Cool Granny Has Taken Up Flying — The Little Old Lady Collection Grows Again

Cool Granny in Her Biplane — © John Corney 2026

Our cool granny is back, and she has done something the family has been quietly worried about for a few months now.

She has taken up flying.

A Brief Recap for New Readers

If you're new to the series: she first appeared in a beautifully kept yellow Austin A35 on the corner of Queen Street and K Road in Auckland, waving cheerfully out the driver's window as she went past. That piece was, in its quiet way, a tribute to my own mother, who in her fifties bought her own motor scooter in Whanganui and never looked back — and to every older woman who has ever decided it was finally her turn.

Then she showed up in a pink-and-yellow flame-painted monster truck, waving out the driver's window in exactly the same spirit, but with rather larger tyres. Same silver hair, same coral scarf, same oversized sunglasses. Same little red heart painted on the door, because of course.

Now she has a biplane.

She Has Cleared Herself for Takeoff

The plane is unmistakably hers. Yellow with the same flame accents as the truck, turquoise trim on the engine cowling and wing struts, red hearts painted on the fuselage and the tail rudder, and — my favourite detail — she has kept the enormous off-road tyres from the monster truck days. She is not a woman who abandons a good idea just because she has changed vehicles.

The goggles are pushed up onto her forehead, which suggests she has already been in the air and has now landed — or that she has decided goggles are for people who care about wind in their eyes, and she does not. She is laughing out loud and waving with her free hand while the other stays on the controls. The propeller is a blur of motion. Somewhere behind her, the ground is receding at what is presumably an inadvisable rate.

Whoever taught her to fly is either very proud or has changed their phone number.

Why She Keeps Doing This

The whole point of the collection is that she keeps doing this. Every piece so far — the A35, the monster truck, now the biplane — is the same woman, moving up. She isn't just refusing to slow down; she's actively accelerating. The joke of the series is that whatever the family thought she'd calm down to enjoy in her later years, she's decided instead to try something more ambitious.

My own mother didn't fly a biplane. She rode a motor scooter through the Whanganui streets. But the impulse is the same one, and the impulse is what the whole collection is really about: the quiet, unapologetic decision, made somewhere in the middle of a life, that from now on she was going to do things because she wanted to.

The biplane is what that decision looks like when you extend it out for another twenty years.

The Wider Collection

The current cel-shaded era — Austin A35, monster truck, biplane — grew out of an earlier body of work I made in a rougher painterly-cartoon style between 2022 and 2025. That earlier collection features the same character riding scooters, skateboarding, jumping horses over canyons, and creating memorable chaos while babysitting the grandchildren. Both eras are still on Redbubble, and both have their fans. If you'd like a retrospective look at where the whole thing started, the original Cool Granny Collection is still available.

Available on Redbubble

Cool Granny in Her Biplane is available at my Redbubble shop across the full product range — greeting cards, t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, stickers, art prints, throw pillows, notebooks, and more. It makes a perfect card for a beloved grandmother, mother, aunt, or friend on a birthday — particularly one who has recently taken up something the rest of the family finds mildly alarming.

Cool Granny in Her Biplane on Redbubble

You can also browse the growing Little Old Lady collection — the Austin A35, the monster truck, the biplane, and whatever she takes up next — at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art. Or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).