Sharing a Room

I've been reading M. R. James' ghost stories since I was about twelve. (I'm a very slow reader.)

There's nothing quite like them for the subtlety and gradual accumulation of atmospheric foreboding, and one of the best is 'O, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,' the story of Professor Parkin's seaside holiday. 

I started this in pen and ink, but decided pencil was what it needed.

"I can figure to myself something of the Professor's bewilderment and horror, for I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed."

Armoured Cat

Aristocat Pen

Pen version of 'Hunting With Cats.'

Sketchy

I've been doing some proper paid design work lately but it's nearly done so I can go out to play again.

We did a craft fair today, and I made enough to pay for some new oil paints, and had enough time to doodle this Victorian geezer. I've been looking through Gustave Dore's extraordinary 'London' illustrations, and floating ship maestro Ian McQue has been posting Dickensian doodles on Twitter, so between them I was in the mood.

I was planning on working this

up into a full scale MARK IT ZERO! illustration, but there's a million of them on the internet already. I might go off into DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS LARRY? DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FIND A STRANGER IN THE ALPS? as the American network TV censor would have it.

That's Tom Waits. I had an idea for what to do with it that I tried. It didn't work. So, the disembodied and disemhatted head and jazz hands of Tom Waits, awaiting a better idea to come along.

Remember, Remember.

My dad, having quietly enjoyed his first outing as a comic character, makes his second, and he's brought my mother.

Again, these people look like people who look like my mum and dad, but not exactly my mum and dad.

Calvin & Hobbes.

I feel a bit fraudulent for entering into the latest 'draw' Twitter hashtag thing run by James Howard. Calvin and Hobbes seems to be one of those things that people go giddy over like a frayed and much-loved childhood toy, and until I looked into it today I wasn't 100% sure which one was Hobbes and which Calvin. 

I've never really read a strip, although having a look at the originals, they are beautifully drawn (by Bill Watterson.) I kind of put them in the same stinky cat basket as the appalling Garfield, but I'm beginning to see that this might have been a mistake. 

So, anyway, Calvin and Hobbes. Or Hobbes and Calvin. Whichever way it is.

City At Night.

New oil painting, a night view. One of two paintings inspired by a visit to the Symbolist Landscape exhibition in Edinburgh, in particular Riddarfjarden by Eugene Janssen, which I sat and looked at for a long time.

Florence, Night, oil on canvas, 76cm x 51cm.