Preparatory Flying Teapot sketch discovered
Printing the huge Flying Teapot poster prompted the question, whatever happened to daevid's original painting? As is so often the way with such things I imagine that it eventually ended up in the rubbish bin of the album sleeve printers repro department in the 70s. So the recent realisation that this drawing, which has been in the GAS archives forever, is almost certainly a fragment of the original sheet of the Flying Teapot cover painting came as a delightful surprise.
This delicate little postcard sized sketch is on piece of high quality French watercolour paper, embossed with the name of the manufacturers, Papeteries F.Bayon Moiran. The size of the embossing indicates that it is from a large sheet of that type of paper as the embossed name is usually proportional to the paper size. Along the top edge of the paper, where it has been cut, is a pencil line and splashes of water-colour paint from the illustration which was above. It's the same shade of blue as used on Flying Teapot, and the drawing itself is readily recognisable as the same as the cover.
So although it cannot be definitively proven, surely this is daevid's preliminary sketch from the bottom edge of the paper he prepared for the Flying Teapot cover painting.
