My most favourite short story I have written is nature adventure fuelled by the internet. I wanted to write about how using the internet can, in certain ways, be a good place to be creative and as I did so themes of 'the way things move around the globe' and 'things preserved in time' started to emerge and so I let that happen. Part of my motivation for the story was that I really like to make my own website where I can set the tone and be myself. So it seems right to explain how I made and continue to make my website, after all, writing it feels as important to being a cartoonist as learning perspective or crafting stories to tell.
I think that maybe I can best describe my website by showing how it is organised. One way I organise the website is to keep the words I want to appear on screen as separate as possible from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. For example the browser needs to know what is a heading, what is a paragraph, what is navigation. That information comes by surrounding the writing you want see on screen with tags that the browser can interpret as being the paragraph part or the heading or navigation part of the text.
The tags come from long standing recommendations from the W3C that have, over the years, been reliably taken into account by browser developers. However, although the tags are defined to some degree it is up to personal choice how they are applied to any particular piece of writing.
Designing the site to be mostly monthly update posts means that each post has the same format so that means the tags can be fitted in a reliable pattern. The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document. A monthly update seems to fit that description very nicely. A heading can be included within the article tag which adds to the description of the article and so can the paragraphs of monthly update text which may be grouped into sections if the post covers several topics each with it's own section. I decided to leave the navigation out of the article as the two forms of navigation that I have are the breadcrumb trail back to the home page, and the other navigation is articles that are chronologically related and so are not necessarily links that have the same topic as the article.
Another part of the website to organise is the site file structure. I wanted to keep the homepage, that is the page that loads when someone visits the domain, quite spare, giving myself the freedom to add new sections to the website in the future. I wanted the monthly pages to be collated by years so that you can read all the monthly entries for that year on one page. The title of the monthly update on the year page would link you through to the individual month's page. I decided that it would be just the latest year page that would be linked from the homepage. So the file structure begins with the homepage and any related pages like the about page and then a directory for each of the years I have written monthly updates for and within the year directories there is a directory for each of the monthly pages numbered from one (for January) to twelve (for December).
By designing the website around monthly updates with a reliable pattern and navigation links that also follow a pattern because of the site's file structure it became possible to begin to separate the words on the screen from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. I wrote some code that takes the writing of the monthly updates that are in text files suitably labelled for the month and year and puts HTML tags around the appropriate bits and organises the pages into the file structure I described.
Writing a piece of software that you really want to use opens up a world, where you become invested in exploring the many ways this task could be accomplished. I have found one solution to making a website, but I am aware that there are other ways I could do the same thing. I could move the data around my program in a different way or try using the coding language differently. Because of the way I keep track of my code development with git I can branch out and try things, all of it monitored and recorded in fine detail.
Writing a program to manage my website has an added advantage which is that I can use the organised information to make other things, for example some Really Simple Syndication or an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a way to let you, an interested party, know when new things become available to read on the site. By choosing an RSS feed reader and adding the object group RSS feed a feed reader will regularly check for updates and let you know if there are any new additions by providing you with a link to the relevant part of the site.
There are a few other details of the website that I haven't mentioned here, like the styling and the tool I have made to ensure every part of the website is under version control and my plans to add images to the site, as they seem to require a post to themselves. Which is something to look forward to in the future.
I've been taking an A3 page and drawing a horizontal line across it. People who teach perspective in videos on the internet call this horizontal line a horizon line. Then in the middle of the horizon line I pick a point (people call it a view point or point of vision) and I draw a vertical line through that point at ninety degrees to the horizon line. I get a big cross on the page. From a point towards the bottom of the viewpoint line I draw two lines that fan out at 45 degree angles until they cross the horizon line. And that is the framework I'm using for exploring one point perspective.
People who teach perspective in videos on the internet say that drawing cubes or boxes is a good way to develop your skills. I like the technique by Dan Beardshaw for drawing perfect cubes in one point perspective. The method uses a scaled line for the width and height of the box. For the depth of the box you extend track lines, one from each corner of the box, to the point of vision. These track lines are the sides of the cube but they extend back to the horizon so you need to work out where they end on the cube. To work it out you draw a line from one lower front corner to the opposite 45 degrees point on the horizon line. Where this line crosses the opposite track line for the bottom of the cube is where the cube ends. Drawing horizontal and vertical lines to the other track lines from this point forms the back face of the cube.
