New year post with dead pan paper crown selfies.

Hello friends and strangers. You will be pleased to know that I recently achieved my fully evolved, ideal self, my fully realised form, the epitome of my existence, my pinnacle of being, I have found my spirit animal and it is the dead-pan selfie in a paper crown. 

Ironically, this has been a year where I have actually felt quite a lot of emotions. More than the average year certainly.  

Not that I'm saying I have been living in a frozen husk of largely muted and suppressed emotions honed by a combination of positivity, privilege and progesterone. 

It's not so unusual now for us to express surprise when our technology presents us with a highlights reel of the last 12 months, and somehow the smiling faces in the photos don't reflect the turmoil we remember. Though the algorithms are new, I think it was probably ever thus. We're far from the first generation to live through interesting times, or under governments we wouldn't trust to carve up a turkey, let alone a continent. All times are end times. And beginning times.

2018 began with me writing the beginning of Biscuits. 

Longer ago than a year, in fact two and a half years ago, I made a deal with myself. I signed up with a supply teaching agency and I decided I would stop using so much of my time chasing short term gains and small scale illustration commissions and try to make something. I gave myself until Summer 2018 to get a book deal, or be in a position to self publish a graphic novel. In those two years a bunch of stuff happened beyond my control that meant I didn't have as much time or mental space for that project as I had projected. Family stuff. Emotions. Life getting in the way type of stuff. That's ok. I didn't give up. Competition deadlines helped.

The Laydeez deadline was in January. And they specified that it had to be the beginning of a graphic work in progress. The beginning. Biscuits is an overlapping and fragmented narrative, so I hadn't made myself think about the beginning and what it could be. But to enter the Laydeez prize I had to. So that was important. Then the Myriad deadline was in February and they wanted 15-30 pages. So I did the first 30 pages. 

I already blogged a fair amount about what happened after that. I signed the book contract in August, and Biscuits (assorted) should be coming your way in twoish years. I now have a script written of 230ish pages, and 130ish pages still to draw. 

Life might still get in the way some. Maybe even world events will. But this is happening. 

Some other things that I did in 2018 include but are not limited to:

I made a snow-cat. 

My first attempt at hourly comic day and you can see my whole 24 hour comic here. 

I got to do lots of cool drawing for my friends Andrew and Susanna's wedding in Scotland, it was a wildlife theme for the invites and stationary and stuff and I even got to do animals for the beer pumps and menus and a fox on a box.

 

 It was a really really beautiful wedding. Also, just a few weeks ago it was featured in the times, so now I can finally say that my tits have been in the paper. 

I was so lucky to be part of such a lovely event. Hooray for Friends. 

We went to see They Might Be Giants at the Barbican. It was amazing. 

I got to help Andy out on the Broken Frontier table at ELCAF this year, and did this sketch of the Broken Frontier panel discussion.

In other BF related life content, as well as writing a few bits and bobs for the site, I also got to design the cover for this years Broken Frontier Yearbook

This Clara and Hana one page story is in the inside too. 

If you want to see everyone else's awesome work for the yearbook you can buy one here.

I also did a number of illustrations for the UCL alumni magazine Portico this year, including this one depicting an overworked teacher. There may be a very small amount of exaggeration for comic effect in the amount of paperwork here. Only slight tho. 

As well as my talk at London Laydeez do Comics in May which I blogged about here. I also made two public appearances doing a talking and a powerpoints at two big comic art festivals this year, in my capacity as Myriad winner.

Here I am on the Laydeez panel "Prolific" at Thought Bubble in Leeds in really excellent company with Kate Brown, Priya Kuriyan, Katriona Chapman and Louise Crosby. 

Thought Bubble was especially good this year. Everyone said so. 

A month later I was off again this time to Kendal (where the mint cake comes from) for LICAF. (all self respecting comic festivals are acronyms. Except Thought Bubble, but you can call it T.Bubs to make yourself feel better) 

I got to hang out a lot with the amazing Sabba Khan, my fellow Myriad shortlistee and book contractee. You should check out her work you will not regret it. And with our estimable editor Corinne Pearlman. The theme of our talks was on the importance of locality in comics, which was awesome to talk about, but slightly awkward that both me and Sabba are making comics about London, when the festival was in the Lake District. Luckily the third speaker was more local - the talented and lovely Owen Michael Johnson

Also this year I got to see Adriene, of Yoga with fame at a giant yoga cult event at Ally Pally with Wallis and Danny.

