Our old family radio, and my 16mm projector.

Which I could suppose should be titled "they don't make them like they used to", but isn't. The radio was my first hands on bit of technology that I remember. The missing knob is to change the waveband, this radio pulled in many short-wave stations and I loved to spend hours listening to them. As a four-five year old, I would spend hours slowly turning the tuning knob listening to the weird sounds and forigen stations. I would try to transcribe the morse code that I could hear or simply listen to voices from far, far away.
On the facia you can see the BBC supplied stickers when they changed wavelengths and station names in 1967. I still miss the Home service (now BBC Radio 4). And although it still works, I don't use this radio much as it needs an external aerial and the chassis is live so there's 230 volts AC on that spindle poking out. It also make me sad as the warm, slightly muffled tones make me think of long, long ago.
The projector also works although I have managed to lose the mains lead which means that actually it doesn't. It would be interesting to put the image up against the HDTV we have here. The image quality of 16mm Kodachrome is simply stunning and it was a very sad day when Kodak discontinued it a couple of years ago. There is simply no other film like it. It was expensive. £50 for about three mins, but as a once-a-year tart it was lovely. I also have the matching camera - a Filmo 70.

WestFest - the map is finally drawn!

52 hours of my life, three sheets of A2 cartridge paper, Inktense pencils, various fine pens, glue and three teabags = WestFest map. This is the bottom corner. On the instance on my son, I did 2mm caricatures of some of the people likely to be there on the streets, plus the traditional self-portrait. Not that anyone will be able to see them.

The maps about four times bigger than this bit, although this is the more interesting corner.

I mainly used Derwent Inktense watercolour pencils for the colouring. These are waterproof once they have been made wet and dried again; so you can draw over the top without disturbing the colour below. This illustration used quite a lot of pencil, so I'm going to have to buy some more soon.

The paper I use is normal cartridge but I stain it with cold tea to give it an aged appearance before I start.

Once the illustration is finished it is scanned and then sometimes tidied up in Adobe Photoshop. I try to keep this to a minimum other than preparing it for print, in this illustration I did use Photoshop to add to the large estate on the right of the picture. I also used it to add the caricatures as mentioned above.