Alley Cat Rally mini projects

The release of my book is creeping closer! It’s less than a month before Alley Cat Rally is published in the UK, and over the past few weeks I have been nervously trying to think of things I can do to promote the book myself.

I’ve started by making a mini-site that gives a good overview of the book, the characters, and the places you can preorder it, alongside some other fun graphics and odds-and-ends.

That’s table stakes though, so I’ve done a couple more interesting projects that I’ve also made videos about.

The first mini-project is the ballad of the little washer. I’ve had this on my shelves for years, but a desire to open it up and add some ballast to it became a mission to connect it to the internet, programming it so it will spin whenever anyone visits the short link I set up to preorder the book:

The second project is a bit less technical, but only slightly: I made a plush version of Asta, the star of the book. She wears a great pair of goggles in Alley Cat Rally, so I had to figure out how to make them, and ended up rigging up my own vacuum-forming setup, on a home kitchen scale:

I am pleased with both of these projects, and also with the videos themselves! I think I am slowly getting more natural at using my voice, which I’m hoping will come in handy as I try to join my publisher in promoting the book!

February’s Fancies

This month in Ricky Trickartt’s wonderful world of colour, I’ve been pondering the backstory to Cecil’s Ride though a series of cat drawings. These are probably some of my favourite doodles over the past few weeks! Not all of the cats are to do with him though – the sack of cats came from Don Quixote, which I finished reading this month.

A couple of weeks ago two stories hit the internet at the same time- the resurrection of Skymall and release of footage from the new James Bond movie. The combination left me remembering Adele’s theme song to the last movie, and I imagined what James Bond would look like (and be thinking) if he ever got the opportunity to peruse a copy of Skymall on a long-distance flight.

I also found myself musing on the possibilities of throwing a hot dog so it would fly the length of a swimming pool. Maybe a 25-metre pool as that’s what was have here in the valley. I think my best bet would be some kind of balsa-and-tissuepaper wing construction. It’d make a great competition, but I don’t know if I’ll ever put this daydream into action, particularly if the hot dog is topped with mustard. That would just make a mess.

Drawing is fun!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “February’s Fancies”

 
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