Favourite Things is a regular exploration of creative people's top five favourite things. It could be a book, a piece of artwork, a much-loved city, an ornament or a favourite hobby. If you'd like to share your Favourite Things, email things@creativeboom.co.uk. Today we welcome Stevyn Colgan, a British writer, artist and speaker. And here are his Favourite Things...
1. Viewmasters
I was born in 1961. I saw the Moon Landings. I saw Star Wars in its opening week. My childhood was during an age of boundless imagination and pride in achievement, unrivalled by any other time except maybe the Victorian Era. Everything we read, everything we saw, told us that the future would be brilliant with flying cars, holidays on the Moon, Bacofoil onesies and food in pill form. And the Viewmaster was one of those toys that gave us a glimpse of the treats to come. Before computers, mobile phones and sitting in cinemas wearing Elvis Costello’s cast-off sunglasses, the Viewmaster showed us glorious, technicolour 3D images like we’d never seen before. I fell in love with them and have collected them ever since. I even have one of the original models from the 1930s. This is just a small part of my collection. I am at least four times more sad than the photo suggests.
2. Signed Books
I’m not really a collector – except for Viewmasters – and I’m definitely not a completist. So I don’t collect signed books per se, but I do happen to have a lot of them because I’m lucky enough to meet, or to have met, lots of amazing people as part of my job. On my shelves here I have signed tomes from Douglas Adams, Eric Sykes, Willie Rushton, Kenneth Williams, Ray Harryhausen, Ronnie Barker, Norman Wisdom, Patrick Moore, Tom Sharpe and many others no longer with us. They're all pretty worthless to a collector as most of them are personally dedicated to me but they mean the world to me. I didn't get them as an investment; they're little happy moments from my life forever preserved in paper and ink. And they're much more personal than a photograph of me mugging it with them. The photo shows one of my favourites: When I was invited to the 30th birthday party of Viz magazine, I took along my copy of Co-creator Chris Donald's biography, Rude Kids, and asked the contributors for their signatures. They all went one step further and did cartoons of some of their best-known creations. Glorious.
3. Bone 37
Like many kids, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Okay, I still am. So when a good friend of mine, the sculptor and special effects wizard John Coppinger, was asked to reconstruct the tail of the world’s most famous dinosaur, I had to get involved. Dippy the Diplodocus has stood in the central hall of London’s Natural History Museum since 1905. She's not actually a fossil; she’s a plaster and coal dust cast made from moulds of a real fossil Diplodocus held in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Anyway, for most of her afterlife, Dippy had been displayed with her tail dragging on the floor. But in 1993, the NHM decided that the tail should be lifted as new evidence suggested that this was more correct. John got the job of moulding and casting every one of the 80+ tail bones in lightweight fibreglass and carbon fibre. It was such a big job that he was happy to accept help from me and other friends. Many of the original plaster ‘bones’ didn’t survive the process but some did and the NHM kindly let us keep one of the originals each. Mine is the 37th bone from the tip. Visiting London and seeing Dippy when I was 10 years old was one of the most profoundly inspiring moments of my life. To actually own one of the bones I saw that day is beyond awesome. It’s awelots.
4. Arthur Andrews’ Horn
I grew up in Cornwall, a land where there are more artists than earwigs, and I was fortunate enough to have three of the most fantastic art teachers anyone could wish for. Phil Howells, Jim Tinley and Arthur Andrews were never less than wonderful; supportive, trusting and informative. They even opened up the school after hours and at weekends to let us pursue our passions. I’m pleased to say that two of them are still with us: Phil is in his 80s but still a magnificent watercolourist; Jim is a potter and oil painter still working in the village of Porthleven. Sadly, we lost Arthur in the 1980s. He was a dapper little chap, full of nervous energy and enthusiasm. He once saw me admiring a beautiful Kudu (a kind of antelope) horn he kept in his classroom for students to draw. I was fascinated by its shape and the fact that it had grown that way naturally and organically. It looked like fine sculpture. ‘Take it home, dear boy’, he said. ‘I picked it up in Africa in the 1950s. It’s been drawn by every child I’ve ever taught but none of them ever found it as fascinating as you do. Take it home and keep finding everything fascinating.’ I did. It’s a thing of absolute beauty and hangs in my studio to remind me of him. I still find the world endlessly fascinating. Arthur is one of the reasons why.
5. My First Payment
Cornwall is the poorest county in the UK and, while it’s a lovely place for a holiday, it can be tough to live there. There are few industries and most jobs are seasonal. Winter can be a bleak time for many families. No wonder then that my careers teacher’s advice was, ‘Get out of Cornwall’. And so, in 1979, I did just that. Realising that my chances of getting a job as a creative were next to zero, I swallowed my artistic ambitions and became a police officer. And, over the next few years, I lost confidence in my abilities and knuckled down to doing my job as best I could and raising a young family. But then, in 1985, I met a man called James Murphy who was a hugely talented but undiscovered comics artist.
We had so many ideas between us that it was inevitable that we would end up trying to do something artistic together. It culminated in a small press comics imprint called Bigger Betty, specifically set up by us to discover new British talent. And we did just that. We found Sarwat Chadda, now a very successful youth fiction author, Dan Schaffer who now writes film screenplays for films and Jez Elford, a respected games designer. The business collapsed after a few years but I framed the very first cheque from the sale of our very first comic; it was testament to the fact that I could make money doing what I loved best. It’s up there, on the wall with Arthur’s horn and Bone 37 – a constant reminder of what I can achieve if I put my heart and soul into a project.