After drawing a few boxes with this method I wondered how I could make a perspective box within a perspective box, so that the box could look open at the top and has chunky sides. This would be useful for drawing, say, raised beds in a garden. Happily I worked out a way. Within the outer box base you draw a cross from the left front corner to the back right corner and from the front right corner to the back left corner. Then draw one horizontal line within the cross along the front of the box and use the point of vision to draw the edges within the cross and join these two points up with a horizontal line along the back of the cross. So in conclusion perspective involves lots of crosses.
Over the last month I put some more work into the arctic fox story that I shared last December. I like this story because it describes a journey simply taken. The journey was long and in hard conditions and a young fox did it. The original scientific paper describes how the fox lived in one place only exploring a little area, did an incredibly big journey pretty much directly and then she lived in another place exploring a little area. I wanted to tell the story simply too. Just things the fox would have experienced.
For the new version of the story I found photographs, maps and diagrams of the features of the fox's journey. I printed out a picture with accompanying explanation for each part of the journey on pieces of paper about the size of playing cards and gave a suggested order of reading by numbering them. The result was a sort of nature documentary you could lay out on a carpet.
The pictures influenced what I included in this version of the story. I added a few new things like a map of the pattern of the sea ice around Svalbard showing the warm sea currents on the west that meant that the fox had to travel north east to find sea ice to leave the island on which they were born. In the first version of the fox's story I included a section about arctic krill and their vertical migration driven by faint arctic light over the fjords of Svalbard. For the second version of the story I instead described the light that defines the arctic circle from the way the Earth orbits the Sun. I also included in the new version the bioluminescent plankton in the fjords of Svalbard because there is a brilliant photograph of this. I kept the way salts in the sea ice form crystals of cryogenic gypsum that hold together after the ice melts because there is a brilliant photograph of the crystal formation. I added a section about frost flowers that form when warm sea water hits cold air and by chance the wind doesn't disturb the ice crystals that form and intensify with sea salt, and the salts can be released into the atmosphere when winds do break off the crystals. I also added pictures from maps of the places where the fox travelled including a photograph of Greenland taken from a NASA mission showing the ice extending off to the sea. I gave this new version of fox's story as a gift and it went down well.
Last month I said I would put together a page of links to comics artists that mean something to me. Well this is who I have picked for a start.
I chose Sweatdrop Studios because this comic collective keeps appearing in my life in good ways. It started several years ago when I went to Cambridge central library to borrow books and the artists from Sweatdrop were exhibiting on the library's top floor. The artist Chen Xi, who I already knew through a friend, was exhibiting with them. Later I went to Chen Xi's book launch in Waterstones and we both remembered the friend we had in common in a nice way and I bought and enjoyed her comic book about other people's dreams. Then on the 6th June 2016 I went to a 'meet the publishers' day at the cartoon museum in London where Emma Hayley who is the founder of Self Made Hero talked about her best selling publication at the time: a series of manga Shakespeare. When Emma had the idea for manga Shakespeare she searched the internet for suitable artists to make it real and the result was that members of Sweatdrop Studios drew the comics.
I chose the MACC-POW comic festival because last year it had a quiz show, a chat show with an especially commissioned theme tune and lots of cartoonists who pitch their comics to you.
I chose Roman Muradov because his new book is about a woman haunted by herself, coming up with that concept alone is enough but he also made himself a nice website.
The down the tubes events page for 2026 is pretty useful to anyone interested in comics and helps plan a life as a cartoonist.
For American artists I chose John Porcellino and also Ron Rege Jr because years ago when I was just forming my cartoon taste I bought McSweeney's issue thirteen which is an anthology of cartoonists and it came wrapped in a big Chris Ware cartoon and folded in that wrapping was two little comic books that looked to have been printed on home printers or at a copy shop. One was by John Porcellino and the other by Ron Rege Jr. I have treasured these books for many years, checking what these authors were up to every now and again and more recently with the wider internet and mechanisms for their readers to support them with subscription models, John and Ron's work has been more visible to someone like me.
Another American artists is Kim Deitch whose intricate story telling as fascinated me for many years now.
And that's my March update. Next month I would like to describe how I made my website and there will be some nice new website features to share.
