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!

The Wolves of Whilloughby Chase

I've been trying to get into the habit of doing sketches from the books I'm reading, since book illustration is my main focus. (Not that you'd know from all the comics I've been doing lately!) So here are some doodles from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. There's a lot more books in the series, so you can expect more pictures!

The characters here are Bonnie Green, Sylvia Green and Simon (a boy who lives wild in the grounds, raising geese). Sylvia was by far the hardest, as she's never really described in any detail. I didn't really pin her down until I drew the girls by the fire.

This is a kind of technique I've used before, where I draw with a fountain pen using cheap, water-soluble ink, then spread it with water. I think it's good for me, since precision is really important to me, and this is a really unpredictable way to work.

Broth Sea Peoples

These are four more art cards I whipped up for the farmer's market. If you got the Eat Me! anthology, you may recognise these as the leaders of the various Broth Sea tribes in my comic, The Mysterious Land of Under-Noodle. Going clockwise, these are the Wise Woman of the Noodle People, the Prime Minister of the Wonton Isles, the mightiest warrior from the Cliffs of Pork, and the Chieftain of the Lettuce Hunters.

You can tell they're the leaders because they wear the most clothes, haha.

Poppets!

Poppet is accompanying the Gransden Brownies on their Pack Holiday this year!

My Mum is a pack leader and requested a cover sheet for their diaries featuring Poppet, but as their theme is Folktales and Legends I couldn’t resist adding some little fact sheets as well. This also means that after years of confusion I finally know how to pronounce Bwbachod, which is one of the names sixes can have. Fortunately I was a Gnome, which is a lot easier.

(Gnomes forever!)

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!

Dr Dee

All those Blur drawings reminded me that Sammy and I also went to see Dr Dee when it was on in London. For those who don’t know (and what poor souls you are) it’s an opera about the Elizabethan mathematician/astronomer/mystic John Dee, by Damon Albarn.

The music was lovely, obviously, but we were also really impressed by the costume and set design, so I did a few sketches in the interval.

Blur at Wolverhampton Civic Hall

BLURRRRR

Sorry, by that I mean that just over a week ago Sammy and I went to see Blur at Wolverhampton and it was the best thing ever.

The first set includes the… warm-up act? The Bots, anyway. It was a hard-core drawing warm-up, the singer never stood still!

Then I drew a million pictures of Blur. I really liked the sketches, so rather than tidying them up on the page like I normally would I traced or copied them onto different pages. The penultimate picture is the traced sketches, the last one is copied freehand.

Autumn 2012 Postcards

These are five of the ten new postcards I made to take to Thought Bubble. I'm really pleased with them, I think they show improvement from the last batch, which is always encouraging. Part of it might be that I really tired to limit my colour palette for all the new postcards.

They're all my own characters this time. There's Meilee and Lin, who have fallen asleep in the rain because they can't find any shelter, Shasta contemplating a remnant of the Old World, Jessie looking out over the castle town in her Patchworker uniform (it's a sort of messenger and general dogsbody, if you're curious), Louise being led into the woods by some fairies (they're still after that key), and the Crowboy giving Lottie a little gift.

Rapunzel and Cinderella

Whoa you guys it's my birthday today! I'm 23! Do I seem older and wiser?

Not that I have any special birthday art though. These are the final 4 art cards in the fairy tales series I mentioned, finally finished in preparation for the Bristol Ferment Farmer's Market, although I didn't find time to post them beforehand.

The top set is Rapunzel. In the version I had, the witch finds out about the prince because Rapunzel gets pregnant. She cuts off Rapunzel's hair, kicks her out, and uses the hair to trick the prince so she can drop him off the tower. It still has a happy ending though.

The bottom set is Cinderella, which is incredibly gruesome! The wicked stepsisters cut bits off their feet to make the slipper fit. It's also the spirit of Cinderella's mother, in the form of two doves, that gives her the gown and slippers in the first place.

I didn't sell any of these in the end, so I've put them up for sale in my Etsy shop. Maybe you should buy one to make me happy on my birthday! Although I have just made an entire coffee cake which I have all to myself, so I'm already pretty happy.

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.

Patience Mini-Mystery

This week Sammy was at Manchester MCM, and next Saturday (work shifts permitting) I'll have a little stall at Bristol Ferment Farmer's Market, so I made a mini-comic to give out instead of business cards. Sammy's been doing it that way for ages, and it works really well - people tend not to turn down a free comic. We also made a free mini-zine to promote What's the Time Mrs Woolf?

Anyway, I decided on a miniature Patience mystery, since I'm hoping to get the first full-length comic done before the spring cons next year.

Aside from the new issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? (with a 'hairy' theme) the other things I'll be taking are all original paintings. I'll be posting some of those next week. I'll also have a few copies of Inspired's latest anthologies, and limited numbers of the mini-library Sammy tried at Manchester.

If any of you are near Bristol, I hope you'll stop by and see me!

I forgot I had more paid work to show you! I did this one a few months ago, it's a logo for a baby swimming school. I had no idea how you teach a baby to swim when they can't even walk yet, so watching the lessons was really interesting. Apparently there's a few tricks to it, like if you start before the baby starts trying to sit up then they'll be much more comfortable on their back in the water, and will have an easier time learning to float later.

The swimming school is called 'Dinky Dippers' and it's run by Nadine Santus, if you're reading this from the Cambridge area and you have a child under 4 who could use some swimming lessons.

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.