Rex to the Rescue Part 1
Sunday . 30th. March . 2025
This is a page from a sketchbook I bought at Singapore Changi Airport in August 2022. I was enroute from Edinburgh to Melbourne. The first change in Germany (I cannot for the life of me remember which airport it was) had eaten my hold bag, we were still masking on the flights and travelling with mandatory proof-of-negative-covid-test passports.
My friend Fiona, one of my original Cameo Cohort, was flying me to Australia.
This trip was two and half years ago now but for the first time since The Shenk I have a minute to revisit my illustrations. The sketchbook brings the place back it scraps and shadows. I remember the controlled and joyful chaos of the house filled with dogs. I remember the evening Fiona drove me out to the Otways. The light fading, silvering bodies of water and silhouetting trees as night crawled over us. The strange and undulating eucalyptus trees pressing in on the side of the road, bone white in the headlights.
A year earlier, Fiona got in touch because she was writing a children’s book about her work and asked me if I would be interested in illustrating it. It was an immediate yes because Fiona and her wife Traci have one of those dream jobs that don’t sound like they should exist. Under their company name Skylos, Fiona and Traci train detection dogs, working with them in the field for various conservation and environmental research projects.
Fiona’s book is about one of her dogs, Rex, his rescue and subsequent training for detection work. It all leads to their conservation adventure looking for the Powerful Owl deep in The Otways, part of a vast national park in southern Victoria. Fiona wanted me to meet the rainforest like she was introducing me to a friend. One she loved but couldn’t describe. I’d have to get to know them in person them to truly understand them.
In the sketchbook I collected shapes and colours like one would fill a pocket with stones and shells from the beach. Fiona was a generous host and in between the days she spent working out in the forest with Sonny (a different project to Rex’s owl hunt) she drove me out to the 12 Apostles, the beach, and one evening to wander a night-blind trail in search of fireflies .
I don’t often draw in the field. For my comics as well as my illustration work I often practice very consciously and purposefully committing things in my memory. Then methodically redrawing them later in both thumbnails, sketches and more detailed drawings.
Fiona and Sonny took me to stay in a little house they were renting for work. They would set out into the bush before sunrise to conduct their surveys, and I would wander about and draw.
This Fairy Wren with their carpet of forest sweeping down to the ocean was perched on the terrace. The vastness of the country would sometimes hit me when I was sketching small details like this tiny gentleman. There is a paleness to the antipodean early Autumn light. The bark, the grasses, the sky itself all had an odd and muted quality. It was chilly as the season was changing. The sun was traversed the heavens in the wrong direction. Perhaps it was also the jetlag, but there was an unreality to it all I never quite shook.
At the other end of the detail scale are pages like this. So many things would happen in a day. The landscape would change vastly as we drove across the Great Otway National Park and to record it all sometimes the barest pen lines were what I needed.
I don’t often take photographs to draw from unless I want certain details to be perfect. I find I never look at them again. Having to translate the memory of an image into lines deepens my relationship with it. It also changes the impression of a place or a moment into the building blocks of a illustration which I don’t want to be photorealistic (although I am still in a process of learning these stylistic truths about my own work…perhaps we all always are…)
One day I was exploring the forestry roads that spider webbed out from our Otways AirBnB when suddenly I heard a commotion in the trees. In the deep blue-green light a few meters from where I stood a mob of Kangaroos was passing, moving their strange bulk with impossible grace. Lines and shadows being broken in ways had never seen before. I was mesmerised.
Then in another moment, they were gone.
Because my hold luggage never arrived with me in Melbourne, Traci took me into Ballarat on the first day to get more art supplies. At the time I was exploring working with watercolour, gouache and pencil crayons. I opted for watercolour pencils as a hold over. They bit the paper with satisfyingly soft power. I chose colour palates filled with blues, purples, greens and sandy tones.
The Kangaroo drawings are almost a cliche but it did feel magical every time I saw an Australian creature in real life for the first time. This one beneath a full moon was drawn near the end of my stay is a scene from outside Fiona and Traci’s house. The mauve, violet and electric blues were a vivid feature of those clear evenings.
Sketching Rex, and the rest of the dogs, the colour experiments and pages that I drew from these adventures is another story.
Thank you for spending time back in the pages of this notebook. Tell me about your processes in comments. I always love to know what and how other people are drawing.
GOBLIN