Drawing smiles is not as easy as I once thought. But after drawing a lot of them, it’s now a piece of cake.
Lauren Child’s new Clarice Bean book ‘Smile’ has a few pages of these drawings and we spent a day arguing about which smiles meant what. As the author, she knew more about it than me (she’d written a book about it) so it was no contest.
Scenes of Belfast. Cloudy with chance of rain.
The Hindenburg’s menu impressed me. And it was all prepared for passengers in an aluminium galley, 200m off the ground.
For passengers at this altitude, enjoying the flavours of the food wouldn’t be the problem it is in modern pressurised aircraft cabins where taste buds may as well be put in the overhead lockers. Here is a selection from the menu of a three day flight:
Breakfast
Coffee, Tea Milk, Cocoa
Bread, Butter, Honey, Preserves
Eggs, boiled or in cup
Frankfort Sausage
Ham, Salami
Cheese
Fruit
Lunch
Consommé Gutenberg
English Prime Ribs of Beef with Young Turnips
Stuffed Tomato
Plum Potatoes
Richelieu Pudding
Demi-Tasse
Dinner
Tapioca Soup with Julienne Vegetables
Boiled Halibut
Mousseline Sauce
Salted Potatoes
Capon a’la Brussels with Mixed Vegetables
Assorted Cheese Platter
Pumpernickel Crisp Bread
Westfalian Dark Rye Bread
And after the meal, one could peacefully and luxuriously enjoy a cigar or cigarette within the 200 million litre hydrogen balloon.
A recent commission required making two illustrations of familiar sights in Queensland, Australia. The first was of a traditional wooden house, and the second a more contemporary brick apartment block which one will often find taking the place of one of the older wooden houses.
The older style (referred to as Queenslanders) are Victorian, and were built up until the 1940’s with the style changing over those years. I like the simpler all wooden style, compared to the more sophisticated thirties type with brick and stucco facades.
But they are all usually single story, on stumps, with a corrugated iron roof. They also feature a covered verandah at the front or side, or in some of the grander versions the verandah wraps around three quarters of the house.
The newer style of building was the brick ‘six pack’ apartment block. These are usually multi-residence flats made of charmless brick and aluminium sliding windows with garages at the bottom. I think the common style first appeared in the late fifties, but they were being built in the eighties too.
The old wooden houses were hot in summer and cold in winter. When there was a summer storm – typically every afternoon in Brisbane at about 5pm – it was impossible to have a successful conversation inside a Queenslander thanks to the heavy rain hitting the corrugated iron roof. Every part of the building was a splinter machine and there was often nails protruding from floorboards, making walking around in bare feet risky. And everyone walks around barefoot in Queensland. And forget about being quiet creeping in late at night without disturbing sleeping housemates: from the first step on the front stairs, to shutting the front door, the entire structure shudders and shakes and trembles on its stilts, making a guard dog redundant.
My favourite feature of these houses are the transoms above the interior doors. Sometimes stained glass, I prefer the wooden slatted ones which commonly have a decorative tulip or geometric shape in the central piece. These allow airflow in summer and snoring all year round to circulate the entire house.
There was plenty of space under the house between the stilts to park a car, put a washing machine, or crack macadamia nuts on the slab of cement laid down for the washing machine to sit on.
As the old wooden houses aged, it became fashionable to close in the verandahs with unsightly glass louvre windows to give more secluded living space. These extra rooms were known as ‘sleep outs’.
I don’t have much to say about the modern apartment blocks. They’re eyesores and unremarkable. But I like drawing them too.
Over the years, I’ve lived in both types of accommodation. It was always desirable to find a ‘nice Queenslander’, to rent and as students you could fit about 6 people in them – or more if there was a sleep out.
Nowadays, these old houses are mostly nicely painted and renovated and the sash windows work so well that the entire house can be airconditioned. An unthinkable mod-con when I was living there..
Hindsight: Working in the sleep-out room in New Farm.
I read My Dog, Hen at St Stephen’s School in Shepherd’s Bush. A good time was had by all (I think).
No photographs exist, but I made a drawing of the event. When I looked out the window, I saw this red tree which was remarkable.
Thanks to the students and the teachers for listening.
Not the Shepherd’s Bush.
I will be reading My Dog, Hen to St Stephen’s School next week. And doing some drawing too. Don’t wag school that day if you like drawing. Or listening to stories.
The spaceman exited this vehicle.
This is what’s left of the best plaka paint colour I have. Thankfully it was a bright sunny day and the sky was as blue as the Pelican paint.
I remember it as though it was yesterday.
Seasonal wood-free offerings from WM Books. Jacketed hardbacks with linen case material.
Cover design and illustration © David Mackintosh.
I stretch in the morning a lot and I do a lot of saunas and steam rooms during fashion week just to keep my blood flowing. – Gigi Hadid
