Behold, What I've Been Doing For The Past Few Weeks! I Kind Of Burned Myself Out Making New Postcards

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. There's also 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.

There'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.

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.

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 because I really tried 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.

Sketchavember 2012 - Part 1!

I missed doing Inktober because I was super-busy, so I decided to try to ink all my Sketchavember pictures instead. Last year I tried to draw all my characters, in age order, so I picked up where I left off. Then sort of wombled off topic. Anyway these are:

1 - Blackthorn, an elf in the Tolkein mold. I never did much with her but I quite like her design.

2 - Louise! She's got her own tag if you want more pictures of her. She lives in a pre-industrial time and has many encounters with fairies.

3 - Louise again. I was reading Hemlock and tried to draw her in the same style.

4 - And again! I'm not sure what happened to your face here Louise but I promise I'll never do it again! Louise is one of my characters in an arranged marriage, but she and Edward get on quite well. He doesn't believe in magic before they marry, and is much more uncomfortable with magic and the supernatural than she is.

5 - Franz, who doesn't appear very often on account of being hard to draw. He's very proud and hates showing any kind of weakness. He probably checked nobody was watching before blowing on his hands like that.

6 - Jemima, who appears more often on account of being fun to dress up.  She has very low self-esteem and is bullied by her 'friends'.

7 - And then it was Friday so I drew Marceline the Vampire Queen!

8 - Lucas didn't come out great last year, so I tried again. This is much more on-model, although I still haven't worked out where his scars go.

9 - This is Lucas's sister, Lena, who has the gift of prophecy.

10 - At this point I'd started watching Gundam Wing, and had to try very hard not to just draw fanart for every subsequent picture. I could not resist drawing everyone's favourite pilot though.

Part 2 next week!

(Yeah yeah I know Sketchavember was months ago, but my scanner is old and senile and it took me a long time to get these onto my laptop.)

July release date? Friends, my birthday is in July. I'm sure you know what to do.

Here is the cover of Gunnerkrigg Court Volume 4: Materia.

Looking to be a July release date!

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.