Today is the four year celebration of the founding of this blog. As the blog is really an attempt to track my slow progress as a creative person, each passing year seems like a worthy thing to take note of (see A Year Among Monsters; Monstrous Highlights; and Three Year Itch).

Looking back over the last year, it seems like the dominant themes of my work have been puppets, props and drawing. I hadn’t really anticipated illustration being such an important element, but I think because of finding all those Domestika illustration courses it really pushed me in that direction.

My top ten posts from the last year (and this was quite hard to compile because although I’m really negative about my art I feel like I’ve done a lot I’m proud of) are:

• Pickled Nightmare
• Meat Head Puppet
• La Befana, the witch of winter
• Pirate Puppet
• Robbie Redcap Puppet
• Ear Relics
• Accordion to Plan
• Egg Cup
• Robot Puppet
• Household Beasts pop up book

There seems little point trying to anticipate what the next year will bring. I have these Halloween props to create for the Museum of the Macabre, and I have a handful of Domestika courses still to do, so I imagine that they will take up the next few months, I’ve normally started thinking about Christmas-related projects by now, but I feel a bit energy-drained at the moment with work and family and everything.

So I was trying to think of a way to illustrate this post, and I wanted four of something, and I wanted to reflect some of what I’ve been up to recently, so after trying to draw the Teletubbies and the Beatles I then settled on the last four years of Chinese New Year animals with human bodies, in fineliner pen. These were all drawn while I was suffering from the pain of having had a wisdom tooth removed.