January 2026
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 playing 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.