Blog

How wonderful it feels to be able to put together a Lego toy 40 years after it was last touched.

I remember playing with Lego as a child, but I don’t recall it ever being on my ‘I want, I want…’ list at Christmas.

Other toys delivered more immediate rewards. Star Wars, Action Force, Evel Knievel, toys that were action-ready straight out of the box.

Nevertheless, the Lego did get a look in and I amassed a fair-sized collection of bricks.

At some point, I stopped playing with it. I am not sure when, but sometime after, there must have been a decisive action to box it up and archive it somewhere in the house.

Thankfully – and I only appreciate this now – it wasn’t thrown out.

So that was that. Life continued on as it sat, immobile, out of mind and frozen in time.

At some point, when I got my own house, we became reunited. And once again it sat, immobile, out of mind and frozen in time.

Somehow, this box had evaded cull after cull of old toys and possessions. Perhaps it commanded some mystical power over all who were entrusted with it.

‘Keep me, keep me, just in case’.

Until, finally, its day had come. A new generation had appeared with small fingers, as yet unimpressed with fad or fashion and ready to build his own world.

And what do you know? It still works as perfectly as it did all those years ago.

It still rewards imaginative play, develops creativity and provides an environment of innovation through small iterative accomplishments.

It also adapts to the child and his interests, whether it’s cars this month, dinosaurs next month or monster trucks every second Wednesday of the month- it just gets taken apart and built again with greater and greater complexity.

Not only that, it is 100% compatible with the Lego on sale today. And boy hasn’t it evolved. If you still think Lego is just for kids look again.

The house now has a variety of Lego-inspired accessories such as iPhone and laptop stands.

There is a risk that tomorrow they will be pillaged for parts in a space rocket, but I don’t mind that, as long as I get to play.

If only more things in life were designed to be less obsolescent and more Lego.

The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely…

Roll back to my early teenage years in Cambridge where Saturday lunchtimes meant a sortie to the public lending library. My hunt was laser like and specific.

The Asterix books were always lined up along the large window overlooking Lion Yard. Tintin was also there, but it wasn’t Tintin I was after.

Every few weeks a new title would appear. Those were good days. I would get the book stamped, in the bag and devoured within the day.

Each tale would take me on a journey to a far away land. Frequently outnumbered, the heroic duo of Asterix and Obelix would come to support the misfortunes of some underdog, usually at the expense of the long suffering Julius Caesar and his battered centurions.

Packed full of funny puns, petty internal squabbling, with just their wits, cunning and the not inconsequential power of Getafix’s magic potion to help them; each story would culminate with the village reuniting under a moonlit banquet.

After reading each story a few times I would copy the drawings. I was no comic artist but I tried anyway. I marvelled at the dedication and patience it would take to fill a book.

As I made my way though the series it became increasingly difficult to find new titles.

Today it would be considered inconvenient to make a 40 minute trip into town with no guarantee of finding what you want, having to wait and delay the gratification.

40 years on and this is no longer a problem.

I now have my own hardback collection sitting on the bookshelf ready to thumb at a moments notice.

I have revisited the stories of these indomitable Gauls. The tales are as enjoyable as ever but the typesetting is a lot smaller than I remember.

Sunday morning, but not any old Sunday. Father’s Day! Permission granted to slumber.

My slumbering isn’t so deep that I am not aware of the birdsong tweeting into the house. The windows left open to let in the cool air of the night.

It is Father’s Day again. Only this year is different, dad isn’t here.

“Daddy come here” the tweets are disrupted by a small voice from the bathroom. My feet roll out of bed, reluctantly followed by the rest of my body. I feel like a cartoon, my head stuck on the pillow as my body stretches through to the bathroom.

Task complete. “Daddy can I watch something” – meaning Spider-Man which is the hot new discovery. I remember watching Spider-Man cartoons when I was small. “Of course” I reply.

So I am back in Cambridge. It is hot and there is still a lot to sort, but that’s not for this weekend.

The house is still full of memories, good memories and it is comfortable to be here with my family.

Boxes of maps, books of munros, rucksacks of outdoor gear, photos of mountains and nature.

My adventuring started with dad. He would take us outdoors, whether it was train spotting, birdwatching, hiking or climbing in the mountains.

He was there on our first canoeing adventures, he was there on our first mountain camping epics.

