Back to work!

It's been a while since I posted new work (I've been busy!), but here's a one page comic I drew the other week...

Glasses Comics #1

The other week I went to have my eyes tested and had to get my first pair of glasses to wear when I'm working on the computer...which is quite often! Anyway, I made this comic (sort of) about it...

Acoustic Guitar - a 69 Love Songs comic

69 Love Songs, Illustrated is an online project, curated by Julia Scheele, attempting to illustrate all of the songs from The Magnetic Fields' three-volume concept album 69 Love Songs.

I had previously discovered the project towards the end of last year, and after seeing a recent tweet from Julia asking for more contributors, I decided to attempt my own interpretation of the song Acoustic Guitar.



After listening to the song a few times I made some notes and thumbnail sketches...



...and then condensed my initial ideas into a 3 page comic offering a slightly sideways take on the original song...
(click on the pages to enlarge)



You can view all the contributions to the project so far here, and if you are interested in taking part, the list of songs still available can be found here.

Creative Project #2: Lost & Found

The latest theme for the Creative Project group is Lost & Found, and I came up with the following comic...

God Of Loneliness

A few months ago, I was contacted by Emmy The Great to ask if I wanted to collaborate on a project together. I'd previously done a couple of fan art drawings and produced a comic strip for an online advent calendar to promote the Christmas album by Emmy The Great and Tim Wheeler, and Emmy thought it'd be fun to work on something together for the release of her new single, God Of Loneliness.

A short film was being produced to accompany the single, directed by Chris Boyle and starring Isy Suttie (Peep Show) and Shazad Latif (Spooks), and Emmy's idea was to have four single-page comics which would be released online in the week's leading up to the release of the video, and act as a prelude to the events of the film.

We came up with the outline for the comics together, with the idea that each comic should take place at a different period in the life of the character played by Isy Suttie in the film, and then I developed those ideas into the finished comics. In the week's leading up to the release of the single and the debut of the short film, the comics were released individually online across different music blogs and websites, together with four remix tracks to download. Each comic would feature a guest appearance by the artists that provided the remixes (Banjo Or Freakout, Dems, Dan Le Sac and CSS).









All of which leads into the events of the short film released alongside the God Of Loneliness single...



I enjoyed working on this project and it made me more confident about working on a longer comics narrative, which is definitely something I want to develop.

Watch this space!

**BLU-RAY BONUS CONTENT**
This project made me develop my way of working, which was more involved than when I'm producing three panel comic strips. I did quite a lot of writing before I even started drawing, working out the narrative and where I could fit jokes within the story. Next I drew rough sketches of the comics to work out the layout of the page. I found it quite interesting to compare these sketches with the final comics, so thought I would include them here...

Originally I was envisaging working to a landscape format, hence the slightly different arrangement of these first two comics. After we decided upon a portrait format, I adjusted these strips accordingly, while still keeping the same idea in place...

One Flew Over The Penguin's Nest: The Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize 2011

So as well as the i newspaper's Comic Idol competition, I have also been working on my entry for this year's The Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Competition. I completed my 4-page comic story yesterday ahead of the deadline this Friday, and here is the result...

I enjoyed the challenge of producing a longer comic story, and am pleased with the final result. I came up with the idea for this story after reading news reports back in June about an Emperor penguin that arrived on a beach in New Zealand after supposedly getting lost while swimming from the Antarctic. Then I started thinking: What if he wasn't lost, and really wanted to go to New Zealand to get away from the Antarctic?

The winning entry will be printed in The Observer newspaper on Sunday 6 November.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

So I've been a bit lazy since the start of the New Year, but I justified this to myself by the fact that it was the weekend and today was a Bank Holiday, so it was only fair. Anyway, tomorrow I begin my Manifesto for 2011...!

London MCM Expo 2010

This weekend was the London MCM Expo at the Excel Centre in London which brings together all the best in comics, movies, games and manga under one gigantic roof, along with an abundance of cosplay.