And speaking of Wallis I also had the honour of helping her put up her exhibition in collaboratoin with Double Jab gym to celebrate her awesome residency there and the comic she made about it. 

I've still been doing bits and pieces of the usual too

 Here's a purple heron

 Here's a facebook portrait of the amazing Katy Wagget, you should check out her photography too. 

Here's an Australian themed name commission. 

These two continue to be the loves of my life and I am very blessed to have them.

If you want to know what my favourite comics are that I read this year I wrote about them for The Quietus here. 

I also went to Devon, and Brighton, and Rye, and probably some other places and did loads of other stuff with lovely family and friends. But this post is already way too long.

So I am going to wish you all a very merry happy new year. 

New year New beer

I'm not going to do big epic year summary blog posts this year, I don't have time. Also I already blogged about lots of the illustrationy stuff I did this year, go read those posts. Sorry. 

As a compromise I will try and post a few pictures of some of my favourite fun things I got to draw in 2017 with captions. 

Not particularly chronologically. 

First here is a picture of me and Alex on Christmas day with my favourite Christmas present

If you didn't guess my favourite present was the googley eyes glasses. 

My brain is having difficulty with 2017 as it is, how silly do the things we said this time last year seem? Remember how people were saying 2016 was the worst year ever? Weird. 

This was my Christmas card design this year, commissioned by Claire. 

Yay puffins. 

Here is the single solitary Real TV Wisdom drawing that I did this year. You can read about it here. 

Muesli cat is the starshine of my life. 

Here is a picture of her in a box at Christmas. 

Please do not get the impression that she is one of those cats that is always jumping in and out of boxes. She only jumped in there because we threw an elastic band in. She bloody loves elastic bands. 

I don't even remember if I have shared this comic page online before. I am thinking of using it as the very first comic page of my comic. But there are other contenders. 

These are my favourite two recent commissions. Because.

This was an absolute joy from conception to completion, thank you Helen!

 When someone contacts you and is like can you draw a tiger and a bunch of cats reading books, you say yes. Yes please. 

That's literally all I'm going to post now, I hope all of you people who put your eyes here also get to put them lots of other good places, and your minds and your bodies too. 

Let 2018 be a year in which sh*t gets done and perspectives and priorities become magically clear. 

Look after yourselves yeah?

Annual really long blog post, things that I did in 2016. Part 3 of 3

Ok so maybe I shouldn't have been so blasé about getting all of the 2016 blogging done by February. Obviously.

Hopefully I'll still get this posted in time for you to see this annual promotion of my Valentines cards and stuff tho. They're up on Etsy.

 Writing about August and things that happened to me generally feels a bit weird again as social media fills relentlessly with fresh portrayals of betrayals of the version of democracy we'd become accustomed to. 

In the waking world most of us are not in constant hysterics, we carry on with our lives broadly the same as preBrexit, preTrump times. Unless you happen to be flying into the US on an Iraqi passport of course. 
But our online selves, perhaps rightly, seem to be vastly preoccupied with politics. 

Things are changing, fast and slow, and being as we are still in the jaws of history, where this is all going to take us is still up for debate. 

Endless, endless, endless debate, and often not debate at all, endless shouting into biscuit tins. Endless name calling, endless meme making, endless circling round the same issues crying in anguish and outrage and endless throwing of stones in glass houses. 

We can't actually relegate these issues to a corner or shut them out (like we did with Brexit at my sister's staghen in part 2 of 3 you may recall), but we also can't let them overshadow everything else in our lives. 

I watched some of the inauguration on a big TV in a staff room full of teachers, and felt exactly like an extra in a film, shown as a snapshot of the populace, watching the historic events in bars and homes across the world. And then I went outside and talked to the kids and didn't mention it. Because we aren't extras in the story of nations, we are people in the story of people. Protagonists of our own minidramas, not masters of our fates perhaps, when the shifting tide of paradigm and price can uproot our fragile safe spaces, but yes captains of our souls. 

Did that work? Can I talk about myself again now? 

Can I resume writing about the things I did 
in August 2016? 
I know that I drew this (in my NEW personal sketchbook) for Book Lover's Day

Twitter, when it's not fully trending with presidential proclamations and reality television, is also the greatest tool ever invented for perpetuating national and international days of stuff. Shallow but true, bandwagons are great promotional platforms. So yeah, if I'm not doing anything else and I see a day is happening, I'll hashtag that up. I also posted for cat day and dog day. And probably some other days. Obviously World Book Day is more commonly celebrated than this lesser known event in August. But I must have been busy on the first Thursday in March. Probably reading books. 

