My muse. My tortoise.

Making art about pets is still making art

I want to say a big thank you to everyone who read last week’s post, commented and subscribed. I so enjoyed hearing about your own adventures in new fields, about brave choices and the joy you’ve found in being creative. I love hearing about knitted frogs, family craft nights and life after burnout.

I thought I’d share a video of some of my work with you today (my plan is to post something every Saturday, with ad-hoc extra content, probably on occasional Wednesdays). It’s me narrating a 24-hour comic book about my tortoise, Nimrod. I made it in my first year at art college, on a Foundation course, following a brief that was inspired by the American cartoonist Scott McCloud. In a nutshell, the idea was to make a comic book of 24 pages, drawn over 24 hours (not 24 concurrent hours, though - my all-nighters are long behind me). There’s more here on McCloud’s brilliant idea that has been inspiring creators for more than 30 years. It was one of tens of briefs we could choose from to kickstart a project.

Say hello to my little friend

My idea was to explore my relationship with the inscrutable animal I share a home with. I made a rough, sketchy storyboard, then used black ink and a think Japanese brush and a cheap, thin paintbrush to illustrate each page. Later I scanned them and added lettering in Photoshop. The inky bits came in well under an hour a page. Thanks to the glacially slow computers at my school, and the fact that I had to write down every instruction in the extremely basic online Photoshop tutorial to have the slightest hope of being able to follow it, the digital side wasn’t as swift. So be it. I learned a lot and had a great deal of fun making it.

I then uploaded the following video to be assessed. One of the tutors who looked at it initially thought I had lost my mind when I she saw that I’d handed in a video of me reading it out loud. Rebecca must love the sound of her own voice, I imagine she was thinking, but later she told me that she listened to it on a few further occasions when feeling stressed. She said that she found it strangely soothing.

When I had a tour of the college for prospective BA applicants, I encountered a student who had transferred from another course. Why had he moved? “Everybody just wanted to paint portraits of dogs,” he said, scathingly. I don’t think he’d be that keen on my comic, but I can live with that. One of the best things I’ve experienced so far at art school is having my ideas taken seriously. You want to make a book about a tortoise? Why not! Here are some other artists who work in ink/like creatures/make books. You want to make a cast of your inhaler/foot/childhood toy? Let’s work out how you can best do it.

Yes, we’re increasingly prodded to explain our decision making and our choice of subject and materials. Yes, sometimes we’re steered away from insanely expensive or ill-advised methods. But having permission to work on weird, niche things that won’t have universal appeal, with people on hand to offer advice, is something that makes me feel both excited and safe. And so I was given the space to make something that could have been a grown-up version of show and tell: pet edition, but that is hopefully a little bit more than that.

Before you watch it, I want to flag two things. Firstly, there is some swearing around the 2:30 minute mark. It’s not a children’s book. Secondly, at the end, I am not saying goodbye to Nimrod because he is dead. I’m saying goodbye until spring, because he’s off to hibernate in the fridge.

And with that, I present to you Nim Indoors: Life with my Tortoise.

I would love to hear about your relationship with the animals in your life, and whether you’ve immortalised them in paint/clay/verse/film.

Thanks for watching,

Rebecca

(And Nim 🐢)