Tag / Chumley

by Andrew Pilcher

A tribe called quest

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The first frame sees the cats on the start of their quest, walking thru Alexandra Park towards the town centre. And the second frame extablishes Smith and Jones’ house to be somewhere in the St Helen’s area of Hastings. I just took this as a chance to portray the cats as they see them selves in their own imaginations. So Jones is, naturally, the Queen, while Smudge is the she-warrior Smudge-Ra. Chumley is more spiritual so I made him the wizard, and poor Smith can’t help but see himself as the fall-guy for the other three.

by Andrew Pilcher

D&D

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I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons for around thirty years so pardon me if the terms I’m using here are out of date. Panic not; Smith isn’t turning into one of those gamer cartoons where motionless people in hats are snarky to one another – this storyline lasted about three more strips before it mutated into something else.

by Andrew Pilcher

Prohibition

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Also published by the Independent. And by the time it was published on GoComics the powers that be had revised their bylaws after a group of dog owners staged a wag-in on the pier, and dogs were allowed on the pier under suffrance.

Look, it’s a guest apperance by my own cats, Billy and Bella. Ginger’s just a generic.

Incidentally, that seat Bella’s sitting on is rather neat. They’re custom built and are all over the pier…

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Oi!

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Dear old Chumley – he loves being a cat, but not if catting causes harm to other creatures.

by Andrew Pilcher

Christmas Tree

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A merry Christmas to everyone everywhere.

Having established that that strip has a ‘giving’ tree, the opposite of Charlie Brown’s kite eating tree, it made sense for it to join in with the Christmas festivities.

If today’s strip is flashing in an alarmingly epileptic way (like it has been on my iPad) try reloading. That cured it for me.

by Andrew Pilcher

Bam! Krakk!

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I haven’t updated this blog for a while – huge apologies for that. It’s been a hectic Autumn and I’ve been concentrating on making sure the strip is always updated on GoComics rather than posting on this blog. But now I have a holiday in the States coming up, spending Christmas with Linda’s family, so that’ll give me the chance to catch up. 

I’m writing this on my new iPad pro. Yes, I’ve finally given in to temptation and bought a tablet. Why did I wait until now? Because up to now tablets have just been about consuming material rather than creating it. The Pro comes with a huge screen, a cover that concerts into a real keyboard, and best of all, a stylus which means I can start drawing straight onto the screen as if I was drawing on paper. That is going to save me so much time – not only that the 4G Sim card means I’ll be able to draw or post whenever I get a snatched moment no matter where I am.

I’ll be catching up at a succession of different airports on the way to Albuquerque, so expect to see a lot of posts suddenly appearing on Saturday 12th December.

Guy Fawkes night… That seems such a long time ago. Note the properly drawn fireworks explosions in this year’s Bonfire Night strips. Up to now I’ve tried to recreate fireworks using Photoshop filters but was never happy with the effect they made. Now I’ve gone back to basics, using a combination of ink and a ballpoint Tipp-ex applicator to create these explosions full of Kirby crackle. I think they’re much more in style with the rest of the drawing.

by Andrew Pilcher

Scrape scrape scrape

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by Andrew Pilcher

Scrape scrape

smith-pilcher-864-151016Back 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.

by Andrew Pilcher

Scrape

smith-pilcher-863-151014The 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.

by Andrew Pilcher

Putting the world to rights, Part 3

smith-pilcher-842-150826I’m surprised to find how popular this series of finger-wagging strips has been – the cartoon doesn’t normally get shared on Facebook but these ones have been promiscuously shared from the GoComics site. I always thought these were fairly weak cartoons saying obvious things in an obvious way. It just goes to show that that last person who should be consulted about the worth of his work should be the author!

A full cast of cats appears in the last frame, with three extras.

To the bottom left you can find one of Val Ware’s cats from the Paws for Thought strip. I’m not an aficionado of one panel strips normally but I love this one. When it first started I thought it was just going to be a bit of Hallmark Cards style sentimentality, but it’s grown into so much more. On one day you might get a piece of fine art recast to star a ginger cat, a piebald cat and a boxer dog – the next you’ll find a well observed bit of animal behaviour – and then an illustrated bit of philosophy. Try it. Work your way thru the back catalogue – it works best in bulk.

Fluffy from Snow Sez is directly behind The Cat That Stares At Stuff. Snow will be promoted to the GoComics main page soon, and about time too!

The tortoiseshell-and-white cat lying on the window ledge is a drawing of my first cat, Sunday. She had so many beautiful colours in her fur that she was perfect as an illustration of what this strip is about.