The Dalek Game

The Dalek Game is played by simply replacing important words in book titles with “Dalek”, and is suitable for long car trips.

The Daleks are drawn with a dip pen on A6 paper. I am not attempting accurate representations of the Daleks. They are my favourite Doctor Who creature not because of their construction and complex history but because of that tone of rising panic in their voices. They remind me of harried engineers.

The pictures to date are:

• The Dalek in Winter
• The Princess Daleks
• 101 Uses for a Dead Dalek
• Bridget Jones’s Dalek
• Little Dalek on the Prairie
• Daleks Aloft
• The Lost Dalek
• Dalek Shrugged
• There’s a Dalek in my Bedroom
• A Short History of Daleks in Ukrainian
• Peter Pan and Dalek
• Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dalek)
• The Six Daleks of Henry VIII
• Life Among the Daleks
• The Reluctant Dalek
• Regency Dalek
• Dalek on the Orient Express
• The Dalek of the Baskervilles
• My Fair Dalek
• The Little Dalek
• The Dalek in the Rye
• The Graveyard Dalek
• Common Diseases of Daleks
• Wuthering Daleks
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dalek
• Death: The High Cost of Daleks (or: Brief Daleks)
• The Dalek’s Guide to the Galaxy (or: Loneliness of the Long-Distance Dalek)
• Pride and Prejudice and Daleks
• Moby Dalek
• Roxie Hart/Twenties Dalek
• Around the Dalek in 80 Days
• Daleks Can Jump Puddles
• The Sheep Dalek
• Cold Dalek Farm
• Of Mice and Daleks
• The Dalek in the Willows
• Harry Dalek
• A Dalek Like Alice
• Don’t let the Dalek drive the bus!
• Dalek Most Definite
• The Dalek of the Flies
• The Dalek of the Rings
• The Kalahari Typing School for Daleks
• A Dalek called Paddington
• The Dalek at Pooh Corner
• I, Dalek
• Where the Wild Daleks Are
• Preludes and Daleks
• Dalek’s Thesaurus
• The Dalek of Sleepy Hollow and Dalek and Prejudice
• Dalek in Wonderland
• Daleks Abroad
• Civil Dalek in Queensland
• Daleks of the Frost
• Dalek of the Apes
• Daleks for Elephants
• I Capture the Dalek
• Dalek with the Wind
• The Secret Dalek of Adrian Mole
• The Horse and his Dalek
• The Dalek of Platform 13
• His Dalek Materials
• Rapunzel’s Dalek
• A Dalek for Summer
• Robin Hood and his Merry Daleks
• A Dalek Carol
• A Shropshire Dalek
• Gumnut Daleks
• The Velveteen Dalek
• Dalek Knits
• A Tale of Two Bad Daleks
• Where the Dalek meets the Sea
• Dalek and Cwidder
• Dalek and Hemlock
• The Dalek Maze
• The Commonsense Cookery Dalek
• Saint George and the Dalek
• Frog and Toad Are Daleks
• Pippi Dalekstocking
• The Dalek Downstairs
• The Penguin Rhyming Dalek
• A Midsummer Night’s Dalek
• The Fault in our Daleks
• Daleks of the Wiener Werkstaette
• Paper Daleks
• The Doubtful Dalek
• The Gashlycrumb Daleks
• Huckleberry Dalek
• Dalek of Green Gables
• The Girl with the Dalek Tattoo
• The Dalek Chair
• A Game of Daleks
• My Dalek Goes Bung
• The Box of Daleks
• The Dalek Service
• Over the Dalek with Jim
• The Dalek of the Opera
• Daleks with a Donkey
• The Daleks of Tom Bombadil
• The Muddle-headed Dalek
• Lady Churchill’s Dalek Wristlet
• The Girl with No Daleks
• The Complete Daleks of the New Yorker
• The Invisible Dalek
• Every Dalek’s Just So So Special
• One was Dalek
• The Dalek, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Storybook Dalek
• The Dalek of the Dawn Treader
• Year of Daleks
• Little Daleks
• American Daleks
• Our Mutual Dalek
• Dalek-in-the-Mist
• Dalekriders of Pern
• A Dalek in Her Hand
• The Name of the Dalek
• Daleks at Play
• I Planted Daleks
• Dalek of the Pigeons
• The Dalek from Snowy River
• Daleks of the Road
• The Dalek Less Travelled
• The Daleked Dog
• Melisande, or Long and Short Daleks
• The Dalek and the Carpet
• Five Daleks and It
• The Dalek in the Morning
• The Ordinary Dalek
• Reach for the Dalek
• My Dalek and Other Animals

I eat a biscuit (also, IF “Stir”)

You can see it larger here.

