• To celebrate having gone over 10,000 views on my drawing school, here is a video to show you how to draw cute little kittens!

    Click here to find more lessons including how to draw Santa and Reindeer. Seeing that Manga lessons attract so many viewers, I think I’m going to experiment and add the word Manga to the tags and see if it has any effect.

    Interestingly, my daily website stats are down. I guess everyone is shopping or getting ready for Christmas carol concerts at school.

  • Also at the Stoke Potteries Museum and Art Gallerywas this wonderful cinema poster for the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night movie. All the lettering is screen printed and hand cut.

    In those days signs like this would normally be painted by hand in poster paint on showcard, but The Gaumont, Hanley probably wanted a few copies and so screen printing would have been the obvious solution. Printing would have meant boring old letterpress – not a very cool option for the subject matter.

    The stencil would have been shellac coated paper stuck to a backing paper. The letters were cut out with a blade – the backing paper would allow the centres of letters to stay in place while the paper was ironed onto the stretched silk screen. The shellac melted just enough to stick.

    The medium allows for very sharp lettering and a modern style – the lettering for “A Hard Day’s Night” is very funky! A gorgeous piece of work and a classic of it’s time.

  • Creamers at Stoke Potteries Museum
    I arrived in Stoke earlier than I expected on Tuesday, so I went for a visit around the Stoke Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Obviously there was a lot of Pottery on display. I came round one corner and had to laugh. It was like a corner of Tutankamun’s tomb or the Terracotta Army’s Farmyard. Row upon row of cow shaped creamer were piled into a display cabinet as if ready to go to war on unskimmed milk. Rather fabulous, as were many of the other exhibits. As with these things it’s hard to see the wood for the trees. So much spectacular china on display that it becomes hard to see the individual pieces, but I realised that I do have a soft spot for naive slipware.

    I bought a bread mixing bowl at auction once. Everyone thought I was mad paying a fiver for it, but i speaks to me and looks so like the the bowls on display in the museum except that it has a machined rope-finish edge which makes it look machine manufactured, but I’m convinced it’s hand made otherwise. Perhaps I should take it along to the Antiques Road show one day, and find out what it really is.