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This morning, I planned to go to the park and draw landscape, but it was so peaceful sitting in the courtyard at the Royal Naval College that I decided to draw something there. I assumed this carved keystone head would be Neptune, because it's a naval college, but as soon as I started sketching, I realised all the leaves meant it was a Green Man. Maybe that's because the college overlooks the park. He even has bows in his hair, he's really quite dolled up.



I thought the sketch was okay, but I really wanted to mess with it a bit more, so I drew this while I was having coffee at nearby Rhodes Bakery. If you look by the door, you can see one of my framed drawings hanging there.



Right now Greenwich is a great place if you want lovely and affordable bags and luggage. I popped in and said hello and had a natter about being self-employed with Sophia & Matt, who make their own beautiful bags. And I found this German guy, Guenter Werner, in Greenwich Market selling bags he'd made with London map-themed material. Got one of those red-bottomed backpack-sacks for a tenner. They should go down a storm with the Olympics crowd.



Oh, and Jurgen Wolff has posted some good tips about making a graphic novel sell, after listening to Karrie Fransmen's talk on the subject.

This morning I ran over to the Surrey Docks City Farm to sketch the sheep and goats. They hadn't been fed yet, so they were restless and moving around too much to draw very easily, but it was nice being in the pen with them. Here's a quick sketch of one of the workers milking a goat.



They're not at all like sheep in the country, they're completely used to people and very affectionate. Sort of like my character, Vern; he's very agreeable and doesn't really understand country life. One of the younger sheep wouldn't let me sit without having his head in my lap, which wasn't great for drawing, but it was rather pleasant having him sniffing my chin and breathing warm hay fumes into my face.




Here's a worker feeding orphan goats with the milk she'd just taken from the mum. I really had to be quick to draw that one, they were wriggling like mad.



This old sheep and young goat were hilarious; the sheep obviously detested the goat, which kept jumping up on his back and surfing the sheep as it bumbled around the pen. Finally the goat used the sheep to propel itself over the fence, and the sheep was stuck by itself, bleating lustily until one of the workers let it out to join the other sheep. I wish I could have drawn these two better, but they were all over the place.

Another try at drawing trees, this time at Nunhead Cemetery. I love this place, it's one of the 'Magnificent Seven', which includes Highgate Cemetery (where I made the recent post about Audrey Niffenegger & Tracy Chevalier).

I didn't know how to tackle the leafiness of the ivy on the tree trunk; I wanted to capture its texture and darkness, but I didn't want to make it over-fussy either. My amazing sculptor friend Eddie Smith has also been making tree drawings at the same cemetery (he pulled a wad of them out from under his kitchen sink when I was last at his house). His tree marks are so gestural they're almost unrecognisable as trees. Which looks great, and very energetic, but I quite like capturing interesting details as well and making everything very solid and, well, 'tree-ish' (as the hobbits would say in Fangorn Forest). So hopefully practice will help me navigate between large gestures and fine detail, I'm still not sure what I want to go for. My marks got more and more gestural toward the end, when I saw how I was running out of time.



Like Highgate, Nunhead Cemetery's being left in an intentional state of 'managed neglect', which means there are all sorts of hidden wonders to be found amongst the ivy. Here are two tiny gravestones just next to the one I was sitting on. (Mine seat was someone's dad.) And lots of dogs off leads. I've been well and properly licked.



I had the most therapeutic sight, in front of a school between home and the studio. The Deptford JAWS OF DEATH. I wish I'd caught on film the bit when it munched through a huge window. The sound was incredible. (Sorry, it's rubbish quality filming.)

I only had 25 minutes before my workshop to draw these two trees, but I liked the way they look like they're dancing the tango. I think I'd emphasise that a bit more if I drew them again.

Once again, this morning I was out and about in Greenwich Park doing hard coursework for my Philip Reeve/Alex Milway Landscape Drawing 101. I was besieged by pigeons and reckless squirrels, and I was very tempted to draw them in. But the whole point of the exercise has been to draw the greenery because it's my weakest link. I only slipped up once with that pigeon in the corner.



Very glad to get an e-mail from the Greenwich Phantom, to say she's happily following the sketch progression. (Hello, Phantom!) Someone (a lovely person) made a funny comment the other day on the phone; they said they'd seen my blog and saw by my sketching that I wasn't busy, so thought it must be a good time to call. And I've had a couple people recently say things like 'if you have time to do that, you must have time to do [insert worthy activity]".

The truth is, I'm almost panicking with how much I have to do before a whole host of events: Sunday's Hypercomics family workshop in Battersea Park, Wigtown lit fest, Bath kids lit fest, Ally Pally Knitting & Stitching Show, four days of comics workshops in Ireland, the British International Comics Show in Birmingham, Cheltenham lit fest, Crystal Palace kids lit fest, two days live painting for Nottingham Game City, three days of London MCM Expo, Oxford FCBG conference, SCBWI Winter Conference, Leeds Thought Bubble and the Sheffield Children's Book Award ceremony (Morris the Mankiest Monster is up for the award). And that's not mentioning the Scholastic book illustrations due in January that I haven't even started yet.

