 15 March 2026 sketchbook (detail) ~ Vincent Cavanagh © 2026 First-quarter Blog Digest for 2026. What’s been happening. Website-wise, there are now ‘next-post, last-post’ buttons at the bottom of each World Youth Day Lisbon blog post for ease of navigation through that series. It just took a lot of time, repetition, and wrangling with the Weebly website editor to get it done. Hooray!  Current versus possible future CavanaghArt logo mascots ~ Vincent Cavanagh © 2026. Art-wise, I did have a day spent doodling out ideas for Bishop Stumbers cartoons, which was a positive. Most of them were about what said bishop might get involved in on a WYD pilgrimage. We shall see if some of them might get developed beyond their initial ballpoint drafts. Rattling about my brain at the moment is a possibility of re-drawing the CavanaghArt bird logos to better reflect my current style of art. The original set of birdies are well and truly about a decade old at this point, in 2026, and I’m certainly not the same artist I was back then. Whether anything actually happens on this idea, or it just keep rattling around my head, is another matter. Also, after the suggestion of a friend, I have been down the rabbit hole of investigating what it would take to self-produce stickers from my art and my conclusion was that, for me, it would be far more effort than it was worth. The shear amount of equipment, testing of cutting depths, sticker paper stocks, lamination, and software quirks is, to my mind, on a par with near-professional, home coffee-brewing: metric scales, correct dosage of coffee beans, the right grind size, purified water, puck preparation, flow rate, etcetera. I already have enough furores of my own with trying to convince the home printer to print on the paper-card stock I want it to. The last thing I want is to increase the number of machines throwing hissy fits in my face because it’s the wrong phase of the moon when I’m at my wits end racing to print something off for a special occasion the following morning. I’m not ruling out that stickers might happen, just that doing-it-myself is not for me. On the personal front, after 2025, I’m still recovering from burnout. Though it’s not helpful when one continues to get sucked into the temporal blackholes of YouTube (the “new” smoking), be overwhelmed by dehumanising discourse around ‘Artificially Intelligent’ generation of images online, and catching oneself interrogating any creative idea for art that pops up with whether, or not, it passes cost-benefit analysis. Talk about being brain-rinsed into mechanistic thinking, oi vey! It’s all indicative of the fact that there’s been a distinct lack of humour in my life of late. All fret and no play makes for a crabby, frustrated artist. The sensible thing would be to just say, “stuff the lot of it (AI generation) and do it (Art) anyway!” without expectation for it to — ahem — “perform well.”  2026 Lunar New Year celebrations. (Photo: Vincent Cavanagh © 2026) Thankfully, there have been some diversions in the form of meeting up with WYD friends at a Lunar New Year’s celebration, birthday party invites, wandering around the odd bookshop or two, colouring projects for others, and the odd heritage train ride here and there. A main issue for me is a lack of motivation and sufficient reason for me to overcome lethargy and get outside, physically and mentally. ■ Seoul Issues South Korean flag waving on the evening of the WYD Lisbon Vigil. (Vincent Cavanagh © 2023) I know that one should “never say never”, but with where I’m at right now I don’t see myself going to Korea in 2027 for World Youth Day Seoul. Don’t get me wrong, I do have strong emotions towards the next WYD, and more so the friendships born of the last one, but that doesn’t out-weigh knowing first-hand what the shear toll a WYD pilgrimage can be on a person and how much it truly demands of them. Which isn’t anything I’m willing to put myself through again—especially if it’s not what God intends me to do. At the end of the day, it’s all in His hands, not mine. ■ 2026 Q1 Blog posts8 Jan 2026 – Year in Review: 2025. 18 Feb 2026 – First new bit of art that I have made in a long while. 27 Feb 2026 – Back to Loftus for the annual Tramway Festival. 3 Mar 2026 – Finally posting about the farewell V Set trip to Kiama last year. ■ Parting NotesOn a more positive note, I’ll leave you readers with this Part 2 video by Daniel Folta detailing his process of depicting the Nativity in oil paint. For myself, it is a calm and meditative experience watch him bring his painting to life. It’s not actually been a year, but it has certainly felt like it since I had made a new artwork. The drought broke on February 14th when I received a request from fellow creative and poet Alexandra Pierotti to draw my own version of a Christian meme that can often be found circulating on social media sites in one form or another for a personal project of her own. She has kindly given me permission to share this with you, for which I am truly grateful 🙏
I had three false starts, which would begin okay and then, after a point, I’d go and add too much detail that pushed it beyond legibility. All before my brain had time to react to what I was doing. Recalling a previous (unpublished) “doodle”, something finally clicked for me. What I needed to do was cartoon, not illustrate like it was going to be a submission to a scientific journal or something.
 The completed artwork. ~ Vincent Cavanagh © 2026 You can find Alexandra Pierotti’s poetry on her blog at Poetry For Wellmindedness. Her latest works of poetry can be found on Facebook.
Vincent Cavanagh 18 February 2026 Surrealism incoming! Illustrated 30 March 2024  Vincent Cavanagh, 2024 A spotlight on Bishop Stumbers’ short-lived career in stand-up comedy. Congratulations to anyone who “gets” the cameo appearances on the far side table ;) With apologies to Messrs Astley and Baker. Vincent Cavanagh 30 Mar 2024 / Holy Saturday Illustrated 1 January 2023
 'Pannier Tank and Diesel Shunter' Vincent Cavanagh © 2022 I have painted in a while, but I did thankfully do a small "just for fun" painting on Good Friday (15 April 2022). It's little scene, set in either the early hours of the morning or before dusk, containing a generic-looking Great Western Railway Pannier Tank engine opposite a British Railways Class 08 Diesel shunter that appears to be having bit of trouble starting up. Note the fireworks coming out the top of it. The basis for this picture was not Thomas the Tank Engine; rather it was because of two OO gauge locomotives that we own: a GWR Pannier and a BR Green 08.
