The latest set of flipsco GCSE English literature revision cards, with illustrations by me. You can buy them here along with many others.
Sadly the allegory of truth-twisting and injustice felt entirely relevant, but more happily, I was able to refine my still-imperfect horse drawing abilities.
Here are Boxer, Clover, and Molly (obviously a relation of My Little Pony, but without the hearts on her bum) – along with some of my million practice drawings. The internet did get pretty convinced that I was trying to buy a horse!
I’ve got better at getting the back legs of a horse facing in the right direction. In fact, I got so confident that my housemate (already an expert horse-drawer) and I decided to tackle the ultimate artistic challenge – a horse riding a bicycle (mine is the pen one, my housemate’s is the rather better pencil one).
I definitely find pigs less stressful to draw than horses – I love their little toes. The difficulty was trying to give them the right characters. Interestingly, Orwell specifies the breed for some of them (Old Major is a Middle White, Napoleon is the farm’s only Berkshire), so plenty of agricultural research was needed.
As well as farm animals, I researched Soviet propaganda posters – I found this site particularly useful: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/soviet-propaganda-graphic-design-wolfsonian. There’s some amazing graphic design on these. I particularly love the one of the workers defeating the dragon of global imperialism (the eighth one down), and I copied bits of them in my cover design, only with more pigs.
