Tag / Hastings

by Andrew Pilcher

Twitten

I love the colouring in this one. It’s a pity no-one will see it. See that bit of script at the bottom? That’s the new URL of the strip on Comics Sherpa. Yes, it’s that easy to find!

The steps I based this on run from the Beacon on the top of the West Hill, down to – you guessed it – Morrisons car park. Twittens and cat creeps criss cross all over Hastings. I’m constantly finding new ones. I’m of the belief that if you walk between any two points in Hastings and only use the roads, then there’s something deeply wrong with you.

by Andrew Pilcher

Glow

The sun reflecting off the windows of the terraces piled up on Hastings’ West Hill is truly a sight to behold.

I don’t have a photo of the actual phenomenon itself, but here’s another photo which will show you how intrusive Morrisons car park is in the views from everywhere else in Hastings. It’s a drone shot of Hastings at night. The crescent in the foreground is St Mary in the Castle, an arts venue in a converted church. The remains of Hastings castle are on top of the cliff, and the terraces and lawns of the West Hill lie behind it. That urine-yellow mass of lights top left is the Morrisons Car Park. Smith and Jones’ housing estate is roughly at the top, in the middle.

About six hours before this was posted GoComics announced that it was going to switch over to its much-threatened new website on the follwing Monday. After a year of hemming and hawing we Sherpa artists were given four days notice that we were to be temporarily evicted from the site, and dropped into a dark corner of the inernet where comments are impossible and search engines never dare venture. Luckily, I’d anticipated this and started an account at Tapastic where I began posting reruns.

To be honest, I’m angry that I’ve built up the comic to the point where it’s the most popular one on Sherpa, and the had that audience snatched from me because GoComics find it inconvenient to update the entire site in one go. In one fell swoop we were removed from the main site and removed from the email feeds and home pages of everyone that had subscribed to us. And we’ve not been given the faintest idea of when we’ll be back on the site and back in the system. And it’s that airy-fairy vagueness about what’s going to happen in the future that really pisses me off. I’m not convinced that they actually know what they’re going to do with Sherpa.

My official response can be seen in the next post.

Smith continues as a weekly strip appearing on Sundays until GoComics get their act together.

by Andrew Pilcher

To Battle

Let’s get this straight. The Battle of Hastings didn’t take place at Hastings – it took place at Battle. Of course, battle was’t called Battle then, that came later, after the battle. Before the battle it was a field on the side of Senlac Hill. After the battle, William the Conqueror founded an abbey on the site, called Battle Abbey and the town of Battle grew around it. Hastings was where William and his troops stayed for the week before the battle, while Harold, the English king, was trying to get his troops back down from Yorkshire where he had just had to fight another battle against some opportunistic Vikings.

Chumley gets to play the humble local.

by Andrew Pilcher

Lawn Tennis

smith-pilcher-995-160817

rx118

That’s one of our Hastings fishing boats in the final panel. The real boat is pictured to the right. Photo by Tony Bates. Buy a canvas print here.

by Andrew Pilcher

Old Town

smith-pilcher-972-160624

This one was drawn on the iPad, after the polls closed but before the results came in.

The drawing was traced over a photo of the Old Town taken from the West Hill – the Old Town nestles in a valley between the West Hill and the East Hill. Smith and Jones and the speech balloons were layered over the top and then the layered file were sent to my Mac for processing in Photoshop. The grass in the foreground, the sky, the sea and the gorse and brambles on the East Hill in the background were repainted, and the photograph of the buildings was filtered with the cut-out filter to create the hard-edged blocks of colour that match my colouring style.

And the results got published in the Hastings Independent at a huge size! And I was amazed at how good it looked (though the lettering needs attention).

The castle on the East Hill is actually the top station of the Victorian funicular railway that leads from the fishing beach to the top of the hill.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

The Observer Building

smith-pilcher-966-160610

I took some reference photos to get the backgrounds right for this strip. The backgrounds to frames 1 and 3 are of the stuccoed fronts of Cornwallis Gardens, a Victorian development of grand houses around a triangular green space that has now sadly gone to seed. It’s got that combination of grandeur and squalour which is very Hastings. If you look very hard at the trees in the background you’ll be able to see a wino shouting at an empty can of Special Brew.

IMG_0018

Turn 180 degrees and you’ll see this glazed tiled pile – another example of derelict grandeur – The Observer Building.

IMG_0016

Once upon a time it was the home of the local paper, Hastings Observer, with the offices you see here on the street level at the front. The building was built on the edge of a cliff, so it drops away two further levels at the back, which was where the printing presses used to be. It’s now being used as a multi-purpose arts space, high on quirk and character but severely lacking as a performance space in my opinion. It’s a great space for a party or a ‘happening’ though, and I’ve used its coffee shop a few times when I’m working on Smith scripts.

Here’s the website for it. Caution: it may contain toxic levels of whimsy.

Why the crowd outside? They’re all waiting for a fashion show to open.

by Andrew Pilcher

A tribe called quest

smith-pilcher-965-160608

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.