Another month has whizzed by, we’re well into Autumn and we have been busy working on the house and garden while the good weather continued. Fortunately, the veranda was replaced before the weather turned wet this week. I’m also happy to report that I no longer get seasick going off to bed as the house has been re-levelled and new piles put in to keep it level-ish.
This week, I have been working on the illustrations for Chapter 13 of the second FAB Club book (rough cover shown left). By the next Epistle the drawing should be finished, which will ease the deadline pressure somewhat.
I’ve also been busy running cartoon workshops in Lyttelton. The first was in the library with kids aged 7-12. They were enthusiastic and engaged and it was very rewarding to see how much their drawing developed in a couple of hours. The second was at a youth club that catered to 11-14 year olds. We started with about a dozen kids and ended up with four! All of them were the younger ones who weren’t distracted by their peers. It was a good learning experience for me.
I think that peer pressure in the early teens is a big factor in which interests we take up. Most kids give up drawing at this point, believing that their drawing isn’t good enough to impress their friends. I was lucky at that age to have friends who loved to write and draw and we created comics to entertain each other. Without that encouragement, I might have given up too, as I don’t find that drawing comes naturally to me and I have to work at it. It is the reason I give myself deadlines in order to develop my work. Doodle Diary on gocomics.com forces me to to draw at least three sketches of my life every week, many of which debut in the Epistle.
