East London Comics & Art Festival

Yesterday I went along to the first East London Comics & Art Festival, held at The Village Underground in Shoreditch. It was very busy when I got there (and got even busier later, when people were queuing to get in) and it was a bit tricky to get around the narrow aisles and have a proper look at all of the stuff on sale, but I managed it eventually and saw some great work and chatted with some interesting people.

I also attended a panel discussion hosted by Becky Barnicoat, talking with Simone Lia, Darryl Cunningham and Karrie Fransman about the successful trend in comics of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical narratives. I drew a quick sketch of the panel while they were getting ready to begin the discussion...

It was very interesting to hear what each of them had to say on the subject, discussing their working methods and inspirations, as well as addressing the moral issues involved when the story you have chosen to tell features other people's lives. It was a very inspiring discussion and after looking at a lot of the comics that people had produced to sell during the Festival, I left at the end of the day keen to create more of my own comics work!

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...!