Many Novocastrians will know Trevor Dickinson's work - even if they don't know his name.
The English-born, Newcastle-based artist's bright, quirky drawings of everyday Newcastle - found in an array of mediums including murals, books, zines, bags, tea towels, puzzles, prints and card games - capture the beauty of often-overlooked, ordinary aspects of Newcastle alongside some of the city's better-known landmarks.
His latest offering is My first book of Newcastle for its littlest locals and visitors.
Dickinson moved to Australia from London with his wife Jo and two children in 2002.
It was a big shift.
Homesick and wanting to feel more connected to his new home town, in January 2009 Dickinson decided to take some time away from his computer screen and his work in children's fashion design and get out to draw the city.
"It took me a while to get my head around the city - what did that was me going out and drawing Newcastle. That's what really changed it," Dickinson says.
The parts of Newcastle that Dickinson found himself illustrating weren't the most obvious or beautiful; he captured details of the city that some may consider mundane or are often ignored by those accustomed to seeing them in the streetscape, like mailboxes, shop frontages, quirky houses, wonky street signs, and empty buildings.
It's an approach Dickinson practices in all the cities he sketches, including Canberra, where he dedicated a whole book, Beautiful Bus Shelters of Canberra, to the city's unique concrete modular bus shelters (which just this month were heritage-listed).
"If you go to a foreign town that you've never been to before, as a foreigner, you pick up on things that the locals just don't notice, because it's there all the time," he says.
"You'll notice the shape of a telephone box or a post box or a manhole cover. Just odd things you might notice that they just would not. It's just part of their day-to-day life.
"I've been here for over 20 years. It's trying to keep that vision. It's quite hard because now I'm kind of a local."
Dickinson's drawings of Newcastle - which are drawn on paper while at the site or from photographs, then scanned onto a computer and coloured using Photoshop - were made from early 2019 through to mid-2020 and form the basis of his work, The Book of Newcastle.
The book serves as a personal portrait and visual diary of Newcastle through Dickinson's eyes and - amid a city that is steadily changing - also functions, he notes, as a kind of "historical document" of the place as it was then.
Dickinson updated the original The Book of Newcastle this year, adding 80 more drawings he's made over the past few years. Among them, many illustrations of Wallsend (taken from his The Book of Wallsend), and places like Raj's Corner on Beaumont Street, Stockton Bridge, and the drive-through-only KFC in Broadmeadow.
The updated book, which is due to be released in mid-October, served as a catalyst for his board book, My first book of Newcastle.
The board book is not his first foray into children's publishing. Dickinson wrote and illustrated a couple of children's books with a friend in England before he moved to Australia, and more recently, his My first book of Canberra.
"The kids' books are much simpler than my other books," Dickinson says.
"They are quite small drawings because I wanted them all to have the same thickness of line, and I wanted them to be flat colour and really iconic."
Aimed at babies and toddlers, My first book of Newcastle, at 20 pages long, is a sweet, colourful and fun introduction to Newcastle. It brings together bright drawings and brief descriptors of local things - from the "red train" (the light rail on Hunter Street) and "long ship" (cargo ships in the harbour), to the "round hotel" (Crystalbrook Kingsley on King Street), "dark tunnel" (the tunnel on Fernleigh Track) to Dickinson's favourite, the "happy house" (aka the Koala Hilton on the corner of Glebe Road and Darby Street).
Inside the back cover is a list of the name and location of each drawing.
Dickinson hopes families get out and explore Newcastle using the book as a reference to spot things in and around the city.
"I think as a child it's really nice to be able to see a picture of something and then see it in real life."