Fairly self-explanatory, I think? Part cartoon, part thank-you note to the friend who acquired it for me from her firm’s career fair promotion material. Pen and ink (and butter, sugar, flour…).

And here is an illustration for this week’s Illustration Friday, “Stir” (also pen and ink and thematically related). When we were younger we used to find the Kenwood mixer’s dough-hook ideal for clasping at the end of a long sleeve and being all piratical, but the new, streamlined, ergonomic design is less appealing for that purpose.

Illustration Friday: Reverse

The first person to get the joke/pun/quotation and post it in the comments may have the original drawing of this illustration in return for evidence of a donation to a recognised fund for Australian flood, fire or cyclone relief. Congratulations to my mother, who worked it out. Next time, no family. Our brains are too alike. The answer is:
Why is a banana like the laws of the Medes and the Persians? Because neither can be repealed.

Pen and ink, with thanks & apologies to Albert Racinet’s costume encyclopaedia.

Birthday card

My older nephew (and godson) turns 10 today (happy birthday!). I was put in charge of card-making from his aunts on this side of the family. So this is the front (you can see a larger version here:

And this is inside:

The dragon’s facial expressions are oddly like those of my younger sister’s dog. Technical pens and digital colour.

In other news, on the weekend I finished the 7 illustrations I’ve been doing for an anthology of science fiction/fantasy stories for the 8-13 set. More on that in the course of time, I suppose.

Illustration Friday: Clumsy

A very small pen illustration (perhaps 6cm tall) with colour added on the computer.

I am in the (final!) throes of a project that is a much steeper learning curve than I bargained for. Below is a test panel I drew (not in the final) to trial some shading. It’s drawn with technical pens but the flat tone is added on the computer. It is also the reason I have been more absent from life than usual the last month or two.

Illustration Friday: Packed

I decided to offer a selection of famous luggage for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, “Packed”. (If some seem obscure, it was going to be called “Literary Luggage”, but one is from a movie).

Literary luggage is often very revealing of characters, more so than real luggage (I hope). It is an object lesson, a key to personality, sometimes an aid or extension of it. Some luggage is simply a reflection of a character’s position: Anne Shirley’s “very old carpetbag”; the Grand Sophy’s piles of luggage. Even then it can reveal personality: Anne’s cheerful, fragile optimism; the avalanche of Sophy’s character.

Sometimes it encapsulates personality and interests: Larry Durrell’s trunks of books and briefcase with spare clothes; the Children of Cherry Tree Farm’s selections for their traveling trunk.

But almost always it contains magic: bags of tricks and mysteries, promises and possibilities, lists bare of verbs to be populated by the imagination with the bizarre and enlightening and hilarious.

What was learned – Part 5 of my travels with a sketchbook

1. I had an epiphany at a Turner exhibit – the importance of boldness. This was the biggest lesson: to be bold in terms of time, line and materials. I have always tended to pale, tentative sketches. The limitations of time and materials forced me to far less subtlety, and I think that is a good thing. You can get away with a lot more if you do it with confidence and flair. I’m still working on both of these, but I am aware of the difference now.
2. To appreciate markers and coloured pencils. Not always like, but appreciate.
3. The joy of having the book constantly up to date.
4. Paying attention to little scenes. I remember places keenly because of a knitting girl or a moldy pumpkin.
5. People complicate travel sketching. I am conscious of their possible reaction (both to my sketching and to others’ reactions), time constraints, the need to move at a joint pace rather than individual, the vagueness it lends my half of conversations. I need to practice drawing in company and to stop being rritated by conversations which on drawing time.
6. I have become much more comfortable with drawing/sketching from life and have continued this in other sketchbooks since returning.
7. I like having a visual record. It is more legible than handwriting alone, I look back at it more frequently than a written journal, and I think it is more self-contained and interesting than a photo album alone.
8. I feel less self-conscious about inviting people to look at sketchbook than at photo albums. This is partly vanity and partly because I am never convinced people actually want to look at photos (and I have to sit there and explain them).

Next time I will:

1. Take less.
2. Ignore perfection – better at all than never.
3. Draw more.
4. Be bold.
5. Make hi-res scans the first time around (still, better at all than never).

The other parts:

• Part 1: What was lugged.
• Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: What was stuck.
• Part 4: What was organised.
• Part 5: You are here.

And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.

What was organised – Part 4 of my travels with a sketchbook

In the grand tradition of not making up my mind until the last possible moment (as usual, some time after take-off) I browsed through travel journals in newsagencies and online trying to determine an optimum combination of categories – should I include expenditure? an itinerary? what about an address book? How much space should be allotted for each day? How did artists organise their travel sketchbooks, if at all? Were journal, diary and sketchbook incompatible?

