{"id":15265,"date":"2014-08-05T06:02:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-05T10:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2014\/08\/05\/strange-animals\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:36","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:36","slug":"strange-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2014\/08\/05\/strange-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sold my camera on eBay and bought a wee pocketable one for taking spontaneous drawing-reference photos. As my friend Margaux<\/a> says, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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I’d been contemplating buying a smartphone, but, thankfully, am not in a position to enter into a contract (i.e. leaving far before 24 months would be up). And, really, when I thought about it, all I wanted was a camera on my person. I don’t want to be any more connected, and I don’t want to drop a bag of money on something I don’t really need. The iPad works just fine as a mobile office. The lack of precise pen input is annoying, but the new Jot Touch<\/a> pen works decently — for colouring<\/em>; I still could never draw with it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So, because I had a camera with me, I’ve been able to catch a few things I noticed around town…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The creatures that live around Wick are strange. We’ve noticed slugs crawling up the front of the house at night, like they’re following a line to some destination:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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You can’t see them here, but the slaters (AKA potato bugs, wood lice) crawl up there with them. It’s like a party for all the beasties nobody likes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And the birds pick moss out of the gutters. I have no idea why. They’re just disposing of it, like it offends them. Maybe bugs live underneath.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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I got an e-mail from my client this morning outlining a whole book he’d written that he wants me to illustrate. This came out of the blue for me, but his timing was excellent: I’ve been feeling a creative itch lately, so this is a dream project. He’s going to get the Marketing team to clear my schedule for the rest of the month so I can work on it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Yesterday, my schedule was light, so I took the day to answer all my e-mails and line up my projects, then… I kind of lost the plot. Even though I keep all these lists of things I want to do, sometimes when I’ve actually got some spare time, the pressure is too much and just drives me crazy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

How handy, then, to have this come along — a creative outlet without the stress of feeling I have to express every serious and funny thing that’s ever occurred to me, all at once.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The book I worked on with Dan earlier this year isn’t out yet — November is the latest launch date I’ve heard — and now we’ve got this other one starting up. I touched up a few of those illustrations the other day and was struck by the evolution in my cartooning style since then. It’s probably imperceptible to anyone else, but I see it. So here I was expecting I might have to go back in and revise some of those drawings, but Dan’s already onto the next project. I like that: Just get it out there rather than tinkering with it forever.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Weirdly, this book may leapfrog the other and come out first. Whatever, I’m grateful this is happening! <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sold my camera on eBay and bought a wee pocketable one for taking spontaneous drawing-reference photos. As my friend Margaux says, “The best camera is the one you have with you.” I’d been contemplating buying a smartphone, but, thankfully, am not in a position to enter into a contract (i.e. leaving far before 24 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}