Together we held up tent poles against storms, we got lost in clouds, drenched by rains and beaten by winds.

For a while the paths we trod were the same. He kept us safe as we learned.

But he was learning to. Although I didn’t know that at the time, dads know everything right?

Well I know it now.

“Daaaddy, can I have breakfast?”

Wait, aren’t I supposed to get that in bed this morning?

“Hey Siri, what am I doing tomorrow?”

“Hey Siri, remind me to put the bins out, oh, and then book that swimming lesson.“

“Hey Siri, ….”

It’s not always easy to tell when Science Fiction is reality.

We quickly get habitualized to  technological innovation, to the point of taking it for granted.

Is it too far-fetched to expect Siri to be able to execute a few simple, on-the-go requests in aid of making my life better?

My Personal Assistant Siri; she is always with me, the ideal candidate in many ways.

She literally exists in the internet, knows everything about me, knows who I know and the tools I use to organise my life.

Except she doesn’t. 

Siri is dumb, capable of carrying out a few scripted tasks, but insight and communication are not amongst them. 

As I sit here barking orders at Siri, a conversation with my personal assistant is just Science Friction.

What is Gagagubby? I am not even sure that is how you spell it. It could be Gaagaagubby, or maybe Gahgahgubby. It is a word that does not want to exist on paper.

There are a lot of things we don’t know in life and this is just another one of those things. You won’t see it, you can’t see it as it resides in a world we cannot touch, the imagination of a 3 year old.

I can’t be sure that the person who invented Gagagubby knows what it is, although I have to admit it appears to be a very useful and flexible word indeed.

We create in our imagination, loads of crazy things that we don’t know, don’t understand and can’t explain.

Gagagubby was brought alive finding his place in the world. Each day a workshop for experimentation, triggers and ideas, a playful process devoid of risk. He gives it a name because he can share it with us.

Our imagination is so powerful it is hard to communicate its ideas. Who’s failure is that?

Despite my best efforts I have failed to reverse engineer its meaning. I have tried to use it myself in conversation but invariably I am met with a stern ‘No’. Gagagubby has remained as elusive as the great Yeti.

And now it’s footprint is fading, I can’t even say if it will survive as a fully fledged memory. That makes me a little sad, so I have bound it, if not by definition, unwillingly to this page.

As frustrating as it is I love that we will never know what Gagagubby was, and that for a short period of time it was meaningful for at least one small person.

The guy sitting next to me is snoozing, his book Claudius the God lays untouched on the flip down table in front of him. I love those Penguin classic covers. Out of the window a very green Mam Tor glides by. My gaze traces that ridge line which I have ridden now many times in many weathers. I capture these thoughts in front of me, and acknowledge to myself that this is something I value.

As a very proud Alpkit co-founder part of my role is getting out and about around the country to visit the team in our superb stores. This currently extends north to south from Edinburgh to Kingston and east to west from Gateshead to Betws-y-coed. Fortunately I live somewhere in the middle.

Anyone into the outdoors is acutely aware of the climate crisis. We know quite often the activities we love have a negative impact either getting to or being in the nice places we want to be. Cars loaded with kayaks, trail erosion from cycling or walking, destroying mountain habitat with ski centres, the list goes on.

While we have been burying our heads in the sand over the climate crisis Covid presented an immediate problem we had to deal with quickly. Painfully it has provided an opportunity for a reset. It has shown we can make great change happen. So as I have been getting out more regularly to visit Alpkit stores I have been trying hard to change my default behaviours.

I am trying to make this work with the train, and on the whole it is going as well as I could expect.

It is taking effort. The car is a habit and I perceived it as convenient. It sits patiently outside the house and I can fall into it at any time of day, crank the engine and roll onto the motorway with little planning. The more i explore this convenience the more I question what I accepted was convenient about the car. In all honesty I hadn’t really questioned what I thought was convenient about it.

Let’s just take today as an example. Right now the convenient choice would have seen me in the car, sitting in traffic trying to get around Manchester, looking at industrial buildings and listening to Boris,s latest exploits on the radio. 7 hours of driving later I would flop fatigued back into the house. No lingering view of Mam Tor, no productivity, no article, no cheeky coffee and croissant at the station and limited interaction with the world.

It’s not going to be the easy choice, I have just noticed Trainline sent me an email last night informing me that one of my return trains has been cancelled (shame there wasn’t a push notification via the Trainline app). If the world has shown us anything over past couple of years it is that we need to be resilient and adaptable. Is it too early for my cheese sandwich?

