#034 Sort Out The House Week

20 reasons to love cycling / The Art Group at work

Hello, and welcome to Diagram Club, Episode #034. It’s the slightly late-running Tuesday edition - thanks for patience, as I’ve been largely off work this week.

In part #034: One of my most popular cycling cartoons reemerges, there’s been considerable progress around the house, a cafe cartoon drawn on actual paper, and numerous brand new paragraph breaks.

Introductory remarks

Before we proceed too far: Just to say that this Diagram Club newsletter is made possible by the brilliant Diagram Club Paid members.

Benefits of upgrading to the Paid version include:

• Mainly, you’re making this newsletter a viable thing for me to do

• But also, you can reuse of my work on your social media guilt-free

• There’s extra content below the Orange Line of Mystery

• And exclusive downloads, advance news about things I’m doing, etcetera

You can join Diagram Club Paid, monthly or annually, via any orange buttons looking a bit like this:

Enough of that - time for a diagram:

Cycling cartoon of the week

This week we’re going back to one of the first cycling cartoons I did, back in 2012. I was reminded about it this week because of a commission request, and realised I hadn’t posted it for ages. The text in the image is smaller than I draw these days, and so there’s a bigger and more readable version on my website here: 20 reasons to love cycling. And here’s larger versions of a few of the panels:

As you can tell there’s a bit more about the racing and road side of cycling than in my more recent work.

We decided that 20 Reasons was the cartoon to go big with merch-wise in the wake of the cycling euphoria of 2012 - Wiggo at the Tour de France, the London Olympics, etc. Tea towels were the chosen medium, printed en-masse, and we attempted to sell them at various cycling shows and the like.

It turned out that not quite as many people wanted cycling-cartoon tea towels as we’d originally envisaged, so I sold tea towels for quite a lot of years.

Am I still selling them? Well, no, but since you asked [No one asked - Editor] there are a good range of other cartoon-based products to be found in my shop. You can browse the available designs here.

This week’s activities - a brief report

The last ten days have been Sort Out The House Week. There’s been decluttering, cleaning, decorating, and taking things to places.

Here’s an image to give you an idea about the kind of thing this has involved.

Oh no - you can really see the dust

Everything is now labelled - the cat only escaped as she is non-adhesive.

Some of you won’t understand why we needed a ten-day week for these sorts of activities, but trust me, we did. I’m pleased to say that we have made really good progress, which I’m hoping will make a big difference to… well, my work, certainly, but also life generally.

But also: During the week I’ve unearthed a lot of cartoon-based goodies of all kinds, and in the Paid section below I’m going to be sharing one of them. And in coming weeks I’m going to be offering Paid members some of the exciting diagram-related finds. Like - actual physical items.

Cafe News

This week, a picture of the Monday Art Group at the Cafe. Drawn on real paper with a genuine pen (unusual).

I’m posting this for Jean, who isn’t very well at the moment. We really miss you Jean, and hope you get better very soon.

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Colour of the week (filler), followed by closing remarks

‘I can see the desk now’ brown.

Well, that’s just about the end of the newsletter for this week. Diagram Club Paid content continues below The Line. This week, as already heavily advertised: One of the cartoon goodies found during Sort Out The House Week.

The plan is to be back before too long with issue #035. Speak to you then.

Dave
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