Also in August I made this card for Ned for his birthday. Totally piggy backing on a joke I have no actual connection to. (If you are interested in tweets that are about politics his twitter feed is a much safer bet than mine, because that is his job.)

I went to some cool stuff in August too.
Here's Mum at the exhibition about colour perception at the Natural History Museum. 

I was official blogsperson for the August Laydeez do comics event, so I drew some while I was there and took lots of notes and then wrote about it here.

Wallis and Rachel yo. 

We went to the final wedding of 2016, James and Kelly's wedding which was very cool and impressive. Their photobooth was so posh it actually printed out little photobooth photos.

It was like being an extra in Amelie except with more novelty props. 

This is me and Michelle and Rebecca enjoying that. 

At the end of the month I went to the Yo Illo event on reportage illustration, here are my notes

Olivier Kugler is upside down. Not intentionally. Pictured right is Karrie Fransman, usually one of the comic book crowd, seen here preaching the graphic gospel to the heathen illustrators. 

Both were a treat to listen to, hats off to Rob and Willa for organising as ever, they have another event coming up on going viral that I'm sure will be awesome.  

September September, I can't think of a pun about September

Back to school time wasn't it? Also time for me to begin doing supply teaching and to stop drawing all day. But not actually stop drawing altogether of course. That would be super sad. It's safest to assume for every drawing I post on this blog there are lots of other drawings that I am not posting. Because we don't have all year.

I had brought up a bunch of my older bird pictures that had been living in my parents house after a Sussex show,  and I started taking some of them along to markets when I went to sell cards and do live portraits and stuff. The first weekend in September I went to Blackhorse Workshop again and sold this old friend

They are pied wagtails. The pink barn owl piece is still available. I really should get round to listing it on Artfinder. 

I did a 5k Rough Runner race which is with obstacles and inflatables on Clapham common with Neeti. 

Pictured here indicating the graze on my knee I got diving over a giant pigeon, and holding my Baileys laced hot chocolate.

The next day I hurt all over all of me, even though we skipped the hoops challenge because what? I had attempted to build up some upper body strength. And after a month or so of that I had almost worked up to one push up. 

September is a fun time for school because we start lots of new projects and especially for year 9 who get a trip and a visitor. We went to the Pitt Rivers Museum again and I drew this lizard skellington

Then here is the amazing Lizzie Mary Cullen with a human skellington. I organised for her to come and give the workshop to year 9 this year and she was amazing. 

Like John, and June, she's a fellow graduate of the AOI business for illustrators talk of 2008 when I took it. Wow that was a long time ago, but so glad I'm still in touch with a lot of the awesome people I met. 

Later in the month we took year 10 and 11 to the Royal Academy to see the Abstract Expressionists 

Here are some gallery drawings of the Janet Sobell and Clifford Still works, which were my faves. I like drawing people with the art because it gives a sense of the scale, especially important for those old Abstract expressionists, n'est pas? We also popped in briefly to see the Hockney portraits, because we were there anyway. 

I only had time to draw Priscilla who was also my fav. although it's misleading to consider any one portrait from the show as a standalone piece, each one was painted in the same chair with the same background and the collection of 82 Portraits and one still life is really an artwork to be considered all together. 

Just the day before I had had an important milestone, I got my first (probably, possible only, it took me 30 odd years to decide on this one after all) Tattoo!

Here's the design

And here it is on  my shoulder blade

Here is a picture of Helen in a champagne glass. Because I am going to draw her in all of the different glasses, every year for her birthday. If I remember. 

Obviously the most exciting thing that happened in September though was that I got to paint an icecream shed parlour for Foxholes Care Home this was a really fun and rewarding project and I also got to meet a lot of the residents and chat about art and stuff with them. 

The whole thing was Neeti's concept, here she is with the blank shed before it was transformed into a parlour (housing for their soft serve ice cream machine that they have for guests and residents).

Fun signage and painting these sprinkles was super satisfying 

Here is my bum while I am painting the roof.  

Here is the complete parlour from all the angles.

Painting big stuff in real life is the best.

October kitten fest

In October I was working on this commission for Katie for Felix' 1st Birthday. Keen fans and family members who read this blog out of a sense of duty will remember that I painted an awesome mural for Felix when he was still tiny which featured some animal characters in a tree with balloons and stuff (you can see it here). A couple of these characters made an appearance on his birthday picture, as did a few more, and also himself

The photos are by his incredibly talented mother Katie Wagget

Here is a close up of the party in progress.

