Focus on Oor Wullie - Scotland's favourite son

Posted by John Reynolds on

I love printing Oor Wullie. The character is so beautifully drawn by Dudley D Watkins (and his successors as the strip's draughtsman) that it's always a pleasure to pick the panels or details to enlarge. 

Watkins was a master of line and composition. Each panel seems beautifully proportioned. You can read more about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_D._Watkins 

Watkins, by the way, was also the first to draw Desperate Dan in the Dandy and Lord Snooty in The Beano. 

As a result, Oor Wullie is a great subject to screenprint. Panels have great composition, so it's relatively easy to pick some to stand alone as screenprints.

I also enjoy the fragments of Scots language that Oor Wullie uses, from 'sair fecht' (idiomatically 'a hard life') to 'braw' (almost directly from the Norwegian, apparently, meaning 'great').

And of course he's often referred to as Scotland's favourite son - a reference to his choice in a survey of illustrious Scots above the likes of Sean Connery and Robert Bruce. Which means that there's a sense of the archetype - you can see a panel featuring Oor Wullie and have a feeling that he's speaking for the nation.  


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