It was time for another collage drawing, and after the frenzied obsession of the World Cup, what better theme to draw than football? I scrambled together some of the football related items of mine – old ticket stubs, football stickers and keyrings mostly – plus drew a thing or two that I don’t actually have (those subbuteo players? Sorry, I stepped on and broke mine decades ago). You never know where these things will end. I’m happy with the final outcome. Click on the image to go to my Flickr site for a closer view (or you could just move really close to the screen, but I don’t recommend it). Here is a step-by-step to show you how it was done:

Stage one: I had a World Cup keyring, and I knew I wanted to draw some football stickers. the subbuteo men were, however, drawn from memory, as the careers of my own ones were long ago ended by being-trodden-on-related-injuries. Speaking of little plastic figures who don’t do much on the big stage, there’s Wayne Rooney.

Stage Two: more details, more Panini stickers, plus some from previous years. I have old sticker albums, plus a small collection of random football stickers from Belgium, Germany, Italy. My Spurs shirt keyring makes an appearance, as does the THFC tie-pin, and you can see a bit of my old mid-90s Ireland shirt, the same one Fatehr Dougal Maguire wears to bed.

Stage Three: the ink drawing is done, and more old tickets, some thrity years old, plus some badges and the CD of ‘Three Lions’. the magazine France Football finds its way in – that’s a great magazine, probably the best. There’s a lace representing a football boot, unfortunately I’ve not owned boots in over 20 years so a lace is all you get.

Stage Four: time to add some colour. I toyed with the idea of only colouring part of it, but the colour was always going to be a big part of this drawing. It’s supposed to remind us we just had a World Cup in the rainbow nation, in a way. I had to think about composition, but in truth when I start these types of drawings I have no idea how they will look, I just go with what comes to mind as I go along. If I hadn’t done the step by step here, you’d still have guessed I go from left to right.

Stage Five: finished! Here is a detail from the final piece. You can see it at the top of this post. I’ll write another post about my thoughts on the recent World Cup later on.