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.

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!

Here's a little preview from the latest Inspired anthology, Eat Me! I was very pleased to win the cover vote this time as well.

I was also really pleased with how my comic came out, since it was the whole reason we had a food theme. Sammy and I were eating at a noodle bar and I started making up a story about my wonton noodle soup, so we decided to do a food anthology so I could turn it into a comic (the other members agreed of course). I really like my character designs for this comic.

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*

snow white and rose red

I got a brown paper sketchbook so I could try drawing with highlights as well as shading. I'm not sure if it's really for me, but I'll try to fill the book up anyway.

Snow White and Rose Red was one of my favourite fairy tales when I was little. They're usually depicted as a blonde with very pale skin and a black-haired girl with rosy cheeks. I'm fairly sure I imagine them as a blonde and a redhead because I have vague memories of playing a make-believe game based on the story with my little sister, who has fiery red hair. (As a child I had pale blonde hair.)

In other news, I now have a day job, hooray! I'm working as a waitress in a vintage tea room, so if you're in Bath you should come and find us up near the fashion museum, if you want to see me in a headscarf and bright red lipstick.

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.

Graham's ghosts

One of the first commissions I got after leaving university was to design a ghostly string quartet for an animated band. It was commissioned by a student called Graham Porter, and I has a lot of fun designing the ghosts. The commission included a painting to use for promotion, and some fairly detailed designs. These are some of the pose and expression sheets I was most pleased with, and a slightly terrible photo of the painting.

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?

monster girls and paper people

Recently (before I went to London, if you're wondering) I was in a bit of a slump and I didn't seem to be able to draw anything. Everyone always says when that happens you should just draw loads of things until it goes away, so I used that monster generator that's been going around and drew monsters for half the afternoon! I got all girls, coincidentally. It worked very well, even if I did discover that I need to work harder on diverse body types.

Also Sammy got me with a paper person! Nooooo! I should have known she had an ulterior motive when she gave me those creme eggs.

The 'paper house' is the scrapbook I made to contain some of the paper people from years gone by. I decided to start documenting my end of the game, so I've made a flicker set showing some of Sammy's previous victories.

Giant Rhinos at the British Library

Today in 'Sarah draws fanart of comics that don't exist yet', Giant Rhinos, the best band in the world! Created by my lovely pal Sammy, who I saw yesterday in London. From left to right this is Terry (lead singer and guitarist), Carl (bassist and possibly backing vocals?) and Steve (drummer). I love these guys. I also love drawing Sammy's characters in general. My style is more detailed, but that makes it super-easy for me to draw the same attractive faces over and over. Sammy's style is more geometric, so translating her characters into my style pushes me out of my comfort zone.

Hmm... except with Carl maybe. That face is FIRMLY within my manga-influenced skill set.

Sammy drew my advice-giving house hob, Poppet, who is also the reason I am currently in the lead in the Paper People game. Sammy has kindly documented my victory in her latest blog post.

The reason we were in London was to go to The Art of Illustration, a talk at the British Library. I drew the guests on my notes. From top to bottom  - Quentin Blake, Posy Simmonds, Jamie Hewlett and Martin Rowson. They all told us about four of their favourite illustrators. It was mostly good, aside from an awkward moment in the question section, in which someone asked why none of them had picked any women. It was shrugged off and joked about in a way that suggested it wasn't important, and one of the guests joked that 'we could have picked Posy, but she's here' which kind of made it sound like Posy Simmonds is the only influential female illustrator in existence. That disappointed me.

Also we got to 'very awkwardly walk down the stairs by Jamie Hewlett in silence' as Sammy put it. Because we are the SMOOTHEST PEOPLE.

Zelda Valentines

'Tis the day for the whole internet to be covered in pink and red! However I went with mostly green. I made these as a present for my friend Nam, of the Nambots, who is a big fan of the Legend of Zelda, much like myself.

Also if you want to show how much you love me and Lily, you could buy a copy of What's the Time, Mrs. Woolf? through our new online shop! The second issue came out in January, and the first is still in stock. 

Time for some cute things!

Ta da! This is one of the commissions I've been working on. It's a logo and some decorative images for Kingsley's Cakes, a sweet little independent bakery. The image above is ever so slightly different from the one I used eventually, I took out a few of the finer details so it would look better when shrunk onto a business card and such. Below are some other pictures that should be going to decorate a new website. This is the first time someone has commissioned digital work from me, I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Bonus feature! Some of the preliminary sketches. I thought it would be sweet to dress the mascot character in clothes based on some cake flavours, specifically cinnamon and ginger, rose and pistchio and mint chocolate. I was having so much fun I designed a bell-dress and a shift-dress for each one. The final design is a slightly different version of the rose and pistachio theme.

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.

Sketchavember, completed!

I finally got round to putting my Sketchavember pictures on flickr, like I said I was going to ages ago! I drew one of my own characters every day, starting with the some of the oldest (created when I was 12 if you can believe it) and working my way forwards. I drew in really textbook shoujo manga style back then, so it was fun to try and make them all look reasonable in my current style. I realised early on that not only did I have a bad case of Only Six Faces, but I also never drew anyone who wasn't improbably attractive. I'm still not happy with how similar a lot of them look, and they're all waaaay too pretty, but I'm confident I can make them better - before this I wasn't at all sure it could even be done.

Anyway, I've posted them all with little descriptions of who each one is and how they've changed from their original design, so hopefully you'll enjoy reading about them.

If you're curious, the boy in the picture is Asmodeus, from day three, and he's the redesign I was most proud of. He used to have HUGE eyes and a little, childlike nose. Not to mention ears that were fairy-pointed instead of deformed-pointed. Turns out all this time it was mostly blushing that made him look like himself, I'd never have guessed!