Now I see why Hans Holbein the Younger put that stretched out skull in The Ambassadors. He had a technique, in his case Anamorphosis, and it seems that he wanted to use it no matter what. I have been learning some drawing techniques lately, one is how to draw patterns of linked curves and it is so satisfying that I want to draw linked curves on all my comics no matter what. When I feel this way it is usually time to stop looking for new techniques and start applying what I know. As it stands I can draw in one, two and three point perspective and I can make some nice curved shapes with a compass and ruler. So this month it is time to start applying some of these techniques to settings in the comic story I'm currently drawing and ease off of learning (too many) new ones.
I went to the Norwich University Fine Art Student show in The Undercroft and there was one artist exhibiting at the very far end of the gallery who had a ring-bound folder full of castles and cavernous halls and stairways inhabited by lots of different people all hand drawn in pencil on printer paper. This student had made a world of their own with a brilliant enthusiasm and it was a good reminder that passion does come through when someone sets their imagination free.
I thought I would share a little bit about how the comic I am currently working on came about. The Stilton story started by being about fragile knowledge and a home that doesn't work. It was one of the first things I wrote where the setting created the characters and the characters created the setting. One character responds to being in an uncertain world with a driving enthusiasm to solve problems, using all the tricks at their disposal to bring a little group together shaped by delicate knowledge that mostly disintegrates as it is touched leaving only what holds true. Another mouse balances the safety of being alone with a deep love of showing others how to do things for themselves. One mouse explores the art of suggestion partly by accident. One mouse explores the dangers of the world through dreams that span the entire story. Another mouse has had strange experiences that they are trying to reconcile. All the characters are trying to understand their situation and each other and it this interconnection in the story that I really enjoy.
That brings me on to how I respond to my own uncertain world as a cartoonist. At the end of last June I went to MaccPow comic festival. The organiser Mark has been building up MaccPow over the past ten years and that's what it takes to make a vibrant small comic scene, they don't exist unless someone with passion commits to building something where nothing existed before. This personal website is a first step of building something as a cartoonist for me. I committed to making this site as easy to maintain as possible and it seems to be working, there are still many improvements I can make but the basics are here. A next step I thought could be to add a web ring for a small comic community. I have seen some nicely designed web rings that look manageable so it seems right to give it a try.
Once I was drawing with my nephew and he invented a new character called Ticking Pup: a puppy dog with the face of a clock. The character came out great the first time he drew it, so my nephew went about filling in some background details. He drew a room with a chest of drawers and then realised that all the drawers and all the handles of those drawers were so boring to detail when you have a character, like Ticking Pup, sitting right there ready for an adventure. I can relate to wishing that a background would just fall into place like it does in life as you are simply living.
Then I think about how it feels to read a comic or watch a movie. The first movie I ever watched, the very first movie I sat down, watched all the way through and enjoyed, was Splash at my friend's house. It was amazing to see the apartment building Tom Hank's character lived in and the department stores he shopped in and the restaurants he dinned in. As a kid who grew up in a tiny village with a four mile drive to the shops, Tom Hank's city life was just as new and amazing to me as Daryl Hannah's portrayal of a mermaid. My friend had successful parents and they had just moved to a much bigger house. Her mum, who owned a fabric shop called Dress and Design (chic), had decked the place with the most beautiful soft furnishings that mesmerised me and I saw the first computer in a home, it was a beige BBC micro with an owl logo in dots that my friend's dad had invested in, in his capacity as a headteacher. So my senses were overloaded with new places that day and it felt really good. Since then most films and comics I enjoy are because they transport me to new places through attention to detail and great execution of backgrounds.
I mentioned before that I need to come up with a home for the mice in the Adventures of Stilton comic: my comic about risk taking. I like the ideas behind this circle house that was designed by Steven Holl and Dimitra Tsachrelia. I like that they built spaces inside the house like a section of a sphere in the living room making a sort of bay window only visible from the inside and that the windows in the bedroom floor mean that light shines through different levels of the house. For the story I am telling I need the house to be mysterious and having shapes you might not ordinarily expect is part of that. I have several ways to draw a basic box-shaped room. But to make it more interesting I have been trying some shapes cut into the room. There is no shortage of good techniques for drawing shapes, like I found this great way to draw an isometric sphere and I found this very pleasing way to draw an egg. These shapes are subtly nicer looking than guessing by eye. So my challenge is to draw some curved spaces in the straight lined room with nice weighty thick walls and unusually placed windows. I'll let you know how I get on.