I went to a real (launch) party for John's book, not with any animals in hats sadly, but with lots of (drawn) musical legends.

I drew this picture of some houseplants, because sometimes I try to be vaguely on trend you know

But enough beating about the bush (houseplant), we all know what you came here for. Because in October 2016 a very special little furry friend came to live with us in our flat and I know you want to see pictures of her.

Who is this?

 here she comes

 It's Muesli kitten!

she was sooooooooooooooooo little back then.

She settled into our lazy home life very quickly

She likes jumping and climbing and baths and stealing underwear and sleeping on stuff. 

Now that I have a cat and bath in my life it is pretty much complete.

I am actually not even biased on this subject but she is unarguably the best cat ever. 

She is very brave and friendly and flufffffffffffffffffffy. 

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

I haven't drawn her very much yet, 

but here is a drawing of her. 

Hopefully I will have many more years of drawing her ahead.

Two and a half weeks after our kitten adoption, I had to leave Muesli (and Alex) for a brief sojourn to Leeds (4th and final trip to Yorkshire). It was a slightly weird thing, and exactly the kind of thing that happens to muggins here (me). You may remember that previously I had drawn an 8 page comic about a hypothetical future European theme park?

All pre-Brexit of course. 

So the publishers of that comic decided that they would bring an exhibition of some of the work to Thought Bubble Festival this year. I have never been to Thought Bubble, although I really want to, my comic book friends tell me very good things I just haven't been able to justify the train tickets and acomodation cost to myself to do it yet (hopefully next year...). I still didn't go this year. But I was in Leeds the week BEFORE Thought Bubble, at an affiliated event, which is to say the launch of said exhibition, which was in fact up throughout the festival next to the toilets in the town hall. So SORT OF TECHNICALLY you could say I was a featured artist at Thought Bubble. But really not really. 

I enjoyed Leeds very much though, and meeting some of the amazing people behind the festival. We even got a cool behind the scenes tour of Leeds Town Hall at night. 

Since Frederick Nauman paid for my train tickets and hotel, it was a great free little trip, but really I wish I had gone up at the weekend too. 

Ho hum.

Here are some of my photos from Leeds

Because it was Halloween, I drew these guys one day while I was teaching supply and coloured it in with the low quality colouring pencils that the teacher had left for poster making. See how that has not prevented them from being awesome? 

There's a metaphor somewhere here, monsters dressing up as children dressing up as monsters. Or something. Mostly it was fun trying to make the skellingtons look like skellingtons under their clothes. It is a very unhelpful shape for looking at on blogs and phones. 

Also this Halloween themed 3.52billion lady

On Bonfire night 

(which is a British thing, in case you don't know)

I went to my excellent friends Andrew and Suze's house and bonfired in a metal bin like homeless people in American movies. And because we are excellent adult friends we spelled out rude words with sparklers. 

Wait, if it was Bonfire Night it must have been in November. I forgot forgot. 

No no no no no no no no no no no there's no vember.

In November I was working on these designs for colour your own Christmas cards, see if you can spot the crucial spelling error that I crucially DIDN'T. I will reveal it later, for if you can't spot it like me and all the people who saw it when I posted these all over the social media before I got them printed.

Quite a lot of this detailed work was also done whilst supply teaching. Which might explain the spelling error (if you forget all of the instances where I have misspelled handdrawn typography working from home). It's pretty great when I get to work at two jobs at once like that, although obviously I can't do drawing all the time. Often I get to actually teach instead. 

In November I was also featured on Our Queer Art with an interview, mostly plugging the 3.52 billion project. I realised after sending off the answers that when they said 

What do you define yourself as? Or do you not? Why/Why not? 

they probably meant gender/sexuality wise, which is not how I answered it, so possibly I accidentally implied that my gender is both more exciting and passive aggressive than it is by plumping for 

'It’s tough, but I usually feel most comfortable with illustrator' 

If you were unsatisfied by that and want to know I am CIS female bi-sexual. But in terms of DEFINING myself... God I don't know. Those labels man, such a drag, guess I would prefer not to be defined. And I promise to try harder not to be passive aggressive. 

In other news of me being awesome, I did a day of live portraits for a charity thing (kept deliberately vague because it was a school thing, and you know, seperate life and that). Because I am lovely I drew all day for free, but because I am not THAT lovely I didn't use my expensive Promarkers, I just used black Berol felt tips. Which actually looked pretty great anyway

These were also done on a 50p per minute basis, rather than a flat £5 per portrait, see if you can guess which ones were 2 minutes and which were 10 (or somewhere in between).

