Have you been out today?

Well, I may have gone the slightest bit mad over the weekend struggling to meet my deadline (for the Wars of the Roses comic strip) on Monday. Worked till stupid o' clock Saturday and Sunday night and up early Monday to tweak it a bit and then took the disk with the artwork on it into smelly London to deliver by hand and found that in the event my editor was off sick that day anyway. Still, comic buddies Nick Abadzis and Gary Northfield both work at the place that publishes the Horrible Histories mag so I got to see them briefly. And I had a very pleasant day in our malodorous capital in a half asleep kind of way, buying unnecessary art materials at the London Graphics Centre and meeting up with my mate Faz Choudhury and later the bright young ink monkey genius that is Tom Gauld at his studio on Mount Pleasant (which is just a road, not an actual mountain, I was disappointed to discover - though it did make getting to the studio easier I suppose. Next time I'll know not to bother taking crampons). I'd been hoping to have a good nose round at the studio but Tom very sensibly immediately whisked us away to a nearby pub, no doubt realising that if I'd been allowed to stay in the studio any longer I would inevitably have tried to steal every piece of paper upon which he had made a mark. Luckily two pints of Guinness, fine erudite conversation (except on my part) and the quality of the company went some distance in compensating for the foiling of my planned art theft. All a welcome antidote to the befuddling stress of working too much and sleeping too little for a spell. A situation which has now, of course, reversed.

In the run up to the deadline I had a bit of an I can't draw day again (I think it was last Thursday) in which progress was painful and slow and this might have brought on dark musings and grumpiness had I not, in the early hours, abandoned the job in hand and doodled freely in a sketchbook for about 15 minutes. One of the drawings I did was this one...



...with which I was inordinately pleased. It didn't matter that the job was behind schedule and I'd stayed up till about 3am and still made little progress on it: I had drawn something, for myself, that I was entirely pleased with and therefore it was a good day's work.