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Now available in real

Oct 14, 2012 | 0 comments

A while back, I started drawing sad cats.

I was playing with a drawing & painting app on the iPad, and they turned out to be the only thing I could really convincingly draw in a way that resembled what they were meant to portray. Not cats – sad cats. Happy ones tend to look more like teapots.

No, me neither.

Anyway, I started a blog where I posted these sad cats, and I’ve put about 90 of them on the internet so far (cats on the internet — who’d have thought?). And some people seem to like them. In fact, I’ve had some people ask if they could have prints of the Saddest Cats, and my answer has always been – yes of course, just press ‘print’ on your computer.

But yesterday, as an experiment (and as a piece of really quite advanced book-writing procrastination), I went shopping for art supplies. I bought some watercolours, pencils, brushes and art paper – and had a go at making a non-digital, handmade, physical piece of (air-quotes) “art”.

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What’s next: singing in public?

Apr 1, 2012 | 0 comments

I started drawing pictures of cats in the last couple of days, using Paper on the iPad. Cats are pretty much the only things that I can draw that people can correctly identify without prompting. For some reason, they always come out looking a bit sad.

For a half-hearted April Fools thing, I joked that I was going to quit my day job and become a cartoonist – and linked to a couple of the pictures. That led my friend Craig to say “it’s not even worth starting a Tumblr for” – which, for various complicated reasons, means that I had to. It’s known as the Rock & Roll Tedium Law.

Weirdly – for someone who has NEVER been able to draw – I’ve had nothing but compliments. In fact, several people have asked if they can buy prints. Which is, of course, absurd.

But it’s encouraged me to continue – at least for a while. If you’d like to see my pictures of sad cats, they’re now available at a Tumblr blog called The Saddest Cats.

The internet is weird.