Tag / Jones

by Andrew Pilcher

Plastic bags

smith-pilcher-835-150810I’m always amazed by how many plastic bags our groceries come in when we get a delivery from a supermarket, especially when you consider that whenever I actually do a big weekend shop, I can manage to get the same amount of stuff in about five of six. I think that’s a habit I’ve retained from the days when I didn’t drive, and learned the trick of doing a weekly shop and carrying the groceries back home in as compact a way as possible.

Why do cats like plastic bags? Aside from the obvious attraction of the rustling sound they make, of course. A commenter has noted that some cats like to bite the – something I’ve noticed Bella loves to do as well, though she prefers upmarket bags from Waterstones the booksellers or the handles of carriers from Next. It may be the particular plastic that they use that attracts them – Smudge loved a plastic bag tidy from Ikea; it got a catnip-like reaction from her.

I really shouldn’t have to say this but don’t forget, cats and empty plastic bags do not mix. Don’t leave your cat unattended with anything that might potentially suffocate them.

by Andrew Pilcher

Sea Fret

smith-pilcher-834-150807I’m not exaggerating here – on Hastings seafront on some days you can cross the road and go from deep fog to bright sunshine.

by Andrew Pilcher

Give ’em enough rope

smith-pilcher-833-150805Yes, this is a bit late, I’m afraid. I drew it yesterday but didn’t manage to colour it in until today. Unfortunately colouring is so soothing and restful that I fell asleep at the computer doing it. So I had to do it this evening instead, with a break halfway through for Bake Off (I like to think I have my priorities correct).

This is my first strip created using tracing paper and tracedown sheets in order to get the backgrounds in each frame looking much the same without looking mechanical. The process involves drawing the first background as normal, and the tracing it onto a sheet of tracing paper. Then, using the traced copy as a template, and sandwiching a tracedown sheet between the tracing paper and the final artwork (imagine carbon paper without the waxiness, so pressure leaves an erasable graphite mark on the paper below) I draw the same background into the other frames. The characters get drawn into position over the backgrounds. Then the art gets inked and the pencil marks erased as normal. It’s a very involved process but it works – its stopped the tree from mutating from one frame to the next.

by Andrew Pilcher

Webcam

smith-pilcher-832-150803A bit of an experiment, this one – how would a cat react to finding a webcam, and what would the webcam record about the encounter?

This nearly got animated, but I ran out of time. That also explains the black last frame – this really should be a five frame comic but for it to really make sense the frames have to be exactly the same size.

I’ve drawn the entrance to my study here, you can see my coats, two Albuquerque Isotopes baseball hats and my Panama hat (as worn in my Facebook profile) hanging from the door.

by Andrew Pilcher

Fifty shades of Scrumpy

smith-pilcher-830-150729The greyscale colouring in the last frame looked rather boring when done in my usual flat style, so I broke one of my rules and added a Photoshop filter to it – in this case the ‘reticulation’ filter.

Isn’t a grey crayon called a pencil?

by Andrew Pilcher

Colour your way to mindfulness

smith-pilcher-829-150727Is it me, or are you starting to find those colouring books for adults really irritating? It started with a couple of books of floral patterns claiming that you could reach inner peace and enlightenment through the medium of not going over the lines. Now its got to the point where Tescos supermarket has an entire section in its book department devoted to them. Every two bit publisher has got an artist to doodle on a few pages and then packaged it as a really expensive colouring book. I’ve even seen a book of W Heath Robinson cartoons repackaged as a colouring book – and that’s sacrilege.

I’ve been doing colouring-in since I started drawing Smith, and I haven’t noticed I’ve achieved any inner calm since doing it. In fact colouring in the trees over the last three months of park-based strips has been really fiddly. I’ve rather enjoyed doing this strip in black and white and then going bonkers with the colours in the last frame. Now, that’s therapy!

by Andrew Pilcher

Sandy will return

smith-pilcher-828-150724Sandy’s become a very popular character – as she did last summer, she’s sort of taken over the strip with a simple sweetness that contrasts with Smith and Jones occasional feline cynicism. But I’ve had a plan for her ever since I reintroduced her this year – she was always going to find her master, whether he deserved her or not. She’ll be back next summer – and who knows, maybe she’ll be staying for good next time… Rest assured, it’ll be a story with a happy ending. I only do tragic endings when writing about humans.

by Andrew Pilcher

Gents

smith-pilcher-827-150722Now this storyline is coming to its end I’m drawing a bit more of Alexandra Park as it actually is rather than just creating a generic park background. The bandstand can be seen in the first frame and the toilet block next to the bowling green in the third. Also, as we’re nearing one of the roads that border the park, houses are visible behind the foliage and so are some Victorian iron railings that somehow never got melted down in the Second World war to make Spitfires.

by Andrew Pilcher

Stool pigeon

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by Andrew Pilcher

Before and after

smith-pilcher-825-150717I took some reference photos of Alexandra Park in order to compose the background for this strip.  As you can see, I’ve edited the background slightly to make it a bit easier to read, in effect editing out two trees and a bench from the middle ground behind the bridge. The sewage pipe had to go as well.

As I took this photo a very large bull terrier was splashing around in in the stream behind me, while its owner was frantically trying to coax it out again with a ball.

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