Welcome to my blog! I want to share what I've been up to lately. The image above, which is the wraparound cover for Scrappy Jack a book I wrote and illustrated. It's a biography of my dad, who had plenty of stories to tell and he lived to be 100 years old. The original version called "So, That's That!"was given to him on his 100th birthday many years ago. That's me and my brother, dad, and two sisters in the junkyard where I grew up. The best playground any kid could ask for!
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| Every summer when my sister and I visit my brother in Ontario, we do a project. This year, it was laying the lino... I tried to capture the essence in this postcard size comic. I posted it on instagram but this version flows a bit better and is also cleaned up somewhat. It was not easy working this small... |
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I came across this great quote by W B Yeats...
"The matrix of innovation is a junkyard."
As a young girl growing up in a junk yard, my dad gave me and my three siblings jobs... picking copper out of wrecked cars or any other junk in the yard that contained copper wiring.
It was like mining for gold. At an early age I new the deference between copper, brass, tin, steel and aluminium. The wires were often coated in a plastic casing, which would have to be removed before my dad could sell the metal, so, he would just burn it off! Cough cough… not environmentally friendly!
Another job we had was to collect the smaller pieces of metal and separate them into different piles, then through them into lugger boxes ( a large steel container)
As the cars accumulated over the years, the yard got so full of junk my dad would
hire a crane service to come into the yard, to load all the car carcasses onto a flatbed long truck.
That and all the other junk would be taken to a bigger scrap metal dealer in Hamilton,
to be crushed into cubes and recycled…This repeated itself about every five years.
We had the best playground anyone could ask for.
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This was the front yard view of the house we lived in, that little white house,
was our first home we lived in when we were very small. It was used as a storage space at the time this picture was taken.
In the foreground is my father chopping wood and me and my brother with our dog.
The photo above this was the side view of the yard. Just to give you
a sense of scale. Behind that big shed was a skating rink, shown in the picture below.
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| I'm the one siting in the back seat of our car made out of junk. Very innovative I'd say! |
