The Mystery of the Nice Granny

This year's free mini-mystery, The Mystery of the Nice Granny.

As usual, I'll be giving these out as business cards at conventions. Some events I'll be tabling at with Sammy include:

Comica Comiket - 16th August 2014
Bristol Comic and Zine Fair - 4th October 2014
LICAF Comics Clock Tower - 17th-19th October 2014
Thought Bubble - 15th - 16th November 2014
True Believers Comic Festival - 7th February 2015

If you'd like some free mini-comics, remember the secret password: 'do you have a business card?'

October Event Report!

I am a terrible blogger and neglected to mention the events Sammy and I have been to this Autumn! As October is the spooky month of the year, and I don't really like being in photos, we drew all over them instead! (The witch hat was supposed to cover my face but Sammy sabotaged me.) Please enjoy these snaps of our table from the Bristol Comic and Zine Fair, University of Gloucestershire Small Press Fair, and London MCM.

There's one more event coming up, as we will be at Thought Bubble this weekend, at table 93 in the Allied London Hall. Click here for a floor plan.

Autumn Events

Sammy and I have confirmed some tables at cons this Autumn, so I can give you a list of where we'll be:

Bristol Comic and Zine Fair - 5th October

MCM London Comic Con - 25th, 26th, 27th October

Thought Bubble - 23rd, 24th November

We'll have all sorts of lovely things to sell! The Autumn issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? our brand new Goth anthology and activity book, mini-comics, mini-zines, postcards and notebooks and sundry other trinkets...

I hope some of you can come and see us!

London MCM Expo

Last weekend Sammy and I went to London MCM Expo. We had a great time! It was much busier than we expected (a lot of people in Comic Village were surprised by the number of guests) and we did very well for sales!

The downside is that we sold out of a lot of stock, which has never happened to us before. We need to get a move on making something new before our next event at Manchester MCM in July.

Sammy has put up a lot more pictures and some descriptions of everyone's work on the Inspired blog.

Inspired Anthology 2013 - The Music Cupboard

I've been working on two short comics for this year's inspired anthology. This is the second one, The Music Cupboard, featuring Poppet the House Hob. This time Poppet and her friends are infiltrating a human school, concealed in a cello case.

Poppet previously appeared in The Bad Fairy Bakery (which was also drawn for an Inspired anthology) and answers questions in What's the Time, Mrs Woolf?. The Bad Fairy Bakery is available to buy online, but you can also read it on this blog.

The finished anthology will be available at Bristol Comics Expo, London MCM Expo and Manchester MCM Expo this year.

Inspired Anthology 2013 - A Ghost Story

I've been working on two short comics for this year's Inspired anthology. It's themeless now, but originally it had a music theme, so both my comics are music-related. This is the first one I did, which is a simple ghost story. (My favourite kind of story!)

I've used this ink and water technique for a comic before, so I didn't need to do too many tests for this one. I think the floaty effect is nice for ghosts, but it's harder for the rest of the characters as I need to maintain a clear outline. I think I've improved since my last attempt though.

The finished anthology will be available at Bristol Comics Expo, London MCM Expo and Manchester MCM Expo this year.

Thought Bubble and a Dress!

Behold, what I've been doing for the past few weeks! I kind of burned myself out making new postcards for Thought Bubble (I'll post those later, for now there's a photo of them on the stand), so once they'd been sent to print I decided to do something entirely different. I transformed my computer desk into a sewing desk and set about making a dress from Josceline Fenton's lovely webcomic, Hemlock! It's the first one we see Lumi wearing. Eventually I'd like to make all of these four, but I think I've done enough dressmaking for the time being.

Here's a picture of the finished dress! Also of me awkwardly standing with Josceline trying not to seem creepy, which is hard when you just spent three weeks slavishly recreating someone's work in cotton form. She said it was very accurate, which makes me happy.

Here's the Inspired table, with Sammy behind it because we used my camera this time.

my postcards...

5 issues of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf...

My art cards, hanging out with some new ones by Sammy and Shaz...

a shot of my side of the table, complete with Patience, miniprints, Bad Fairy Bakery etc.

and a portrait commission I did! If you look really closely in the back you can see a little drawing of Patience that Sammy gave me. It's so cute! I seemed to do pretty well at Thought Bubble, and we certainly did well as a table. I also bought about £80 of comics, and John Allison said some very nice things about our work, so I'm very pleased with how it went. There'll be a write-up of Thought Bubble on the Inspired blog soon as well, now that I've got round to sending the photos to Sammy.

journal pictures and upcoming events

These are the other half of the journal pictures from that horrible notebook. The next one I used was much nicer. I seem to have drawn a lot of plants and animals instead of people.

Also, these are events I am going to in Autumn! Inspired Comics will be at:

London MCM Expo - 26th-28th October 2012

Thought Bubble - 17th - 18th November 2012

Come and buy our comics, and see how little I resemble my self-portraits!

All the Zines!

Here's what I've been doing for the past few weeks, making two different zines! Sammy and I have made a music zine together, filled with comics and articles and gig sketches. I'm so excited to see it printed, it was so much fun to make. Also now I can draw a fender precision bass from memory. Sammy's put a preview on her tumblr, and you can buy the zine from her etsy shop.

There's also the September/October issue of What's the Time Mrs Woolf? which has a spooky theme because Hallowe'en is my favourite festival. It contains sewing instructions and comics as usual, but also ghost stories and horrible illustrations! There's a preview up on the woolfblog.

Both of these are being launched at the Birmingham Zine Festival tomorrow, but they'll also be available at London MCM Expo (26th-28th October) and Thought Bubble (17th - 18th November)

I'll be at all 3 events, so I hope some of you can come and say hi!

miniature bookmarks

These are some more originals I’m selling at the farmer’s market this Saturday.

