So, I took the major part of the money that I inherited after my step-father passed, and took 8 months off to write a book, and draw it as a graphic novel. During that time, we moved around: in our campervan, staying at a friend’s house, renting a short term apartment.

The book is: written. The words are done.

The drawing is… not done. In fact, the more I do, the less I feel good about the drawing. I’d say that, essentially, I will scrap every bit of drawing I’ve done for the graphic novel. But, I’ve learned how to draw… kind of. Maybe.

We left London in mid-January in our campervan, and arrived in Lucca, Italy. There, I wrote a majority of the book, from February to March. I did little iterative scraps of drawing. Here’s a scene from Lina’s chapter:

I didn’t like any of these. I was learning some of the elements of art: body structure, shading, how cloth works, etc. But these pictures don’t work. In fact, I look at my work for Chapter 1 and 2 (which you can see on previous posts), and I hate them.

The month of May came around, and because of Brexit, I had to leave Italy (UK citizens cannot stay longer than 90 days without a visa). So, we leave the EU, and drive towards Istanbul, Türkiye. On the drive, instead of drawing in pencil, I experiment with paint pens:

In fact, we don’t make it very quickly to Istanbul. We’d booked a short-term (3 month) rental close to the centre of Istanbul, and they were having all these massive anti-government protests. So, we delayed for 2 weeks, and stayed in a little city called Ohrid in Macedonia.

Macedonia has quite a few churches with masterpieces of the Byztantine period, so I spent some time copying that style:

We carried onwards to Türkiye in mid-April.

After 3 days there, Istanbul experienced a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. We were spooked and went to the coast for a few days, during which I drew this:

There are parts of this I like, but I began thinking: I really don’t know what makes a scene. I’ve begun to understand how to draw, but I don’t know what to draw.

I get out into the city, and I think, “okay, let’s draw some landscapes. Let’s find out how to draw things outside”.

But, no, that still isn’t working. I can’t just learn “how to draw the outdoors”.

I take some time to try to understand composition. What makes a scene? Visually, what makes a picture strike someone? Turns out that I have no idea.

On this website I find this excellent summary of Edgar Payne’s “archetypes of composition”: Steelyard. Tunnel. Silhouette. Pattern. Pyramid. Balanced Scales.

So I try them out:

At this point, I’m really happy. The drawings aren’t perfect, but I think they’re much more compositionally balanced than anything I’ve done before. They are scenes.

Outside of our apartment in Istanbul, we were feeding two cats: Tiny Cat (a gorgeous but kind of gross long-haired tabby with an infection on her mouth), and Grey Cat (a Russian Blue, with 6 kittens).

Then, one day, we see that one of Grey Cat’s kittens is sitting in the rain, not moving. She trusts us to take take him in, and he has an infected leg. He’s barely breathing. He’s so weak that he can’t eat, can’t raise his head. The vet tells us that he’s fairly likely to die.

After a day of death-rattles, passing in and out of consciousness, he POPS UP and meows at us. He was still very weak, but he struggled on. Here he is, three days after we found him:

Here he is, being cleaned by his mother (who would visit twice a day to feed him):

He was still so weak that he’d sleep in this wine box, unable to climb out:

Eventually, he was strong enough to move around. He had no concept of personal space:

Grey Cat still came by our back door as much as she could:

Here are some cat scenes:

We had that kitten until he was strong. By that point he’d been socialised (unlike his completely feral siblings), and then he got a further skin infection, so he needed ongoing healthcare. We had to leave soon afterwards, and we could not take him. Long story short: our permanent home cannot have cats. We have close people in our lives who cannot (even for a minute) be around cats. We were about to move countries (twice). We could not take the kitten with us when we returned to the UK and Italy.

So, we found him a home with some wonderful people (the owners of the lovely Makam Restaurant). To give him away broke our hearts in a way that I could not have predicted. We think about him often.

Part 2 of our big 8-month trip will follow in the next post. The images were making this post a bit too big.

I will leave you with, possibly, the best photo that I have ever taken.