vern & lettuce on the catbus

Congratulations to Will Kirkby (chamonkee) for winning the DFC challenge! My two references in the latest Vern and Lettuce strip were My Neighbour Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. (If you know the pinkish book cover, you might spot in this panel that the cat’s holding it up as his ‘rule book’.)

Edit: Speaking of catbuses, here’s a great Totoro mask made by writer and illustrator Alex Milway.

From time to time I get this obsession with copying historical portrait paintings without any attempt to get the proportions right, just letting my pen wander over the paper, a bit like one of those exercises in the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Sometimes the results are fairly accurate anyway, but it’s even better when I get surprises, and the face doesn’t look anything like it’s supposed to, but in kind of a cool way. I don’t put any thought into it at all, so it’s a nice stress reliever, with occasional fun results.