Letter from Peter Lord to accompany our MORPH print
Dear Collector,
When I was approached by Cult Prints to produce a drawing of Morph, it came as quite a shock to realise that the little plasticine fellow was approaching his thirtieth year. All the rest of us - myself, Dave Sproxton and Tony Hart - are showing distinct signs of the passing years, but Morph, bless him, stays as youthful as ever. Animated characters have got it made in that respect; they breeze cheerfully down the years like Peter Pan refusing to grow up.
I often say that Dave and I created Morph, but there is a strong sense that he created himself. He emerged out of a lump of plasticine as a mischievous little bloke who interacted with Tony Hart and gradually over the years he evolved a recognisable character and personality. It was as if he told us who he was, what he’d think and what he’d do in any given situation.
I always used to draw Morph as well as model him in plasticine. When you’re writing stories, you very often start with a single drawing that suggests a mood, or a situation or a joke. It might be Morph skating on ice, or clambering up a full-size desk lamp or sulking because Chas has got a bigger slice of cake. The story grows out of the situation; and over the years I’ve filled sketchbooks with drawings and doodles of Morph in dozens - no hundreds - of situations.
So when I was asked to do a finished drawing of Morph, I wanted to use, or re-use some of those hundreds of small character and action sketches from my sketchbook. It didn’t take long to decide to redraw them. In the original sketch-book context, drawings are never properly finished. They’re only ever a means to an end, and so they’re incomplete, or on top of each other, or mixed up with phone-numbers and shopping lists. Because drawing Morph is pretty well second nature now - I just drew them again, Some of the doodles are in ball-point pen (blue medium point Bic pens to be exact). I love ball–point. I know some artists are rather snooty about them, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve grown up with them, I’ve been drawing with them for forty-five odd years and I’ve really got used to them now. By the way, you can do lovely subtle things with a good old Bic biro.
I coloured some with those water-soluble coloured-pencils - what a wonderful invention they are! And for the main image I used coloured pencils straight – I’ve always been a coloured-pencil sort of fellow - never could get the hang of paint.
My one regret is that while Morph is ever-new and ever-young, we’ve somehow lost his original box. So the one I’ve drawn here is based on memory and old photographs. But I still have high hopes that the original will turn up somewhere. Nothing gets thrown out here at Aardman.
Peter Lord