Photographic reference

Originally published 16 July 2010

Discouraged by how the previous strip had turned out I went to Hastings beach and took some photos. That led to this, one of my most successful continuous backgrounds. It’s obviously traced over a photograph - this strip involves perspective - something I can normally never be bothered to deal with.

Here’s the photo.

The tall black garden shed things to the extreme left are net shops - structures unique to Hastings. The town never used to have a beach, but when the first groynes (the wooden fences that divide the beach up into sections and help control longshore drift, Smith’s sitting on one in yesterday’s strip) were built in the early 19th century, a tiny bit of beach suddenly appeared, and the fishermen built huts on this new strip of land in which to dry their nets. There wasn’t much room and there were lot of fishermen, each one was only allowed an area of beach of around nine square feet, so the huts went multi-storey. The beach has since grown around the huts but the huts have stayed as they were.

Hastings doesn’t have a harbour, so the boats are launched from the beach, and hauled up and down to the shoreline by tractors.

The cliff is to the proper scale this time.