Yesterday I bumped and bobbed my way over the pot-holed moorland road to the Flat Cat Gallery in Lauder to drop off some new pictures. Small brown birds (goodness knows what they were – too fast for my eyes) flitted and dived in front of me. Way up on a steep peak a man was letting off racing pigeons from multiple baskets. A battered hand-painted sign read ‘Young Lambs for 2 mls’ and indeed there were young black-faces leaping in and out of the road as though they were playing chicken, their funny white tails flicking with delight.
As I drove I was thinking about the tea label brief we were given at college this year by the Eteaket tea shop in Edinburgh. The reason it was in my mind is that some of us had put up pictures from the brief in the tea shop on Monday. I’d looked at the labels I’d done and thought how I would do them so differently now. These little sketches are more along the lines of what I’d do. It’s strange to look back on previous work but also oddly satisfying to survey these stepping stones on the route to some sort of illustration coherence.
If you’re around in Edinburgh do pop into Eteaket. Our pictures are in the back room.