These ones are miniature bookmarks, which I’m selling in these sets of three. The first set are meant to be birds that have symbolic meaning in England, the second set are elemental spirits.

I’ll also have free mini-comics and mini-zines to give out, the latest issue of What’s the Time Mrs Woolf, and a few copies of Science Fiction Octuple Feature and Eat Me! from Inspired.

present tags

Since I had very little time to prepare for the farmer’s market this Saturday, I decided to do some more originals to sell instead of trying to make a comic or a book.

These sets of six are tags for presents, they’re threaded with red embroidery thread now, but my camera is out of battery so I can’t take a photo. 

The top set are my favourite spring flowers. The bottom set are based ontsukumogami, an item in japanese folklore. Supposedly when a tool or belonging reaches 100 years of service, it gains a soul and moves around the house.

I’ll also have free mini-comics and mini-zines to give out, the latest issue of What’s the Time Mrs Woolf, and a few copies of Science Fiction Octuple Feature and Eat Me! from Inspired.

Art Cards - Fairy Tales

These are some art cards I painted to sell at Bristol Expo. Originally there were going to be 14, all based on German fairy tales (so no Beauty and the Beast), but I only had time for 10. Rapunzel and Cinderella are still to be completed.

1 and 2 are Snow White and Rose Red. I mentioned in an earlier post that I imagine Rose Red looking a lot like my sister because we used to play a make-believe game based on the story, recently she told me that she remembers it too.

3 and 4 are Snow White. I love painting her, I like to interpret the 'hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, lips red as blood' thing literally.

5 and 6 are Little Red Riding Hood. I tried to make her look German, and make the forest look like it could be a scary place, since it would have been back when the tale was written.

7 and 8 are The Frog King, or Iron Henry. That's probably my all-time favourite fairy tale, I always imagined the princess to be only 12 or so (I think because the frog addresses her as 'King's daughter, youngest daughter'), and I liked the traditional description of the prince as 'a king's son with kind eyes'. Also the version where she throws the frog against the wall is vastly superior to the kissing version in every conceivable way.

9 and 10 are Sleeping Beauty. I find that story pretty creepy, but it's got some nice imagery. In the version I was told the prince can only get through the thorns because the 100 years are up, and on the way though he can see skeletons of other men who've tried to get through and died in there. I'd like to do a bigger version of that some time.

I'd never tried selling originals at cons before, so I was pleased to sell two of them. I put the rest up for sale in my online shop.

The Bad Fairy Bakery

I wrote two comics for Inspired's newest anthology, Eat Me! (I was also very pleased to win the cover vote this time with my cheerful takoyaki.) The Mysterious Land of Under Noodle went into the anthology, so The Bad Fairy Bakery was printed alone and sold as a mini-comic at Bristol Expo. Since it's only 8 pages long, I thought I'd put up the whole thing for you all to read, like Patience is a Virtue. I hope you enjoy it!

Andersen and Coda

I've been doing quite a lot of work that's not ready to show, along with frantically getting ready for Bristol Expo this weekend while doing many, many shifts at a tea room, so here are some old-ish sketches I did in spare time instead.

I don't think Andersen has appeared on here before, but he's a shape-shifting cat who is found by Jessie in a forest, and seems to have been abandoned by his people for some reason. He's mute, but he does understand speech. (Although he doesn't speak English.) It never really comes up in the story, but he hooks his tail over his leg like that because when he was little someone trod on it.

You should all recognise Coda, she's in white because she's participating in a ritual.

As I said, I'm also going to Bristol Expo this weekend with Inspired Comics, I hope some of you can stop by and see us. We'll have our new anthology, and with any luck I'll be bringing a new issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? and an 8-page comic called The Bad Fairy Bakery.

*rush rush panic panic*

Guess where I was last weekend! Inspired Comics (from whose blog I have stolen the photo) got a table at Birmingham MCM, so I went along to help and to monopolize almost a third of the table with all my junk. I think it looks sweet all together though, all muted colours and soft toy mascots. (Fox!) You can see the edge of our latest anthology in the corner there. Remember the new Inspired anthology will be debuting at Bristol Expo on the 12th-13th of May.

Thinking of debuts, issue 3 of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? was on sale, and is now available in our online shop. You can find information on our features and contributors this time on the zine blog, and you can buy it at Comiket later this month if you'll be in London. If you want issue 1 you'll have to be quick - sales were good at Birmingham, so there's only two left in the shop.

And thinking of shops, I now have an Etsy shop, how exciting! You can buy my postcards and miniprints there so far, I hope to have new products up soon, including some original paintings. This picture is the header, before I cropped it. Isn't Tabitha cute?

Journal Pictures and Degree Show madness

I finally got round to scanning some more of the pictures from my journal, so mooch on over to flickr to take a look at strange scenes from my life.

In other news, my degree show is going well so far.  It all looks really good up on the walls and I think we've got a lot of good work in our class this year.  Sammy's put up some nice photos of work by the Inspired crew, which includes me, or you can find out more on the university website.

It's weird to think that we're almost done after three years of work, work, work.  It seems to have gone really quickly, but at the same time 1st year feels like a lifetime ago.  I've enjoyed the course a lot and I finally feel like I wouldn't be ripping people off if I charge them for my work, which is a big milestone.  I can't quite believe how much my work has improved since we started.  (Of course then I look at other people's work from my class like Sammy, Jamie, Nathan and Rob and think 'Waargh they're all so much better than me! Panic panic flail flail' but I'm told that's normal and healthy in a creative field.)

I hope some of you can make it down to the show!