Have you been out today?

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook number 10, begun 31st October 1997.

And here we are again at the start of a new sketchbook. Historically speaking, this one was started early on in the MA course in sequential illustration that I did at Brighton University. The previously documented nine sketchbooks played a large part, I suspect, in winning me a place on the course.











Those notes about "book repairs" relate to a set of five handbound, photocopied books I'd made for a project on the MA. I had read somewhere that dental floss made a good thread for sewing book blocks. Unfortunately I had used waxed dental floss which turned out to be a very bad idea. All my knots slipped and my lovingly made books were falling apart on the morning when they were to be judged by my fellow students at The Big Crit. I ended up slipping rubber bands around them to hold them together which was an effective but inelegant solution.









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Rough version of an illustration I did today for the book...

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, begun Friday 13th June 1997.


The traditional sprint finish through the lists and notes of the rubbishy last few spreads...

One particular illustration in the book (of the bear nervously lighting a gas stove) has given me an inordinate amount of trouble but I finally sorted it on Friday. Here are a couple of very rough roughs that helped me on the way...

Abandoned a previous composition yesterday when I came up with this scary bear moment for the neverending book...



The second attempt at a finished version came out like this ...



... which I thought was okay - not brilliant but okay. Then I looked at it in place with the text and thought it actually worked very well on the page (which is what matters, after all). Hurrah!

And then I looked at the other illustrations for the same chapter and realised the boy is wearing a parka at this point in the story...

Oops.

Watching an old Miss Marple while doodling Ned Trumpet the other night resulted in the above. Despite being inspired by the Joan Hickson version he's turned out much more Margaret Rutherford, but that's hardly a bad thing. Quite possibly more of these to come...

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, begun Friday 13th June 1997.






Ah yes, Pooka. Lovely folky female duo (who split up about a decade ago - as opposed to the other band of the same name that I'm vaguely aware exists but of whom I know nothing more) that I saw live with the estimable Mr Chris Sculthorpe at a pub in Brighton (I later saw a very erratic Reckless Eric at the same venue if I remember rightly). A very fine gig indeed. And I remember the support act (who in all other respects were hugely unmemorable) had a bass player who possessed the same angelic beauty as the boy in that film with Dirk Bogarde the name of which temporarily escapes me but, hey, you either know the one I mean (or else you still wouldn't know what I was talking about even if I could remember). Based on that very short book by Thomas Mann. Really very famous... Oh well. Either I or someone else will say what it is in the comments in due course I'm sure.

And "my friend's son's mother's other son" would be the also estimable Mr Richard Freeman (hello Richard, if you ever stop by here).

Note also the dancing banana, prefiguring Mr Robert Webb's similar comic turn in the first series of That Mitchell and Webb Look by a decade.







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This is almost certainly not going into the book so I'm bunging it up here instead. Thought it turned out all right but then the space I needed to fill with it didn't need to be filled any more.

A lot of drawings that I put up here look better to me on screen than they do on the page. Often they gain something from having been blown up from tinyness. This one kind of went the other way. Thought it looked lovely in my sketchbook in a pleasantly Searle-y sort of way but I think it looks a bit ordinary here now. Odd.

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, begun Friday 13th June 1997.













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