For something different I used a "earth tone" palette of colours consisting mostly of Yellow Ochre, English Red and Sepia, with a bit of Ivory Black added here and there. God bless to you all and Happy Easter. He is Risen! Alleluia! ~ Vincent Cavanagh, 20 April 2022. For 2 reasons: 1) I've been preoccupied editing our June Holiday videos and; 2) I totally forgot about the website. Apologies. Okay so let's start with the artwork then; which requires us going back to May:  St Pope Paul VI. First off is this watercolour of Saint Pope Paul the Sixth that I did as a Memorial Card for a friend's Priestly Ordination at the end of May this year (2021).  Pentecost 2021. Then we skip back a week, or so, to Pentecost 2021 for this quick, unplanned sketchbook drawing. I'd been pulling my hair out earlier struggling to do something for Pentecost digitally and it wasn't working out, and then just before, say, 10 or 11 o'clock that night I made this with a black, blue and red ballpoint pens with text highlighters as well. You don't always need fancy stuff to make art.  St Charbel Makhlouf. And now come to the missing blog month of July with this watercolour of St Charbel Makhlouf, Maronite monk and priest, and a patron of Lebanon. At the moment I don't know if, or how long, this "pure watercolour" (ie, no ink outlines or such) style is going to stay. I think, on reflection, that it came about for 2 reasons: 1) during a conversation with a family friend whose eyesight is not what it once was, I realised that some of my more ink-heavy pictures (such as St Joseph and the infant Jesus) had no real clarity.  St Joseph and the infant Jesus (2020). I knew what I was looking at, but someone with bad eyesight couldn't untangle the mess of black ink from the sometimes equally dark watercolours; and 2) I'd been watching some watercolour demonstrations on Youtube (link here) and there was one where the instructor painted an picture of Santa Claus, for a Christmas Card, in with just Red, Yellow Ochre and, I think, Payne's Grey or Black. So that was an added impetus to change my style: I wanted to also try painting a face with just watercolour. And that is the condensed set of reasons why I painted Paul VI in watercolour (see above). Now as I mentioned earlier in this post, I've been, and I am still working, on editing and uploading our June Holiday to South Australia videos to Youtube. If you want to see where we went, I've put the first (in no way chronological) video at the bottom of this blog post. As of 12 July 2021, 12:49pm, there are 3 South Australia videos up on my Youtube channel (link here), with much more to come. So until next time (barring me forgetting again!) God bless and stay safe. Lately I've been participating in an online tuition course for Blender 3D, which has been a good if somewhat challenging experience. The challenging part being trying to work in a group with many other students in multiple different time zones (and the associated late nights that come with it), but I'll talk about that more in a later post. Sometime in May. Hopefully. Below is the sketch that I made last night to release some of my creative frustrations:  Christ Pantocrator (2021). I just needed to do something religious to make up for my recent lack of any such artworks. The original Christ Pantocrator (roughly translated as "All-Mighty" in Greek), that is the inspiration of this image, is one of the first icons depicting Jesus in early history of the Church, and remains to this day a very important image in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It depicts the two natures of Christ, being both fully God and fully human, through the different sides of His face. Below are the mirrored composites of the left and right sides of my rough sketch:  Pantocrator Blessing, Mirrored.  Pantocrator Gospels, Mirrored. Honestly, I had no real plan about how to mirror this image, I just had the vaguest of recollections of what a Pantocrator Icon should look like and I went from there. So I sketched in out with blue ballpoint pen and went over it with a water-based black marker, and added colour with text highlighters. In hindsight I really should've either scanned or at least taken a photo of the under drawing, but I decide to let it go and just keep on drawing with the black marker.
The one real difference between this sketch and the Icon it's based on, is that the real Pantocrator doesn't have the wounds of Christ in it, as far as I know. So, until the muse next takes me or I need another outlet to create, God bless and stay safe. Much of what I have been working on during July hasn't been finished yet, so I have decided to share with you a bit of a ramble through my sketchbook instead. The first one is a series of sketches of Bishop Stumbers from which I started building an animation. That animation is far from finished, but there is a draft version of it on Instagram (@cavanaghcreative). In it you see Bishop Stumbers walking along engaged in social media activities on his phone, until he walks into a wall, recovers, and continues tweeting etc.  The second one is of a coffee addicted robot, or coffee-bot.  The last one is a new character in a classic heroic pose.  I've also been working on a 4 part comic strip, but it is only about 70% completed. Each part is 3 panels wide. I'm currently wrestling with how best to share it online because Weebly displays vertical and square images much better than horizontal images.
Since April 2020 the regular emailed newsletter has been in hiatus. For the last few years the list of whom we send it to hasn't been growing, in fact it has shrunk a little due to deaths here and there. Given that no one has been asking why it is missing, it seems to be the right decision to let it lie fallow for a while until there is a good reason to re-start it, eg some very positive news to share. It has been some time since I shared the development of a final image. So here it is..... It started with some drawings in my visual diary.  Then I started to re-draw my Sockethead character on A4 paper.  After that, the ink work began and resulted in this:  The ink work got scanned into the computer, and then the digital colouring began. And this part was the most time consuming, with many screen hours getting things 'just so'. But I think he was worth it.  And I can't end without the mini-story that goes with it.
SOCKET-HEAD ! ! ! =============== "If you'll <sniff> notice he isn't <snort> GROUNDED" — Electrical Humour. |
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