Author copies of the first in the Draw It! series arrived this morning – hooray!

Looking forward to Draw It! workshop on the 28th May, and big excitement yesterday. Dust from Dr. Who’s Tardis arrived (via, erm, Cardiff’s BBC studios) in an Encyclopedia Gallifreya bottle.  Another fascinating addition to my Dust Museum.  And official date for the first Draw It! book is June 12th.  Draw It! Monsters & Other Scary Stuff and Draw It! Christmas coming later this year …

Stephen stayed with me for a few days while we organised our vast and entertaining array of postcards before heading off to Mario’s to hang the exhibition, which included prints and postcards for sale.  But first there was a quick tour of London which included a visit to the Tate and our dancing the tango in Euston’s Underground concourse for some reason.

Guests at the private view included a young Actionette , Finnish lady-about-town and sometime Northumbrian castle dweller Outi,  photographer Peter Haxton,  film-maker Roland Denning, the soignee Ms Patti and a large ex-Tory MP.

Back to the brilliant Lerwick museum, one side of which resembles a sail.  Most intriguing items.  At sea a long time and getting bored?  What better way to pass the time than … paint a whale’s eardrum.  Several on display, as well as many other wonders including an artist’s reconstruction of a fairy’s cave.

After running an evening workshop at Bonhoga, got a lift to a Pete Stack and the Rayburns gig at Gulberwick Community Centre, making a detour to pick up nine partying lady postal workers who somehow fitted into the car.  Several, squealing,  seemed to have climbed into the boot. Had a dance at the community centre, to the deafening sounds of the Dirty Lemons, the first band on, and managed to avoid one of the postal workers who wanted to pick a fight.  ”Why aren’t you drinkin with us?” etc.  Actually I was, slightly, but thinking about the early morning workshop next day, and my interview with Mary Blance for Shetland Radio Shetland Radio Interview (SK)_1-2

The second Draw It! book about monsters, publishing date autumn 2013 by Bloomsbury,  is off to Bologna Book Fair next month, and of course the monsters will need a new outfit or three for their trip …

Before it completely fades from the feeble SK memory bank, must write about my trip to the north last November. En route, in Edinburgh, encountered the Blue Footed Booby aka Marcus Coates  before setting off to catch a tiny Flybe plane to Shetland,  where I was met by Shetland Times cartoonist and writer  Smirk, aka Stephen Gordon, aka Pete Stack of Pete Stack and the Rayburns, aka Victor Vomit of the Regurgitators.

A chance meeting with Smirk in 2011, when I was taking part in Shetland’s Wordplay book festival, led to an exchange of  illustrated postcards – more than 100 over a period of a year – and this in turn led to an exhibition called Cartoon Correspondence which was why I was back in the 60 degrees North line of Latitude (the same as St Petersburg in Russia btw).  That evening Smirk, wearing a rather splendid tangerine shirt and a new overcoat (see photo below), drove us to our pv at haunted mill/gallery Bonhoga 15 miles inland where we ate cakes and played a special sort of Ping Pong.

I spent a week on Shetland, exploring its capital’s night spots – popping into the Happy Haddock, drinking (small amounts of) gin upstairs at the Lounge Bar (downstairs is ‘the men’s bar’), eating ‘Roadkill’ biscuits at a harbourside cafe and visiting Lerwick’s grand new and controversial music and film centre Mareel.  Sadly I missed the multimedia performance about the life and death of a pig, and opted for watching Skyfall instead.  Ran three workshops at Bonhoga, including one with artists and teachers, a happy bunch who produced most fascinating comic strips about a recent discovery of (ahem) the rare Shetlandosaurus.