I settled on the winning combination on the flight over: The debden notebook would retain its usual structure – infodump with index. I put all postcard addresses in there (indexed under “contacts”). Otherwise, it was used for directions, reminders and a futuristic science fiction story involving cryogenic sleep and prosthetic limbs and lawyers on motorcycles and mafia connections and the rule of law (the true hero) and consisting only of the bits in between the action.

The sketchbook was divided into two sections.

Section one was a planner: each page featured four hand-drawn boxes with the date (a sticker), month and day of the week. In these I jotted down a very minimal account of the day, and only missed the last four or so. For a random example, 17 October – Wednesday reads:

Up 9-ish.
Watched part of the Waltons and Little House (guest starring a very young James Cromwell)
Breakfast @ Free Port (“Good food, legal drinks”): cinnamon scrolls.
To North East to wait for Martha to get off work.
Lunch at Bova’s.
Back to Martha’s to drop off a sub for Nick.
Through Eyrie to Presque Isle.
Drove around Presque Isle, monument, lighthouses.
Stopped at visitor centre.
Back to Martha’s for pie. Spoke to C.O. on phone.
Back to farm.
Downloaded photos. Kathy & Mommy organised for me to go to Pittsburgh.

Section two was everything else (I micromanage content, as you can see). The date headers went in as each day came along. I sketched as I could through the day, wrote only a little, and at the end of the day added in any cartoons or drawings (often from photos on my camera or phone) or bits-and-pieces that remained.

I had an idea that if I wanted a list of expenditures I could start from the back, or keep lists of Things to Eat on the index cards in the back pocket, but none of these were necessary.

• Part 1: What was lugged.
• Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: What was stuck.
• Part 4: You Are Here.
• Part 5: What was learned.

And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.

What was stuck – Part 3 of my travels with a sketchbook

I did not want to repeat the pattern of previous holidays which resulted in collections (envelopes, packages, bags, boxes) of papers, brochures, tickets, advertisements, envelopes, squashed pennies, packaging, cards and labels.

This time, I implemented a policy I referred to as Cut Things Out and Stick Them In.

Every night, before bed, I had to cut up the papers collected through the day, cut them up, stick the relevant sections into my sketchbook-journal and Throw The Rest Away.

There were a few late nights, but it was not generally an onerous task and tiredness could make me brutally selective. As I carted the glue stick with me, dead time in airports (“the planes in America have never been so safe or so late”) and planes and trains or while other people were in bed could be used productively.

My bags were lighter, there were no folders to sort or store when I arrived home, and I don’t regret throwing out anything I did.

Best of all, the journal was always up to date. I could not show photographs to people, but I could show them scraps and sketches, and when I arrived home, the journal was almost complete: pictures drawn, scraps stuck in, observations made at the time. All that remained was to add in the few pieces that had fallen through the cracks and into the back pocket of the sketchbook: a menu, some currency, a greeting card.

Scraps, however, were not the only things that were stuck in. Before I left, I treated myself to one of the unsung treasures of the stationer’s: numbered stickers. I took a package of black-on-white to label the days in the planner at the start of my sketchbook, and white-on-black to label each day as I progressed through the sketchbook. It was unnecessary but fun, with some of the mild excitement of an advent calendar, and knowing that as each day was sketched and written and pasted, I could mark it off and start a new one with a fresh new sticker.

The sketchbook is here: USA 2007 Moleskine.

Other parts:

• Part 1: What was lugged.
  Part 2: What was used.
• Part 3: This is it.
• Part 4: What was organised.
• Part 5: What was learned.

What was used – Part 2 of my travels with a sketchbook

I divided the tools I took into two bags: a large ziplock bag in my checked luggage with scissors, brushes, watercolours and so forth; and a smaller bag in my handbag with markers, prismacolors, unipins and mechanical pencil. The glue stick travelled between this smaller bag and my clear-onboard-toiletries-and-liquids-for-inspection bag according to whether or not we were airborne.

And in the end I used only:

• the monochrome markers
• the prismacolour pencils
• the mechanical pencil
• stickers
• glue stick and
• scissors.

The first two were unexpected. I have almost always drawn in pencil or pen. Markers were still unfamiliar territory, unwieldy and permanent and blending poorly. I disliked coloured pencils – using them, what they could and couldn’t do, what art in coloured pencil looked like.

They were, however, the most travel-friendly: light, portable, not messy, quick to use, bold, handy. Both travel in my handbag still and if I am again travelling light, I might leave behind all the excess security blanket of other media.

The last two were used for cutting things up and sticking things in, of which more anon.

The sketchbook is here: USA 2007 Moleskine.

Part 1 is here: What was lugged.
To come:

• Part 3: What was stuck.
• Part 4: What was organised.
• Part 5: What was learned.