Tag / referendum

by Andrew Pilcher

Old Town

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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

Doom

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It’s hard to appreciate just how awful the European referendum campaign was. Both sides were making apocalyptic predictions about what would happen if the other side won. All of the claims except the last one were made in all seriousness by one side or the other. And of course, in the end we just continued on as normal – the pound tanked but it was possibly overvalued at that point anyway. Apart from a hangover and the creeping feeling that this has become a smaller, meaner country nothing much has happened yet. We shall see what happens in the next few years…

by Andrew Pilcher

Decisions, decisions

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At this point in the campaign I hadn’t made my mind up which way I was going to vote. After a few weeks in which the Remain campaign spent most of their energy exaggerating the apocalyptic scenarios that would happen if we left the EU, while the Leave campaign just flat out lied about everything, I ended up plumping for the Remain side.

by Andrew Pilcher

Eurovision

smith-pilcher-954-160513Written and drawn in the run-up to both the referendum about whether we stay inside the EU or not, and the completely unrelated Eurovision Song contest.

That’s Boris Johnson on the telly in the last frame, figurehead of the Leave campaign at the time. OK, get your head round this if you can. I’m writing this from the perspective of early July – we’ve voted to leave the EU. Boris joined the Leave campaign, expecting to lose by a slim amount, calculating that he could take over the Prime Minister David Cameron’s job when he resigned, having lost his authority. However, Britain voted to leave, which he didn’t expect. Cue immediate backpedalling during his victory speech. Cameron resigned, Boris announced his candidacy, and then had to throw in the towel when he was stabbed in the back by his ally, Michael Gove, who announced his own candidacy as someone who actually believed in what he was saying. Gove himself is currently floundering, as he’s now established himself as someone who can’t be trusted, having insisted for all of his career that he didn’t want the Primeminister’s job. So now it looks like we’ve got a contest between a third Leave supporter, Andrea Leadsome, who noone had heard of outside of her constituency until a week ago, and Theresa May, a Home Secretary, despised of by the Police force she is supposedly in charge of. Anyway, that’s the story as of July 4th 2016. Expect everything to change again tomorrow.

As for Eurovision, the UK came 24th out of a field of 26 entries into the final. A few of the national juries voted for us, but none of the phone voters in the real world did. Bland doesn’t work, it turns out. Cocking a snook at your powerful neighbours does, though, as Ukraine won with a protest song about the treatment of the minory populations of the Crimea during the Second World War – something that they insited had no parallels with any more recent events between Ukraine and Russia. Russia came third, and Putin had an enormous (but very manly) huff the day afterwards.