| Picture |
[17 Jul 2008|10:46pm] |
I've just recently bought Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. Which is a very nice book. It's the sort of book I wish I'd had ten/fifteen years ago. The perfect gift for younger me.
One of the things I like about it is how it expands on some of Scott Mcloud's 'frameworks' for discussing comic language. The best thing about it is that it answers so many questions that you would otherwise have to scour the web for answers to. But I also think I've done a lot of that legwork already now.
One reservation I have about the book is that it doesn't always explain or justify some of the advice with enough explanation. For example, the rationale for setting your Ames lettering guide to 'five' is that 'most people do'.
But it has got me thinking about process and format. So I drew a roundhead.
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| When all else fails, lower your standards.. |
[29 Jun 2008|09:55pm] |
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| Inner Animal |
[23 Jun 2008|09:08pm] |
I spent my Sunday looking for snails with my wife: she needed them as nearly-still-life subjects for an art lesson. I pointed them out but would not pick them up. This inspired my entry for stripfight: Inner Animal.
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| Thought Bubble |
[19 Jun 2008|03:31pm] |
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Work winds down for me at this time of year. I have five weeks of leave coming up. Caption is too soon to really get anything made, but I've booked a table at Thought Bubble, Leeds. You know, like an incentive. It's not til November. Anybody else thinking of going?
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| Birthday Card |
[12 Jun 2008|08:38pm] |
For my little sister.
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| ...and me now. |
[14 May 2008|10:07pm] |
Characteristics of me today:
- Very little hair.
- Checked shirts: If you see me on any give workday, you could reasonably assume that I have only checked shirts in my wardrobe. At weekends I wear hoodies and t-shirts, and people from work do not recognise me i the street.
- Omnipresent mug of tea. I often leave half-finished mugs of tea all around the house. I'm not sure which of my organs is responsible for absorbing the gallons of tea that I consume, but when I die and they remove it from my body, it will have a handy drawstring.
- Jeans; only slightly more contemporary in their cut. I've never really graduated from jeans, so I can never have a proper grown up job. If I had to work somewhere where I had to tuck my shirt in and wear a tie, I think it would affect my posture.
- Stirdy walking shoes, with high-tech anti-sweatiness-nastiness technological lining. After the army boots, I spent fifteen years wearing converse all-stars (not the same pair, obviously), but I think I will stick with this style until hover-boots are invented.
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| Teenage me |
[14 May 2008|09:11am] |
Teenage me. To add to the list here.
The closest I got to accomplishing anything when I was a teenager was attending a Graphic Design course when I was seventeen. I quit after five months as an attention-seeking strategy.
Here are the main features of seventeen year old me:
- Hair! I had hair! In the style of "Tucker's Luck".
- A scruffy blue jumper that I loved so much: I rarely wore anything else. The seams came apart at the shoulders, and formed two cornish-pasty-style epaulettes. On hot days, I would not remove my jumper: I would simply remove everything underneath it, and them put it back on.
- Various badges used to hold together aformentioned gashes in jumper. Sometimes, I would use safety pins with memos attached. These days, we have PDAs.
- Oh dear. On my graphics course, we were encouraged to purchase fancy A2 portifolios to store our oversized artwork. I was too stingy and too overtly eccentric to conform, and carried all of my papers to-and-from college between the folds of a Subbuteo Football pitch.
- Fishing-Tackle box used to store pens and stuff. I remember masking-tape being as good as currency at college.
- Jeans with too-tight hems. I though anything approaching flares would stigmatise me beyond redemption.
- Hyper-tough steel-toe-capped work boots. It took a whole year to wear each pair in. Although I don't know if I was wearing them in, or if they were wearing me in.
Looking back, I don't really like the person I was when I was a teenager. I think that trying to find happiness was, for me, like those times you are looking for your keys: and you look, and you look, and eventually think, oh sod it, I give up, I'm going to be late for work. So you decide to leave the house anyway, hoping that somebody else will be home before you to let you in. As just as you are are stepping out of the house, they are right there - you find your keys - they were under your bag the whole time you were looking, you idiot. It's like the act of surrender throws them into visibility again.
If I appear to be reluctant to re-establish old friendships with people who contact me over t'internet, it's because I don't much like who I was back then, and I don't want old friends to extrapolate teenage-me to construct the middle-age me. Although I still have the tackle box. It is now used to store needles and buttons and velcro.
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| Trying to do without pencils |
[27 Apr 2008|11:15pm] |
There is not a lot of colour on my journal, so I thought I should colour a sketch in.
I sketched this roughly with my lovely Pentel brush pen, then traced over that with my lovely Pitt artist pen. Then I messed about with levels and Noise-removel filters in Photoshop before colouring it there; I never seem to get a decent scan.
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| Stripfight: Gas Giants |
[23 Apr 2008|09:42am] |
Vote! Even if it's to make me stop.
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| Latest strip |
[25 Feb 2008|12:15pm] |
My last strip won Stripfight: thanks if you voted.
My new one is up now: the theme is "The Last Person on Earth".
Click on the image to visit and maybe vote.
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| Valentines |
[14 Feb 2008|05:35pm] |
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| I am a drawing wimp |
[08 Feb 2008|02:46pm] |
I am an over-sensitive soul: my mojo was severley bruised at the end of last year. The only reason that I though I might have a shot at winning the Observer competition was not because I thought my strip would be the best, but because I wanted to win it the most.
About the same time, I had a strip rejected for an anthology. The fall in motivation was compounded by a lot of stupid stuff going on at work. The upshot is that I had a little break from drawing - aside from Christmas cards and PTA posters- and I subsequently forgot how to do it.
I am getting back into it: my latest effort is now up on stripfight, which records me re-learning how to make a comic, this time with a lovely, fatter Pentel brush pen. In fact it is more like a collage than a comic.
I feel like a shit because I promised drawings and comics to people and did not do them. (I'm sorry). But I think that maybe the pressure/stress/guilt that I felt about not having done them is probably disproportionately greater than the level of disappointment felt by the non-recipients for not having received them.
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| Still not drawing |
[12 Oct 2007|06:44pm] |
The last thing I drew before embarking on a hiatus was my entry for the Observer/Jonathon Cape Graphic Story Competition.
( Read it behind the cut )
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| Glacier |
[06 Oct 2007|06:29pm] |
Hello internet! The second-to-last-thing I drew was this declined submission for the Fluke anthology:
( Two more pages behind the cut )
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| Animation Freeware |
[18 Sep 2007|09:28am] |
Haven't had a look myself, but this might interest some of you:
Pencil: Open Source Animation Software.
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| Observer Graphics Short Story Competition |
[17 Aug 2007|07:13am] |
I emailed Jonathon Cape regarding the confusing entry requirements for their competition. Their response was:
"We said to submit on A4 purely for ease of posting and judging. But we are
happy to accept your submission on larger/smaller sheets if necessary.
Basically, we hope that the graphic story can be scaled up or down to fit
the Berliner size Observer page. That is the most crucial element."
Which does clear things up.
My story synthesises some of the successful features of my previous strips: using speech bubbles with pictures in it, as well as children and death.
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nabbit's journal