It wasn’t enough to have drawn the damn thing in the first place, you then had to go over it again with a surgical scalpel and cut out masks. Once the masks were cut out, then and only then, could you start laying down the colour with the airbrush.

A mask, is a stencil. Banksy uses them all of the time to create his art. The benefit for him is that they reduce the amount of time he has to hang around looking anonymous. That wasn’t a particular issue I had, but spray on its own does produce blurry edges and that was a problem for precise engineering illustrations or fancy chrome lettering.

So we buy this masking film on the roll (Frisk brand incase you were wondering). It comes attached to a backing paper from which you peel it off, being very careful to avoid it sticking to you or itself. Easy enough for small details but a handful for large areas.

Once removed from the backing paper the next step was to lay it flat over the artwork and apply it without introducing creases or air bubbles. There were always air bubbles.

You then meticulously cut the mask out of the film using a scalpel, being careful not to push too hard. Cogs and meshing teeth were particularly tedious.

This film has a slightly tacky side so that it didn’t get blown to the other side of the studio when you point the airbrush at it. Also it wasn’t supposed to remove your paint when you pulled it off, but it did. This really hurt when it destroyed a lovely smooth gradient.

There would be no choice but to find your original mask, you kept it right?.. and do it again. Each time building up layer upon layer of paint, making it increasingly difficult to work with.

Times were changing though, Photoshop, Cmd Z and layers were just around the corner.

The airbrush was the thing that got me interested in technical illustration. It had it all, a shiny little gun in the shape of a pen which when connected to an air compressor would fire out a fine spray of colour.

If you had a dual action airbrush – and I did – you could control the rate of paint flow by a little trigger on top of the airbrush. There was also a whole world of different nozzles and paint reservoirs to choose from. It didn’t end there for you also had air compressors to consider. Wow a little machine sat in my bedroom squashing air, and delivering it through a flexible hose to my finger tip. It even had a moisture trap.

Through this collaboration of engineering and hand-eye coordination photorealistic illustrations were made possible. If you are thinking reflective chrome metal, clear glass, smooth plastic surfaces and smooth skin gradients – yeah that’s the stuff.

My tutor was Tom Liddell, one of the best in the field. Man he could spray. I always enjoyed my time with Tom, he was gently spoken, down to earth and understanding when things went wrong. And they did, often.

But despite the glossy exterior the reality was a right pain. The airbrush would frequently get clogged up with paint and had to be cleaned when you wanted to change colour.

The compressor would start up alarmingly just as you were adding a delicate highlight or shadow. Chug chug chug.

But the thing that drove me to desperation was the masking – more on that in a later post.

The compressor has long gone but I still have the Iwata, still shiny and safe in its little box.

These were a real gem of a find. Marker pens really came of age in the graphic and design studios of the 80s. They were a key visualisation tool and any graphic studio worth their salt wouldn’t be complete without a full set of these stubby little glass bottles.

Their advantage over other rendering techniques was that they allowed you to work fast to get ideas out of your head, through your hand and onto paper in a form that represented form, volume, speed, texture.

For this reason they were ideally suited for product and automotive concept renderings. In the right hands and with the right choice of papers you could blend colours and produce illustrations that approached the photographic realism of the airbrush. I used to pour over work by the likes of Dick Powell.

These stubby glass bottles refused to conform to any ideas of ergonomic styling that current markers now follow, but fitted snuggly between your thumb and forefinger. They stood up proud and ready for action on your desk rather than rolling around. The name was great, the shape was great and you could refill them with solvent when they ran dry.

With these little bottles of colour you could render the future.

A recent visit from my parents brought with it a load of goodies from the past, a box full of my old illustration tools.

There is something important about tools, whether it is in the pursuit of creative work or just bashing down a wall.

It is no exaggeration to describe tools as extensions of our limbs. Indeed much of the satisfaction of using a tool does come from sensory and tactile feedback, and when a tool delivers high quality results – sometimes even under an unskilled hand, the results can be truly emotional.

A tool rarely lives in isolation either, it is part of a family all with their own little specialisms and quite often has a home, like a tool box or rack where it sits merrily in its place until it is called upon.

With these back in my life I thought it would be fun to write a series of homages to the tools of my trade.