I went along for the first time ever on the Saturday, and really enjoyed it, although after a while it all began to take its toll a little...


[click strip to enlarge]

In all seriousness though, the event did make me feel like making more comics again, so I should be posting up some more comics-related work on here very soon...!

28 Comics Later... Day Twelve

Sometime ideas just present themselves in the most unexpected places. I was travelling on a bus today when I overheard two girls talking...



...The idea of someone being "scared of 3-D" when we view the world around us in 3-dimensions just struck me as amusing. I sketched out a few ideas of how to present this comic, finally deciding that it worked best by focusing on my reaction, and keeping the girls unseen. I found it interesting telling a story with minimum changes between each frame. I was also trying to convey the loudness of their voices by making their words fill the speech bubbles, although I'm not sure how successful that particular idea was...

28 Comics Later... Day Ten

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programme...

So as some of you may have noticed (and a few people have actually pointed out to me when I've seen them), I haven't posted anything on my blog for the past week or so, which also means I've neglected my 28 Comics Later... project. Well, now I'm back and my first new comics offering also acts as a sort of summary of what I've been up to during my leave of absence...

28 Comics Later... Day One

Happy New Year!

So it's 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and I have been making a lot of plans for the year ahead. One thing I want to do is to work on my comics more, and be a bit more experimental.

I got a few new comics for Christmas, including Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli and It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken by Seth, which both use a limited colour palette, which got me thinking about how I could employ a similar technique in my own work. Today's comic is my first attempt at using a limited colour scheme and I'm quite pleased with the results.

As the title of this post suggests, I intend to produce a new comic every day for the next 28 days (I was originally going to do it for 30 days, but then I realised that 28 days would take me to exactly the end of the month, plus allow me to make a tenuous riff on the title of the British zombie film, 28 Days Later). Hopefully it'll be a good exercise for me, and maybe it'll even teach me some shit about something or other. Either way, I hope it will be a bit of a laugh. And in the end, isn't that the point? ...I don't know.

"Digital Love" The Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize

So I've been working on a submission for The Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize. I decided to try out building a longer story from a series of shorter comics, so I ended up with a series of single page 4-panel strips, which go together to make a larger 4-page comic story.

The story itself is an extension of a comic strip idea I had a few years ago. Although the main character is obviously styled on myself, I can assure you that it is entirely fictional ... Honest!

I really enjoyed the challenge of working on this longer piece, and it's a process I'd like to employ again in the future. I'll know if I won at the end of the month, so keep your fingers crossed till then...!

Illustration Friday: Cracked

This week's Illustration Friday theme is Cracked. I had a few ideas for this theme that I scribbled down on the bus yesterday, but in the end decided to go with this little comic story about two eggs. I've got a lot on this week, so didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, but in a way, I quite like the simplicity...

...Also, I've just realised that this is my 100th blog post! Wow! Happy Birthday, Blog! Now where's my telegram from the Queen??

3-page comic: The Amazing Adventures of Bobo the Unhappy Clown

I haven't posted any new work for a few days as I was working on creating a short comic story. I really enjoyed the process and it was interesting to see how it compared with drawing my daily strips.

I decided to take the clown character that I drew a few weeks ago and use him in my story. From there I sketched out some thumbnails to work out how the story would work over a few pages, as opposed to a couple of panels...



...After sketching out the initial idea for the story, I looked at how best to present the ideas from my thumbnails, removing some ideas condensing others, and letting some parts have a bit more space. At the end of this process I'd reduced the number of pages to 3, with more panels per page than in my initial sketches, as I felt that this allowed the story to move along at a more comfortable pace.

I made the decision to allow the story to play out mainly in pictures, limiting the text to sound effects. I think some of my more successful daily strips are the ones that don't rely too much on text in order to get the idea across. This presented me with an interesting challenge and meant that I had to make sure that my drawings were able to convey the story on their own.

I am pleased with the end result and think I've managed to achieve what I set out to do. I'd like to continue working on some longer comic stories alongside my daily strips...