At some point in November I had a badger for a head at a pub quiz. It's a thing.

Having already been in the news for at least the last 100 years, the American election happened and we entered into a heightened state of speculation and fear. Our time is genuinely a crazy time (but what times aren't?). Living as we do simultaneously in a time of unprecedented openness where our thoughts can be beamed around the world in less time than we are able to perceive, and a time of unprecedented limitation where we had got used to being able to choose what we were exposed to. My feed has been scattered for years with mental health dissection and advice for coping with the anxiety of the narcissistic impulses that the evolution of capitalist echo chamber arenas has supposedly thrust upon us, only for us to end up needing to deal with the real world impact of the very real authority of the impulses of a narcissistic capitalist who shouted into his own echo chamber so long and so hard that it became the only one that matters.
That was a very long sentence sorry. 

Hopefully the sentence on the world for it's own political disengagement will not be too harsh. 

One other highly anticipated event happened in November 2016. I don't want to equivalent this with the US election at all, but in the way that we now must get even more used to segwaying from the depressing world of current events to talk of other things (lest we go mad), there was another thing that was kind of a big deal coming over from stateside on the airwaves, and in this case I mean netflixwaves.

I am of course referring to the Gilmore Girls revival.

Gilmore Girls is my favourite TV show.

The joy of having new Gilmore Girls to watch was immense, although my approval of the middle two episodes definitely comes with a lot of caveats. 

Turns out expressing my thoughts on Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life succinctly might actually be harder than talking about contemporary politics. If you want to discuss it with me in the pub sometime, I will READILY do that.

December almost Christmastimes

with the future hanging in the balance, the ever reliable distraction of Christmas was here to focus us all on the usual gift angst and binge guilt, I mean seasonal cheer (I actually love the build up to Christmas, possibly as much as Christmas itself). As per for me this also meant accelerated market schedule and Christmas commissions, as well as making presents and a new set of Christmas cards to schlep to shops and galleries and friends and families. 

Did you spot the spelling error in the colouring designs?

In case you didn't here it is:

Chstmas guys. Chstmas

So I did get these printed and then I couldn't sell them, I still have quite a lot left but I've been cutting them up into colour your own gift tags. So yay for making the best of a tragicomic mishap.

The rest of the designs are pretty damn good though. I have some left if you are interested for next year. 

While I was at Urban Makers East market I drew this 

which is fun if your crafty and that. 

I sent a print to Alice, I may put some prints of word things up on the shop soon if I have time, because I've been doing quite a few incidental typographical pieces whilst supply teaching too, such as this zentabgly clouds drawing

Here are some diverse gifty Christmas commissions I did:

this watercolour house portrait for Anna

This personalised memory print for Charlotte

This quick portrait for Franchesca

I wore my bridesmaids dress from my sister's wedding again at a formal dinner thing

It was definitely a bit tighter and more boobtastic than it had been in the summer. 

I decorated baubles for my made Christmas presents this year, but true to form I forgot to photograph most of them, except this one. 

I altered the classic Kipling illustration of the Cat that walked by itself for my immediate family, after asking them what kind of cat they would be if they were one. It's about how we're all awesome Mavericks but like, we have each others back tho yeah? 

Cos my family is awesome.

Christmas was more fun than it looks in this photo.

We took Muesli on an adventure to Sussex for the festive week and she swiftly became queen of her domain/chaircat of the board.

Everyone loved her obviously.

For new years we had a quiet one with our longstanding besties Fran and Ian and their recent edition of a human baby Henry. 

Here we are rejoicing in an espresso martinis. 

This year was especially cracker heavy for me, I wore at least 7 different paper crowns. Which for me seems a pretty reliable measure of the quality of the Christmas. 

I've almost run out of stuff to say. This has been long guys sorry. I don't know if more stuff happened or if I've just been less good at editing what to include this year. Obvs as well each time I had to talk about politics I had to spend ages trying to get the words right because it stresses me out and is complicated. Really these 2016 blog posts are as much about now (the beginning of 2017) because that's where my head's at. Already that stuff at the beginning of the first 2016 post about how it wasn't the worst year ever seems kind of absurd. It is absurd. We are absurd. 

May 2017 grant us, if nothing else, perspective. 

Also if you have any prayers or well wishes left which you aren't using for the poor downtrodden Americans, wish me productivity and luck in working on my comic book. It's happening, slowly. 

This is one of the pages I have completed, and it was also included in Dirty Rotten Comics #9

Ready Salted people, ready salted.