The thing is, those all involve a zillion e-mails, and if I sit in my studio trying to answer them all day, never drawing or going for a walk or anything, I will go completely mental and fat. I had to quit the rowing team because I couldn't keep up with the training and races since I was doing so many weekend events. I'm rubbish at doing exercise just for the sake of it, so I've put on a lot of weight this year. Going to a gym in the morning makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel and makes me crabby all day. So getting up at 6am to cycle a ways, then draw in the park isn't a bit of frivolous free time, it's absolutely essential to keep me from going twitchy. And I'm new at this, too, so I don't always know the best way to divide my day into perfect regimented segments.

The other thing is that, when people ask me to make children's books and do events, they're not asking a person who sits and does e-mail all day, they're asking someone who can draw pictures and has experiences to tap into so the books are filled with life and joy and hope and all that good stuff that makes stories. And sitting all day in front of a computer just doesn't make that happen. I like that bit in Neil Gaiman's article, George RR Martin is not your bitch:

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

Hehe, don't even get me started on housework, that has gone way, way by the wayside and no, I can't yet afford a cleaner. Which doesn't thrill Stuart one bit. Blogging is another thing that isn't a spare time thing, it's how I remember what I did ever

A solid blanket of grey clouds this morning made the light in the park less than inspiring. But after all my big talk yesterday, I was determined not to wimp out of drawing a bit of landscape without using my standard crutch of having one big central thing in the foreground filling the whole page.



I'm so used to using landscape to frame buildings and close-up trees, that it was hard for me to pick out a good alternative composition. (Figuring out what to draw must be half the battle.) In some of his drawings, Philip Reeve used the boundaries of fields as compositional lines (here, for example), so after walking across the whole park, I ended up using layers of footpaths for my leading lines.



I got very frustrated drawing this. I didn't really know what I was doing, particularly with the trees. When they're too small to pick out individual leaves - just little cotton balls - I'm not sure what kinds of lines to use to set out the different shapes, and it feels like I'm just scrabbling around. There were some lovely willows in the centre, but I didn't really capture their downward-hanging branches; they just look a bit muddled. I really need to get some books of landscape drawing and actually take them along with me, so I can use them for reference while I'm drawing.

That's the Millennium Dome and Greenwich Power Station in the background. Quite a few little dogs came over and made studies of me when they saw me sitting in the grass. I should get some tips from Alex Milway, he trained first as a landscape painter and he has a gorgeous canvas he's working on sitting in the middle of his front room. Speaking of which, Alex is the key organiser for the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival on 23 Oct, and bookings are now open! Lots of free workshops, author readings, comics, fun to be had. (Do you like my dinosaur poster?)

I just spotted this great animation over on the FPI blog, by Lane Smith (creator of The Happy Hocky Family and loads more):

YouTube link - It's a Book, by Lane Smith

And don't forget to keep an eye on the Super Comics Adventure Squad blog, the DFC team keeps popping up with loads of amazing stuff, including several new drawings by Monkey Nuts' Lorenzo Etherington.

A bit quiet in the studio today. Lauren and Gary are off at the Prince's Garden Party again. This time Lauren brought along her giant squid.

I was inspired by Philip Reeve's recent landscape drawings to get up early this morning and draw in the park. (I have a bit of a love affair with the trees there, they're so full of personality. Go visit them if you're ever in Greenwich! Say hi for me.)



I hadn't made a landscape drawing in ages and, in a way, I kind of chickened out. This is really a drawing of a tree (my favourite tree), not a landscape. And the tree is more of a life drawing than a study in light or anything. Basically, it's a portrait of a tree, just like I'd draw a portrait of a person, and the other bits are just there to frame the tree and put it in a bit of context. In that way, it's a bit like a medieval paintings, where the people or religious scene are the main focus, and the nature just decorative or symbolic bits around the edges.

I find it much harder to draw nature without some big, obvious chunky thing in the foreground, unlike my favourite so far of Philip's drawings, which takes in the whole field and plays with its overall composition. I'd love to learn how to do this. When I was at Bryn Mawr, I took an art history class in Flemish landscape painting from a professor named Christiane Hertel. Sadly, I don't remember a lot of the details, but I do recall her pointing to several of the Dutch painters, who were innovators in making the landscape a character in itself, with fewer man-made or human focal points (often just a little windmill somewhere, or a tiny figure of a traveller or hermit saint). They painted dark, angry, windwhipped trees, deep shadows, heavy forests. At the time, I got some books from the library of landscape etchings by Rembrandt, whose line work still fascinates me. I really want to track down another well-printed book of his etchings and make some more studies of them.

Another thing I've been thinking about a comment Mark Stafford made while we were looking at drawings in the Cartoon Museum's Fougasse exhibition. Mark said how rare it was these days to see illustrators putting small characters in landscape compositions because we're so conditioned by television close-ups and mid-range shots. I don't watch much telly at all (don't even own one) but I know that when I take photos, I almost always zoom as close to the figure as I can go, with little regard for the larger sweep of space around them. And I think I do the same with drawing. When I draw wider landscapes, I struggle to get a good range of tonality, and my textural lines are tentative. I lived in rural Lancashire for a year when I was much younger, and I remember being hugely impressed by the way the clouds made moving shadows on the hills, and the purplish look of the night-time fog. But I never managed even slightly to capture it. I'd like to think that now I can draw more skillfully, and I might have a better chance of it, but I still need to get in some practice. ...Adding that to my to-do list.

One of my three studio mates, Gary Northfield, just wrote a post about clouds on his brand new blog; I need to link up with this and try drawing some. Maybe we could make a cloud mini comic. Except we need to finish Sheep Swap, we've left that one hanging.