you see in early 20th-century Russian paintings, so iconic. But I remember it being a bit tricky to find a place to park anywhere near the cranes, since they're on private dockland. Although I also have a fuzzy memory of being lost in the car somewhere around them with my Taiwanese sister Joyce, when we were sixteen, at about 4am, which felt well dodgy. I think we'd been \u003Ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_papering\">TP-ing\u003C/a> someone's house, shockers! The other popular wasteful things to do at the time were 'forking' people's lawns - sticking plastic forks in the grass in the dead of night, or noodling them - sticking dried spaghetti in the lawn which would wilt in the rain and be impossible to pull out. Apparently 'flocking' was all the craze after I left, which involved a night-time raid to cover a lawn with plastic pink flamingos, but that seems like it might have been out of our price range. TP-ing involved the most skill, or you'd lose your roll as you threw it over a tree. It's the opposite of environmentalism, really, we were such little wasters.","2010-11-28T23:46:00.000Z","weekend-catch-up",[],"weekend catch-up",1776628719225]