There’s nothing more 70s than a car with a vinyl roof, and I still think a car with a reconditioned one looks rather swish. But most survivors from the 70s now look like the one in the cartoon.
The car is a British Leyland Princess – a Ford Cortina competitor that could have been a world beater if only they built them well enough to hold together for longer than one week. And if the management had given it the hatchback it was so obviously designed for.
Note the pumpkin-orange background, a colour normally only ever used on Alison Ward. It’s that time of year again.
Possibly the only cartoon strip published today that doesn’t mention Back to the Future Pt 2. Instead I used time travel in a slightly different way, creating a never ending temporal loop. This is regularly enacted in our house, with Bella in the hammock and Billy underneath her, playing with her tail.
Back when this was a simple all-in-a-line strip cartoon I would have used one of my continuous backgrounds to get the idea of the litter tray moving through a landscape across. Now I have to draw the same background four times.
The real Cholmondeley tended to do this a lot. He’d start of scraping at the litter, then move on to scraping the floor and the walls. Bella has taken this one step further, by trying to fold in the sides of the litter tray once she’s done her business. She can’t manage it, but she uses so much force trying to do it that she ends up propelling the litter tray across the bathroom floor.
I came up with this one while I was in the shower, trying to work out what Bella was up to on the other side of the frosted glass panel. I don’t used Photoshop filters very often, but this time round I drew the strip as normal, and then overlaid a ‘frosted glass’ filter over the top of the inked artwork before colouring.