He was born under a wandrin' star

And passed his itchy feet to his descendants

Dad may have started out in a tiny town in the northeast of England (he really loved that English cap…) but he sure didn’t stay there. Not only did we move several times as a family (you already know we spent some time in Australia and Banff), between moves, we took some fabulous trips (all over the western US and Canada, mostly by car, to Europe, into the outback of Australia, by ship from Australia to Europe via the Suez Canal while shots were being fired…). I’ll get to some of those trips in subsequent posts/sections, but for now, I’ll bounce forward in time to 2018 when he took a fabulous trip to Tokyo to visit brother Pete. This was after the fateful Camino in 2017 which, fortunately, didn’t kill him but which did whet his appetite for more journeys and more art.

Just because age was catching up with him, that didn’t stop Dad or keep him grounded.

Part of the reason why I grabbed a few photos from Dad’s trip to visit Peter (and to hunt down exotic lino printing supplies… more on that, too, in future posts) was that yesterday’s efforts at drawing my brother we so awful. Having the two of them side by side proved to be challenging in a whole new way. The photos show two men, both with most of their hair and sporting beards and moustaches. Clearly, they are related. So, how to draw them so they don’t look like weird twins?

By studying the two faces carefully it’s kind of cool to see the family resemblances but then also to start to identify the differences. I had never noticed, for example, that their hair parts are basically mirror images. Pete’s face is a little wider but their eyes are very similar. Dad obviously had deeper grooves and fissures and his beard definitely ran to the scruffy end of the spectrum whereas my brother’s facial hair was much more closely cropped.

I don’t have a ton of photos of the two of them together on this particular trip, but the few I found gave me some good opportunities to keep trying… Because I know the sheer volume of drawings that will ultimately be required, I’m trying to keep things loose, playful, and quick - but, at the same time, trying to improve so readers can quickly identify who is who. Each time I add a new person to the tale I feel like I’m going back to square one when it comes to depicting them visually.

Sigh.

I also felt terrible about my scribbly spider drawing yesterday, so I did this one today to try to redeem myself and send a respectful apology to any arachnids who may be reading.

Still not exactly a super accurate amazing drawing but a step up from the scrawl from yesterday.

As for my title and subtitle above, all those travels also mean I’m going to have to find ways to draw coastlines and big cities, northern Alberta traplines and Banff in the early 70s, Europe and the Middle East, the ocean, the prairies… Things would have been a lot easier to draw if Dad had never left his home village. Of course, I probably wouldn’t be here, he likely wouldn’t have had the artistic career he did, you wouldn’t be wading through this post…

And, yes - his kids and grandkids are likewise big on travel. We are typiclally scattered all over the world (one brother in Tokyo when he’s not in Hawaii, another brother in the Bahamas when he’s not travelling for business or sailing wherever the winds take him), me splitting my time between the Rockies and the west coast when I’m not walking Caminos or visiting brothers or on some other trip, my daughter and her husband modifying a lifeboat so they can be perpetually on the move when they take the boat to Europe and take up residence on the canals…)

BTW, if you are interested in that project, you should check out their YouTube channel:

That’s enough for today! See you tomorrow…

By the way, if you are a regular reader you may notice my habit of flitting around from topic to topic. If I've mentioned something along the way that you’re particularly interested in learning more about, ask! I’ll consider it a personal challenge to write/draw about whatever your heart most desires!