Self Portrait

We’re all working from home at the moment and there are a lot of Skype meetings, but I’m working from my bedroom so I’m not really comfortable having the camera on. (I just don’t want everyone being able to see into my room.) I thought I’d update my old skull avatar so my colleagues would have something to look at.

I couldn’t use it in the end because there was no way to set it to JUST Skype and not my email avatar too, but I used it on some social media instead. Should I use it here too and redesign the blog a bit?

New Years Resolution

Here's something silly I drew around the 5th of January this year! I was rather put off the UK small press a couple of years ago and hadn't really drawn a comic since, so when I suddenly felt like drawing one I dropped everything and bashed it out in a few hours. It's about one-sided competitiveness.

Some of those few hours were spent working out how to draw Markiplier, so I inked the best practice faces as well. I hope you will all continue to respect me as a serious adult now that I've revealed that I watch Let's Plays.

Hourly Comics Day 2016

I usually forget Hourly Comics Day, but Sammy helpfully reminded us all the day before so I actually attempted it this year! I say 'attempted' because, as you can see, I fell behind and couldn't finish drawing the last few hours I was awake.

I also found out later that my children's books lied to me and it's actually spelled 'Zeno'. Oh well.

Inktober - Part 1

This year I found myself with just enough free time to do Inktober (producing one ink drawing a day for the month of October) and I really enjoyed it. I mostly did these in the evening, and it was great to take the time to sit down and draw a proper finished picture without it being for a job or a long-term project. I also tried some ink techniques that I haven't used before.

I posted these daily on tumblr, but here I thought I'd put them up in large sets.

Day 1 (mapping pen) - Nettle and Spider, with Nettle showing off her psychokinesis. Spider is horribly off model and I felt very bad about that.

Day 2 (mapping pen and ink wash) - Nat with his dangerous shadow. I re-did this one in colour for one of this year's postcards.

Day 3 (ink and water) - Sweetpea! He's sitting on Louise's hand, although you can't really tell unless you've paid close attention to her clothes. This technique always has the potential to go horribly wrong, but I think this is one of the best pictures from the whole month.

Day 4 (brush inking) - Brush inking is something I'm not experienced with, so I tried it on Tabitha because she's a very simple shape. It was clear I needed more practice.

Day 5 (mapping pen) - I felt so bad about Spider being off-model in the first picture that I drew a portrait of him for this one, then added Nettle for good measure. I also discovered I have no purple ink and had to mix some.

Day 6 (gel pen) - Louise skulking around her creepy house. At this point I'd thought I haven't done any cross-hatching yet, and I should draw more backgrounds, and didn't realise I'd just decided to do a full hatched illustration at 9:30 at night until I'd already started and was trapped! I got to bed quite late that night.

Day 7 (brush pen, gel pen and water) - This one is what a colleague of mine thinks I do when I'm not at work. I've used this scribbly system for concept art in the past, I don't think I'll ever like it for finished pieces.

Day 8 (brush pen) - Violet wants to know how Meruch got the 'lightning flower' on his side. This is another one of my favourites, I very rarely use my kuretake brush pen for line work even though I love it very much (I tend to use it for filling in black areas) and I'm very leased with how the lines came out.

Day 9 (mapping pen) - This one I doodled up while on the phone to my sister late at night. I often feel differently about pictures I draw when I would usually be sleeping, compared to ones I draw in the day. They seem to... come out more easily?

Day 10 (brush inking and ink wash) - This one was an experiment that went a little wrong, but I'm new to both brush inking and ink wash so it's all good practice.

Part 2  Part 3

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.

The Tale of the Chocolate Shop

I forgot to post this for so long. These are pictures from a little manuscript book I made my pal Nam last year. It was based on a twitter conversation about my trip to a chocolate shop. I wanted to make it as nice as possible (since I had… er… forgotten to get her a present for her birthday AND Christmas) so I painted the pictures onto heavy card pages, hand-lettered the text in my best rounded gothic, (still not very good, hahaha) and bound it all up into a hardback book. I forgot to take a photo of the finished item though. I think the middle picture of me in the chocolate shop is one of my favourite things I drew that year!

If you’re curious, the Tale of the Chocolate Shop runs thusly:

Once upon a Time, Sarah went to the Chocolate Shop. Sarah was going to be a Good Girl, and not buy any Chocolate. But then she bought some anyway.

The book was only 3 pages long.

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.

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!

Thank-you Letters

I’m terrible at remembering to write thank you letters, so this year I decided to draw some postcards instead, in the hopes that it would make up for how late they usually are. It was actually a lot easier to get round to it when I was drawing them, so they’re not even that late this time!

Blisters (again)

Yes, yes I sketched my blisters again. Look at the size of that thing! Wouldn't you want to record it for posterity? Originally it was much smaller, but it was on the sole of my foot, so walking around forced the fluid up the side and made it almost three times its original size.

It's weird to look at my toes and realise they've developed in the shape of my shoes. I'd rather have natural ones, I think.

In other news, I am so tired. I've been working a lot more hours at the tea room than I was contracted for. Not that I'm not happy to have more money, but there's a reason I only applied for part-time. We're hiring new people soon, so hopefully then I'll be back to my contracted hours and I'll have time to do drawing again. With any luck the Summer will be over early too, so I can stop being in such a bad mood.

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!

journal pictures

I've uploaded some more doodles from my journal, this time on horrible paper because I was using a horrible notebook. These are all from after I moved to Bath. Find them here.

This one is of me leaving Sammy in my metaphorical dust in the Paper People game.

Last journal pictures of 2011

Yea and verily I have finally got round to scanning these, so here are the last few pictures I drew in my journal in 2011. They got a bit lazier because I was not very cheerful at the time, but some of them came out pretty fun.

Nambots

These are a set of robots I designed as a birthday present for my friend Nam, shamefully about 6 months late. The top two are me and Nam, the little ones are AngstBot, HugBot and DanceBot.

I'm on a bit of a robot kick lately, I never even tried to draw them before. They're a lot of fun as it turns out.

Strange Friends

I told people some stories about friends I made at university, I met a ghost possessing a human who died at birth, a lovely creature made of moonlight, an urban wendigo, and a woodwose. I'm the tooth witch.

These should be available as sets of miniature prints when next I get taken to a small press event. I think that should be Thought Bubble at the end of the year.

Incidentally, even disregarding the fact that I drew him as a horrible slavering spirit of famine, I find it interesting how different the wendigo looks in my pictures and his own. I emphasise a completely different selection of features.

Journal Pictures

Since I realised the other day that I update my personal blog even more infrequently than this one whenever I'm busy (which kind of defeats the point since people who worry about me, like my mum, start bugging me for news) I thought I'd start uploading my journal illustrations on flickr instead.  I might even get really wild and put some of the better ones on here, but for now you can find all the ones I've put up so far in handy little sets over there.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahfogg/

These are a few pictures I doodled up at BICS, two of me and one of my friend Sammy Borras.  The top one doesn't look a whole heap like me because I forgot I don't have eyebrows.