A little introduction to Oxford University Chronicles:

"With her autumnal mists, her grey spring-times, and the rare glory of her summer days, when the chestnuts were bloom, her spacious and quiet streets, and her bells that rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, Oxford was a city of aquatint that exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth — and, at its nucleus, was Oxford University, an historic federation of twenty-one colleges for men and four for women. Where the flood-meadow stretched out like green desert and rolled down at last to thirst upon the water's edge of the halcyon River Cherwell which etched its theme of mediæval presence, Christ Church was a system of towering edifices and gothic cloisters surrounded by ivy gardens and flowering groves. The wind had dropped. There was even a glimpse of the sun riding behind the clouds. And now, a solemn and plangent token of Oxford's perpetuity, the first stroke of Great Tom sounded since sunrise. Sherringford Basil, a lonely and friendless undergraduate, settled in his seat next to dusty window and leprous façades of his college digs in the heart of this grey city, glancing his green eyes over the flat, crisp pages of text upon text upon text as he leaned back against the wall, with the thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him and a look of infinite languor in his face. But even in the earliest days, when the whole business of living at Oxford with rooms of his own and his own cheque-book should be a source of excitement, in his heart, he knew that this was no all that Oxford had to offer, leaving his lonely, gloomy childhood in Sussex and boyhood straighten by war and overshadowed by bereavement for a life of legend..."

I'm a day late for the 23rd anniversary of the Great Mouse Detective, which was yesterday, because I spent it at the airport and came late that night to colour this. I wanted to do something special in celebration:

This is pretty much the beginning Basil's adventures at Oxford University during first morning that begins Michaelmas Term (or first term) at his college of Christ Church — before his reputation, before his meeting with Oscar Milde, and well before his legendary career. This is his first pipe. He had smoked a cigarette and a cigar twice or thrice before, but it was at Oxford that Basil first truly got acquainted with tobacco — and pipes have to be broken into before one can really enjoy it.

(The drawing is from Basil's old profile and THIS is how I always saw the drawing, with him at a window-seat, reading a book, breaking in his very first pipe. The background is a Victorian window-seat, which I cropped all the Christmas stuff away and edited it enough to make it look rather bare, and out the window is an photograph of Peckwater Quadrangle of Christ Church.)

Models - Barrie Ingham

Medium - Photoshop, Col-erase blue, HB graphite.

Basil of Baker Street © Eve Titus/Walt Disney.
The name "Sherringford" © Diane N. Tran.