And to finish off the colouring-in theme for this week, here’s the ‘I can sing a rainbow’ song rewritten for Crayola colours. Each colour name has been rendered in its own colour according to the official Crayola-Hexadecimal colour conversion chart that you can see here. The writing’s a bit shaky because I had to do it using my graphics tablet.
The 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?
Is 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!
Sandy’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.
Now 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.
I 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.
I see so many stick-hounds when I’m walking through the park. I’ve even seen a Border Collie proudly carrying half a tree in its mouth, which directly led to this cartoon. The walking stick and the estate agents’ board which lead up to it are my own invention, but the punchline is true.
