Thought Bubble 2014

Thought Bubble is the annual week-long Comic Art Festival held in Leeds, which culminates in a two-day comic fair this weekend. And for the first time, I'll be exhibiting with my own table, selling my comics! If you're going along, you'll be at table 65 in New Dock Hall sharing with John Cei Douglas.



I thought I'd give a quick summary of the comics I'll be selling this weekend...



Look What I Drawed..., as well as taking it's title from the name of this blog, is my latest comic and will be debuting at this year's Thought Bubble. It's a collection of various comic strips, single page comics and a couple of longer stories I've created over the last few years, including this two page story, The Orb, which I produced earlier this year...





Look What I Drawed... includes a wide range of comics, featuring vampires, werewolves, feline superheroes, Shakespearean penguins, and more!



March Of The Penguins was released earlier this year, and is a collection of comic strips featuring a pair of penguins who live alone in the middle of an isolated snow-covered wasteland. I originally produced these strips daily during the month of March, which is where the title comes from. What started out as an attempt to produce a comic strip about nothing, gradually evolved to develop more of a longer narrative, and I'd still like to come back and do something else with these characters at some point. Here's a sample of a couple of strips...







I'll also have two penguin badge designs on sale alongside the comic!

And finally, I'll also have a limited number of copies of my first self-published comic, Haiku Comics!



This was my final project for my MA Illustration degree, where I decided to adapt English translations of three-line Japanese Haiku poems into three-panel comic strips. Looking through these again now, this is also a project that I would love to return to. Here's a couple of sample strips...





So there you go! Now you know what I'll have with me and where to find me, so I look forward to hopefully seeing lots of you during the weekend! Do come and say hello!

Haiku Comics #1

I'm going to be at the Alternative Press Fair this weekend, and will be selling copies of my first issue of Haiku Comics, collecting my first batch of Haiku comic strips. I've been busy today setting up the pages in InDesign and drawing a brand new wrap-around cover image featuring various characters featured inside...



The rest of this week I'll be busy printing pages, cutting and binding in preperation for the weekend.

I'm Baaaaaaaaaaack!

So, that's the MA all done then!

I haven't posted anything new on my blog for a few weeks, as I was busy with the little matter of the Final Show for my MA in Illustration. The past couple of weeks have been really hectic, but a lot of fun! And now, I've reached the end. Our show was on last week, and was really well attended. I was very happy with my final pieces, and had some really good comments back from people who came along to see it, which was very uplifting! On Monday I went in to take my work down, and yesterday we collected our results, and I was very pleased to have passed with 78%.

My main piece was a collection of my Haiku Comics. I've posted most of them on here already but I kept a few back until after the show, so that people coming who had been following my blog hadn't seen it all before.

Here is the final piece, followed by the individual Haikus that I hadn't previously posted:




I was really pleased with the way people reacted to my Haiku Comics. There was lots of laughing to be heard, which was really pleasing. I definitely want to continue with this project, creating new Haiku Comics. Also I am going to make a book from my existing Haiku Comics to sell at the Alternative Press Fair that is happening at the beginning of August – more details soon...

So anyway today is my first day as a fully-fledged Master of Colouring-In and Doodling, and after a bit of a sleep in after a "few" celebratory beers last night, I'm ready to begin the next phase... But first I really need to tidy up my desk...