When the Renaissance painters rediscovered perspective, did fans experience it the way we experience 3D movies? Was the depth of emotion in Baroque anything like Technicolor was for us? Or THX?

When I ran into Sassoferrato’s Virgin at Prayer at the National Gallery in London, it was like running into a time machine, and I didn’t know if I was going forward or backwards. I knew immediately that I would have to finger-paint it on my iPad as soon I got back to my own time period.

It took me a couple of months longer than I expected, and I missed my self-imposed deadline — I wanted to be done in time to send it as a Christmas gift — but I got there in the end.

Epilogue: I finished the painting about 3 months ago but, sadly, haven’t painted anything since. I have a half-finished Edward Hopper rip-off in the works but my muse has left me and who knows when she’ll be back. Time for a new hobby?

Naval establishments in those days were almost defined by their automats and automats were the place to be for a certain kind of junior sailor. There were the living quarters, the dining hall, the bar if you were old enough and the automat if you were not. I was not.

There were two occasions to visit the automat and it presented quite a different aspect for each occasion.

Killing time after lunch, waiting for class to begin, you encountered the brash, flashing automat. At lunchtime, the automat was a buzzing hive of sailors drinking crap coffee from the crap coffee machine, playing video games and sitting around crap little tables munching crap snacks from the crap little dispenser things tempting you with their little A-H and 1-9 buttons that made their inner robot spring to life and threaten to dispense the pack of tutti-fruities to keep you awake through the afternoon’s boredom but, ultimately, disappointing you with physics-defying feats of cruelty, snatching your tutti-fruities back into its greedy maw or dangling the little snack mere inches above the dispenser tray with all the other unreachable tokens of misfortune.

It was in such an automat that I first completed Dragon’s Lair to great applause and where I first found all the Easter eggs in Track ‘n’ Field. It was where Alf Menzies and I made it to the end of Super Mario Bros (though we never did defeat the final Bowser or, as we called him, the big green thing) and where we emptied the trivia machine, Blockbusters, of all its pound coins every day. But that was the happy automat. The other automat is the one that looms, forbidding, in my memory.

“The fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight on your quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an eeeevil dragon…. Lead on adventurer! Your quest awaits!”

Can you tell how many times I played Dragons Lair?

Melancholy automat was a dark, empty hall of flickering lights; the only place open at 2:30AM when the bus back to base after a weekend in civvy street dispensed its young, tired human cargo.

I remember several variations of that journey back from the exciting world of stolen kisses, distant family and fading friends still plodding their way through their school years while I served Queen and country: Portsmouth to Helensburgh; Bexleyheath to Fareham. The worst of all was the journey from Sidcup to Torpoint and HMS Fisgard.

It started on Platform 2 at Sidcup Station (where the Rolling Stones began) and the 12¾ miles to Charing Cross. Then came the long, rumbling Circle Line trip to Paddington in time for the 4-hour train ride down to Plymouth. At Plymouth Station, it was a short cab ride to Devonport and, most romantic in my misty memories, the long chug-a-lug of the Torpoint Ferry as it dragged itself along its heavy chains across the dark, forbidding Hamoaze.

By the time you got to the Cornwall side of the river you were well into the wee hours of the morning and, if you were lucky, could share a cab ride to the base and that was the moment when it hit you that you were in the Navy for real and for the foreseeable future. Then the short walk up the hill and the flash of the ID card to the bloke unlucky enough to be on gate duty at that time of the morning — those were my rituals — until, finally, the automat.

The automat was the only place to get food at that hour and it was a place entirely transformed from the bustling, mechanical bazaar of the daytime. At night, there was just you and the whir of the carousel dispensing your stale pastie; desperately needed sustenance after so many hours of travel.

The main lights were always off and you were condemned to peer at your pastie in the ancient microwave oven—the same oven used by Admiral Nelson himself— lit intermittently by the brazen flashing of the video games. Those sounds are still fresh and familiar—from the ding-a-ling-a-ling! of the fruit machine to the Beep-beep-BEEEEEEP! of Pole Position—until, eventually, the bright Ding! of the microwave would announce that it was time to wolf down my oggie before the sun came up and summoned me to my classes just a few, short hours later.

I didn’t think I’d ever finish this drawing. I thought my muse was gone. It happened before. I have a half-finished charcoal drawing of Mrs Clown that I started in 2001. I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up that drawing and stared at it, wondering how I would ever draw anything ever again.

I picked Hopper’s Automat precisely because it looked easy. I expected I’d be able to lose myself in the memories of automats past as my finger rubbed the image of Hopper’s lonely flapper girl onto the screen of my iPad but just the act of opening Art Studio was a challenge. The splash screen to me was Oglaf’s Muse or, more likely, her successor. Under her withering gaze, all confidence faded.

