Here as the four of them set up a camp from their bicycles for the first time ever, Holding is explaining all the processes and necessities after the tent goes up, including his camp stove:
There's a lot of odd language in this book. Which is one of the things I love about it. Occasionally it needs a footnoted explanation, but wherever possible I'm hoping I can draw my way out of any possible confusion. Here as the four of them set up a camp from their bicycles for the first time ever, Holding is explaining all the processes and necessities after the tent goes up, including his camp stove: I looked up that word 'cuisine' and found its archaic meaning was indeed kitchen. Merriam Webster says Etymology: French, literally, kitchen, from Old French, from Late Latin coquina. Whether or not anyone else was using it to mean a portable kitchen like this I have no idea; probably not many were talking about such things anyway! Toward the end of his book (and mine, too) the interior workings of this apparatus are shown in full detail - two wicks, a water bath to avoid overheating... It's quite something!
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Well, somehow I thought these pages would be quick and easy, being mostly technical. But boy was I wrong. Figuring out exactly what was meant by the wording, looking at diagrams of the tent, and trying to show the process reasonably clearly has taken... far more days than I care to admit! Here's are T.H. Holding's instructions from the book which I had to make sense of:
And here's how these words have been incorporated to show this process, across four pages: It took so long that I confused myself and had to re-do parts of the third page - page 64 - twice. When I was working on page 65, I mistakenly thought the ground sheet was only being put down then. So I went back and removed it from page 64... and it was only when I looked again at the first page, after uploading it here, that I remembered they had indeed put it down in place first. So re-scanned my coloured-in version and spliced it back in again!
I think I've got this right in the end... It's late afternoon on the first day of the tour, very windy and looking like it's going to rain, and the four are having a hard time finding a suitable place to pitch their tent...
After about five years of planning, researching, thumbnailing and pencilling... I've at last reached page 151 which is (I think!) the final page of Two Shillings a Day. Below is the draft of that last page as currently envisioned: Now preparing for the inking and colouring... I'll aim to show regular progress here.
A delightful short film (3+ minutes) with a few quotes from and photos of Holding and some early camping sites, made by the CCC in 2014. In 1908, eleven years after carrying out and writing his book about the world's first portable cycle-camping trip, TH Holding wrote The Camper's Handbook. It's a massive 400 pages of very comprehensive detail on every aspect of camping, on which he had become a notable expert. The section on cycle-camping includes this packing list.... all of which can fit, amazingly, in one large handlebar bag which was Holding's favoured means of carrying equipment. I love seeing what things were considered essential then, and which we would still include today! I realise I haven't been remembering to keep this blog updated, though if you follow my newsletter or Patreon you'll know that progress is being made! Albeit slowly... I'm currently drafting page 108 of about 148.
Here's a draft from a couple of weeks ago, as the four rode the seventeen miles from Maam, after they'd obtained hot potatoes from a farmhouse and cooked up an excellent lunch in the field, on to Cong. I think I need to make that "huge piano encased in a box" a little bigger when I draw the final version, actually. I was thrilled to be offered a guest spot in the weekly mailing produced by a superb filmmaker whom I follow. Adam Westbrook writes The Third Something full of "ideas, sketches and reflections on the creative process" and it's always deeply thought-provoking and entertaining, very highly recommended even when it isn't all about me! This one is, and I get to talk about figuring out my weird way of drafting this graphic novel, which finally got me unstuck and able to make (slow) progress on it. Click on image below to read.
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What's this all about??I'm making a true-story graphic novel called Archives
April 2024
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