March 2026

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.