Velopresso beasts on bikes

Last year my friends at Velopresso asked me to draw them a horde of cycling animals, people and beasties-in-general to decorate one of their beautiful pedal-powered coffee trikes. Trike 001 was recently launched during Bespoked in Bristol, where Velopresso also won the Constructors’ Challenge prize – HURROO!

Velopresso 001
Photo © Velopresso 2015

I haven’t seen it with my own eyes YET but I love the photos (more on Velopresso’s facebook page). The designer did a brilliant job arranging the crowd.

Bicycles are quite hard things to draw – not so bad as horses maybe (so many knees! On backwards!), but getting all the legs on the pedals? When the legs may be very short and belonging to pigs or sheep? Ach! I was afraid Velopresso, who clearly have an exemplary understanding of bicycle construction, would want drawings in better working order than I’d be able to muster – but luckily they were very supportive of skrunkiness and wrongness. I don’t know that my bike-drawing skills are much improved, but my repertoire of cyclists has certainly grown. Bring on the unicycling horse.

I must have drawn over 100 beasties or groups as I submitted about 70; I keep losing count, but I think there are 31 drawings on the final trike. Here are a few constituent beasts:
Tandem bearsVelopresso

ChickensLibrary
If you’d like to meet a Velopresso in real life it’s probably best to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

What happens in the Outer Hebrides

Whilst on holiday in the Small Isles, Inner and Outer Hebrides, I saw a lot of beasts. I did draw them a bit, but mostly retrospectively on napkins, bus timetables etc. This is not exactly what I saw happening on Eriskay – more a kind of summary of the day’s events:
Seal with large kite

I was going to say that the two images below did not represent my recent experiences in this way, but actually, the one on the left pretty much happened last week, except that the mouse himself was not at home when I opened the drawer.
Mouse in drawer and monsters eating a banana etc