The Pax

The Longford Bestiary: The Pax

Anyone familiar with my blog will know that I am currently trying to compile Ideas for for a project called The Longford Bestiary. So far I just have scary monsters, so last night I was trying to think of a benevolent creature a bit like Tom Bombabil, someone to maintain the countryside or something less boring. So I came up with the Pax, he’s based on a man who used to live on my road when I was a child.

The Longford Bestiary: 'The Razor Bird', 'The Banshee, and the 'Hairy Eyes'

I had an idea the other day to do a small picture book that would act as a tourist guide to the monsters of Co. Longford. First of all it's an excuse to draw monsters but it also gives me a chance to remember my child hood and bring back those things that scared me at night. Its just an idea at the moment but I plan to do a huge range of creatures and to locate them in a certain part of longford. For example the razor bird (which I am still not happy with) would spend its time mostly in Longford town and hang around razor blade alley at night.The Hairy eyes would live at the top of Cairn hill and the Banshee..Im not sure maybe bog land near from where I was born. Anyways will be doing more.If any Longford people know any monsters they heard about ..let me know.

Ballagh Road

 I went back to Ireland for a month this summer. It rained everyday and my cat was killed by a car. Pretty depressing really. Among all this greyness and sadness I noticed that a pet dieing was very much a ritual in my family (as I'm sure it is most family's)and that we always went through the same motions, searching, finding and burying. Mum , Dad and myself would desperately search, Dad would always find the animal dead, Dad would always bury the animal..alone. I tried to document the whole process in 3 ink drawings.The long picture with the most rain is my dad telling me he had found the cat and he was dead. Although they seem depressing these images made me feel better, i had managed to document something that had always happened and had always been relatively quickly forgotten. The cat's name was Francy. He was a bit of a dick...as most cats are.