Artist’s recreation of the events high above the Himalayas. Animal-lovers will be pleased to hear that both the goat and leopard survived the flight.
In 1924, pioneering aviatrix Kitty Hawksley set out to be the first person to fly over the peak of Trundling-Dee, standing at 8603 meters and the third highiest mountain in the world.
Major Reginald Spoon of the King’s Royal Hussars had led an unsuccessful expedition to make a first summit of the mountain the previous year. The two lead climbers A. V. Larnch and Thomas Wobble had reached a height of 8000m when they ran out of milk for their tea and had to abandon the attempt.
Hawksley carried out preparations at a remote landing strip at the foot of the mountain range and it was while parked there over night that a mountain goat hid in the passenger cockpit in an attempt to evade a snow leopard that was prowling the area.
The next day Hawksley climbed into her biplane, completely unware that she now had a stowaway onboard. While the plane was taxiing for take-off, the leopard reappeared, got wind of the goat in the plane and making a spectacular leap, managed to scramble onboard just as the wheels left the ground.
The leopard continued it’s dogged, or should that be catted?, pursuit of the goat which resulted in a high altitude stand-off worthy of any barnstormer’s display of wing-walking.
Impeded by the extra weight, the biplane was unable to reach altitude, and so Hawksley had to abandon her attempt to fly over the mountain. However, she did, or rather her passengers did, set a record for the highiest altitude achieved by either a goat or a leopard. A record that was to remain unbroken for thirteen years until 1937 when another aviatrix, Betty Boing, took her goat Trevor on a flight across the Alps.
So what has this all got to do with recycling an image?
What we’re going to cover
I really enjoyed creating the above image. It took me a bit of time, particularly to draw the biplane, so after finishing it I started to think if I could recycle any elements of it to create subsequent images.
In this image I’ll go through some examples I came up with and then go through a few ideas to recycle images.
Here is the biplane by itself. I felt that it was a shame if I’d gone to the trouble of carefully drawing it only to not use it again.
Choose an image to work with
To try out some of the ideas we’re going to cover, choose an image of your own to work with. It could be from a recent or an older drawing. Choose something that catches your eye, or might be fun to work with.
Visible
I used to part of a ‘word of the day’ challenge, whereby I ad to come up with a daily cartoon to make a certain word.
For visible, I started off thinking in terms of animals in nature that were either concealing themselves or putting on a show. From there, I substituted army soldiers and that the such like. Finally, I ended up with a row of warships being spotted from the air. I thought I would add a double-twist of painting the biplane in a bright colour to also make it highly visible.
Exercise - Word association
What words do you associate with the image?
For example:
flight
air
travel
old-fashioned
dangerous
exciting
etc
Now try it out with your own image
Social Distancing
During the height of Covid-19 I put together a series of illustrations to promote social distancing, hand washing etc. I had been playing around with the idea of bird hitching a lift on an airplane’s wings, and so I thought I’d have them on opposite wings for the sake of balance and also to keep their distance.
Current events
Are there any current events that could be combined with your image?
There could be in the form of:
current news
important concerns (e.g. environment)
socail media memes
popular culture (music, TV, movies, games, etc)
Exercise - current events
Try and connect your image to a current event. Use the above suggestions as prompts.
Adding new characters
Finally I’m going to return to the bare outline of the biplane.
Instead of having Kitty Hawksley or the leopard and goat, what other characters could I have flying the plane or even sitting on the wings?
Here are a few possible sources:
look over existing characters you’ve drawn
If it’s a human character in the original, try swapping it for an animal
If it’s an animal character in the original try swapping it for a human
How about a famous person or existing cartoon character
Exercise - add new characters
If you have the outline of your image, like the biplane above, then make a copy and sketch on top of it. Have fun adding new characters to the image.
Here’s what we covered
word association
current events
adding new characters
One more thing…
Talking about characters, I’m currently working on a course on how to build a cast of characters. If you’d like to find out more, add your name and best email address below.