My previous painting had become a slog. My earliest finger-paintings took a mere hour or two each. No wonder The Impressionists were so prolific! But copying the old masters was hard work and a drain on my enthusiasm. Hopper was easier but each time I fired up Art Studio the memory of Sassoferrato bade me close it down just as quickly.

But it’s done now and the long, forgotten memories of automats past can go back to the dark place where they so lately rested.

I have all her albums on CD or vinyl. I’m almost glad that she only makes an album every few years because it gives me something to look forward to. They are all brilliant.

My favourite Sade memory is when we had a cabin at Tahoe and I took my Little Clown every weekend for two or three years. He skied. I snowboarded.

We shared the cabin with 11 other people but one Saturday night we had the cabin to ourselves. We had the wood-burner stove going and all the lights were off, and we were listening to Sade’s Love Deluxe — me on the couch and five-year-old Dylan in an armchair. When Pearls came on he got tears in his eyes and came to snuggle with his dad tighter than any little boy ever snuggled.

I still get tears in my eyes.

PS. If you look closely in the crowd at Live Aid, you can see me in the seats on the right of the stage.

Ingrid Bergman’s Elsa is the woman caught between the cynical man she loved and lost and the man who wants to save the world. You probably know half the lines even if you have never seen it.

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.

Of course, I had to draw her.

Rick: Don’t you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all this? I mean what you’re fighting for.
Victor Laszlo: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.
Rick: Well, what of it? It’ll be out of its misery.
Victor Laszlo: You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who’s trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.

Did you know that Rick never actually says, “Play it again, Sam!” Go watch it and find out.

More sketches on Flickr.

I think that’s enough copying for now though. Time to come up with my own idea. A portrait, maybe.

Funny thing about Monet prints… the images that turn up in the google vary so much in colour and tone that you have to decide which version of a Monet painting you are going to paint.

In hindsight, I like the muted second one best but the yellow in the clouds makes me think the bottom-right is closest to the original.

Makes me want to go track down the original to see what colour it is. Anyone seen it?

Same deal with the Sunrise. Check it out.

Too lazy to crow the day.

Actually getting the tattoo was pretty cool.

Tattoo parlours always intimidated me from the outside but inside it was just like going to the dentist (if your dentist had a lot of tattoos) [is that supposed to be less intimidating? — ed]. My hostess – I wish I remembered her name. The google was no help. I’ll call her Tattooed Lady – sat me down and pulled out a Bic razor. Ooooh! Didn’t expect that. Never had my legs shaved before (or since).

Next, Tattooed Lady traced the outline of a dragon with a Bic ballpoint pen (didn’t expect that either) before going over it with the needle thingie. Holy crap! It hurts when the needle hits your tibia! I don’t know how people can tolerate it when they get the really bony bits – like the top of their feet – tattooed. When I mentioned this to Tattooed Lady, she showed me the half-finished tiger that she was having on her skull.

Colouring the tattoo didn’t really hurt (though, oddly, when I had my other tattoo done it was the colouring that hurt most). As far as I could see, Tattooed Lady was working blind because all I could see was a mess of red and yellow ink. Every now and again, she would wipe it away and I’d get a brief glimpse of a stunningly vivid dragon before the ink (or was it blood?) would flood back and my dragon faded back into the mess.

When she was done, she covered it with a bandage which quickly got soaked with red ink (or was it blood?). She gave me the after-care speech and sent me on my way.

I happened to be staying with my mother at the time and it was hard to hide the huge, red-soaked bandage. She assumed the worst but all sympathy vanished when she found out that I had not been in a horrible accident.

Everyone thought I was nuts. I got all the usual lectures.

“Only bad people get tattoos. People will think you are a bad person.”
“You’ll regret it when you are older.”
“They cost a fortune to have removed.”

But I can honestly say that I am still fiercely proud of my tattoos. I don’t notice them very often but when I do, I still get a flash of pride – as though I drew them myself. I know a ton of people that regret their tattoos and it’s usually because they are sick of seeing them or because they got some spur-of-the-moment image that they don’t like any more. Don’t even get me started on the people that tattoo the name of a former lover.

To summarize, my tips for getting a tattoo that will give you a lifetime of pleasure:

• Get it on a part of your body (ideally not a bony part) that you don’t have to stare at all the time
• Don’t settle on the first image that takes your fancy. Take your time over it. You will have to look at it for the next 60 years. Make a few trips to the parlour until you are sure.
• Don’t be under the influence when you get it.

Bonus tip that may or may not apply to you:

• I like to make big decisions alone. Getting advice is fine but in the end, it’s me that has to make the decision and I like to do it free from pressure. I make better decisions that way so I went to the parlour alone. YMMV.

I still love my tattoos. Will you still love yours in 60 years?