Simone Lia talk

Today at college we had a talk from Simone Lia. Simone is an illustrator and comic artist who has published several comics and children's books, as well as other illustration work. I was already familiar with her work, and really enjoyed her book Fluffy, so I was looking forward to listening to her talk about her work. I was thinking about it just now and thought it would be useful to write about some of the things I took away from the day.

I was interested to hear Simone talking about her experiences with self-publishing. I'm getting more and more into creating comics lately, and have been thinking about how to continue with this after the course. Self-publishing, either physically or online, strikes me as a good way to promote your work and, hopefully, get it into the hands of someone that may be interested in taking it further.

I couldn't help smiling when Simone mentioned how it helps to be around other people, as opposed to working in isolation, as it was something I had definitely experienced during the past week, and was discussing just the other day with my friend Arina. Also I raised an eyebrow when Simone showed an image of her old studio space, and I realised that it was above a cafe in Wapping that I use to go to a lot with my friend Laura when she lived in the area.

I came away from the talk, and the tutorial session afterwards, feeling a lot more upbeat about things than I have been the past couple of days. I want to continue to develop my comic ideas and push myself. One thing I'd been contemplating recently was that while I enjoy doing my daily strips, they didn't really have that much commercial appeal to those people that don't know me. I want to spend the next few days working on coming up with some illustrations for characters I can use to build some new comics for the Final Show.

Something suggested during the tutorial was building up a larger story from individual strips. I liked this idea a lot which would enable me to build on the work I've done with my daily strips, while working towards creating some more developed stories.

The image at the top is a quick sketch I drew in my notebook during the talk of Simone talking about her characters Chip And Bean, which I've added some colour to in Photoshop. Well, I couldn't do a blog post without any images...!