Adventures in Ink

Today I attended the 2nd International Alternative Press Festival at Conway Hall. As well as buying a lot of cool comics while I was there, I also took part in an Ink Drawing workshop run by the amazingly talented Zarina Liew. The workshop was a lot of fun and we got to play around with inks and brushes with Zarina explaining the various techniques you can try with inks.

Here's Zarina demonstrating the techniques to a clearly engrossed audience...

Photo courtesy of Richy K. Chandler

And here I am getting down to trying it all out for myself...

Photo courtesy of Richy K. Chandler

One of the techniques that I liked the most was to load the paper with water, and then add the inks, before blowing on the paper causing the ink to spread out across the page. I tried experimenting with this technique to see what effects I could produce and turned it into this final image...



Here's a close-up of the little penguin I added in the corner...

I really like the effects you can achieve with inks and the vibrancy of the colours and definitely plan to experiment some more with this medium...!

Happy Birthday Zarina!

The other day was my friend Zarina's birthday. Zarina tweets quite a lot of photos of food (but she also tweets links to her amazing artwork, so that's okay). So I decided to draw a picture of her taking a photo of her birthday cake on her iPhone ready to tweet it to the world...

And in a wonderful moment of life imitating art, after I gave her the card, Zarina then took a photo of it on her iPhone and tweeted it!

If you're on Twitter, you can follow Zarina @cobaltcafe. She doesn't just tweet photos of food and her illustrations are amazing!

Happy Birthday Zarina!

Last week it was my talented friend Zarina's 30th birthday and to celebrate I drew her a special card featuring characters from her excellent weekly webcomic – Le Mime.

Happy Birthday Zarina!

Today was my friend Zarina's birthday! I made a card featuring her comic character Le Mime wishing a "Happy. Birth-day. To (two). Zarina." in his own silent style!

Japan Matsuri Festival

This weekend I went to the Japan Matsuri Festival, in Spitalfields. It was a really good event, and I had a great time eating sushi, and watching Japanese musical performances.

I also met up with Zarina Liew, who was exhibiting her work at the festival after entering a competition to illustrate a traditional Japanese tale. While I was talking with her, material for a new comic strip literally happened before my eyes...


...Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up!

You can check out Zarina's winning illustration here.