Author: hamishmacdonald

So many people to see, so many visitors, so many dinners out. Yes, it’s just four weeks until Craig and I leave Caithness, and the stark fact of it is really dawning on me.

People here have been so kind to us, and the landscape is vast and gorgeous.

We went to a model fair at a local hotel when Craig’s family visited recently, and among all the scaled-down farm equipment, articulated lorries, planes, and boats, there was a table featuring all kinds of buses. When I saw the burgundy Lothian bus, I suddenly choked up.

I used to ride those buses into Edinburgh when I first moved to Scotland 14 years ago. It’s the feeling of those days that fuelled my novel, Idea in Stone.

It’s strange to be going back to Toronto. Exciting, in many ways: work is going extremely well (I’m illustrating a second book for Strategic Coach), I have dear, old friends there, and there’ll be such a wealth of culture for us to explore (it pains me that I’m missing the Toronto Comic Arts Festival by two months; everyone I admire in cartooning will be there).

Sometimes I wonder if it’s giving up, like I didn’t make a go of this whole Scotland thing. But I did achieve what I set out to: even according to “Me-Then”:

For days, there’s been a sporadic noise coming from the wall of our living room. Craig and I deduced that something must’ve fallen down the chimney and, since that’s closed up, was trapped there.

It was breaking my heart to think of a living creature trapped and afraid in our chimney. So I took off the vent cover behind the TV, and, sure enough, there was a rectangular opening to the chimney. I left it open, and before long, a pigeon came out.

After much flapping & chasing on both our parts, it squeezed out of the top living room window and flew out across the green.

Thinking there was no solution, I’d been trying to rationalize leaving the bird be to die, but I’m glad I wasn’t able to do that.

I took several big bags of stuff to a charity shop this morning, and some broken electronics to the recycling post. We’ve still got heaps of books to donate, but we’re finally making some headway.

Last weekend over brunch, we made an inventory of the things we own, and over the next two months we’re going to give most of them away and pack a few select things to ship to Canada.

I have an acute sense that all these possessions are just temporarily borrowed for the time I’m here on the earth, anyway. That’s handy when it comes to making decisions.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy doing illustration work, and, since I want to get better at that, I created a “cartoon school” for myself: I took all the ebooks, PDFs, reference pictures, manuals, and video guides I’ve collected and organized them into a curriculum. I figure this will take me at least a year to work through.

The four main subjects are:

1. Draughtsmanship
2. Software
3. Content & Story
4. Meaning & Motivation

There’s so much good stuff here, and I have that feeling again like I did with the podcast that I want to share it and spare others the effort of finding these things from first principles — except a lot of it belongs to other people and isn’t mine to give away. So I’ll concentrate on just doing my lessons.

There’s so much material that I’m using dice to decide what to look at next, and today’s lesson was on colour theory. This brontosaurus was my test subject:

I just found the sexist, dated ancestor of the work I’m doing now. Gosh, it would be simple to just repeatedly draw one kind of white guy who’s after a pretty wife, who then spends too much of his money. The jokes just write themselves! (Even if no one finds them funny.)





My first illustrated book with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach is out!



I had the honour of being interviewed for a website featuring lots of creative folk in different fields.

I babbled about my background, my work, and my process here on Work_Spiration.