In the war between Smudge and creepy clowns, there can only be one victor, and you can guarantee it won’t be the clown. Especially if her wall is involved.
Tag / Smudge’s wall
Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?
Some people can only get validation by being as obnoxious as possible and seeing what response they get. Ignore them and it’s like you’ve taken away the reason for their existence.
So now you know
I’d always wanted to do a story about the origin of Smudge’s wall, but was never quite sure how to do it until the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings rolled around. I’d considered a story from World War 2 where the wall was all that was left of a bombed out cat shelter, but it would never coalesce into something tangible that could be told in six pages. I’d also wanted to do a 1066 story. The two dovetailed together quite nicely.
Feinites is the term school kids to the south of England use to say you give up, or want a truce in a game. Most dictionaries, however, spell it as Fainites. Time Out appears to be the equivalent in the States.
Repel all boarders
Smudge in a horned helmet. Of course. What else would she wear?
Yet more evidence
High Jump
The 2016 Olympics have started in Rio, and once again the cats are holding the backyard Olympics in the garden. It’s useful to have a set subject to write about sometimes. It’s also good to have any other sport than football to write about – I ignored the European Cup completely this year. So, it turned out, did the England team.
Who knew we were going to do so well this year? I was fully expecting us to have the hubris Olympics this time round, turning up expecting to get all the medals after our performance in the London Olympics and then choking on everyone of them. I was very glad to be proved wrong. Of course, half the Russian squad being in rehab helped, but even so…
Dandelions
I remember rehearsing a show with the West Kent Youth Theatre in the open air one summer. It was a beautiful day, so we were using a tiled quadrangle next to West Kent College’s science block, which was downwind of a field of dandelions which had just come into seed. The wind got up and we were suddenly breathing dandelions…
Tracks
This was originally planned as a story that was going to be told by the tracks alone, but I decided that it required Smudge on her wall to make it obvious what had happened. I tried drawing paw pad prints in each one of the impressions in the snow, but by happy accident they ended up looking like smiley faces.
Squirt 2
Give ’em enough rope
Yes, 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.