Minor acclaim for typical laydeez, OR if one label is problematic, all labels are problematic.

Look guys it's the working cover for my in progress comic book! 

Who's this pensive sparrow? I will tell you later, but first abstract ramblings. If you're just here to see all the Drink and Draw drawings, feel free to scroll down. 

One of my favourite artworks whose title creates 99% of the genius and meaning, is Wolfgang Tillmans' 2003 exhibition and book of the same name 

If one thing matters, everything matters. 

Ok,  the content and quality of the photography was also super important I'm sure. But the meaning of the whole thing together would have such different, probably diminished power without that great title. I think so anyway. 

Why is this relevant? I'm not sure. 

Because it put a phrase in my head that feels like a sort of summary of how I feel about a lot of the discourse I encounter on the webverse recently. Around labels and problems. I have had some instances of minor acclaim recently (which will be explained shortly) but I haven't found myself in the firing line, I haven't been viciously attacked for my stance on or ownership of labels, but a lot of people have. You could say I have been lucky in this, blessed, or privileged. In the sea of hysteria I have a foot in within my bubble these things are hard to measure with any confidence, but yeah definitely I am all of those things. And since this is KIND OF the area that my book, Biscuits (assorted) is based around, not really, but if it makes people buy them let's say it is, it's an interesting area to talk about. 

Wait, what am I talking about? 

There are two kinds of people in the world, those that believe there are two types of people in the world and those who don't. 

That's another phrase (not the title of an exhibition to my knowledge, or not YET anyway) that I heard a long time ago and have literally just googled and learned that it can be attributed to Robert Benchley. 

If you put both of those phrases together you come close to my outlook on people: you can categorise and label people endlessly and a lot of the time they will fit snugly into those boxes, but also they will never fit into all of the boxes you want them to. Everyone is stupid and ignorant about some things, everyone is wise and smart about some other things. Everyone fits some stereotypes and smashes blindy through others. Everyone matters. All labels are problematic. 

Also, I hate all generalisations. 

So anyway, the first piece of news if you missed it on the twitterverse is that Biscuits (assorted) made the long list, and then got a "Judges Mention" in the Laydeez Do Comics Prize. 

It's a brand new prize for female identifying individuals working on in progress graphic novels, this was it's first year and hopefully it may have many more. The winner was announced amongst other festivities at the Laydeez Day Festival at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon. This was quite close to my flat so I volunteered to help out on the day. It was a great event and an honour to be a part of. I hung out with a lot of cool comic people and got to meet some of my heroes I hadn't previously met like Simone Lia and now one of my new heroes is the winner, the wonderful Emma Burleigh who is working on a lush watercolour autobiographical comic which will be very deservingly hurried along by her prize money I hope. 

This is the sign we made in the window. 

So that was great. Andy wrote it all up more eloquently here. 

The other thing that happened is I got to be a guest artist at Gosh Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw last week, which was great. It was on the last day of term and I had run a big stressful trip the day before so I was a bit delirious. 

Here is me and the other awesome guests Elizabeth Querstret and Michelle Mildenburg holding our wares. Which incidentally you can go and buy my wares at Gosh Comics where they were stocked for the event. Get them while they are there. 

There was a great turnout (because we are so famous, and it was just after payday) so much so that quite a lot of us sat on the floor. You can see me there, cunningly sharpening a pencil into a crisp packet. 

If you live in or near London or are passing through and you like drawing and friendly geeks I do recommend this event as it's always fun, even when I 'm not the guest artist. You get three drawing challenges of about 20 minutes and you can win stuff. I have been going on and off for a few years and in that time, the instance of drawings of penises has massively dwindled to the point where you hardly see any any more. We all chose quite introspective challenges, Elizabeth asked us all to draw our ideal birthday, Michelle asked for how we saw our future 20 years from now. 

For my challenge I really wanted to channel the Biscuits (assorted) message of label introspection, so I asked all the assembled drawers to draw the way(s) in which they fit the stereotype about themselves, and the way(s) in which they didn't. Everyone moaned. That's really hard they said. Then later everyone thanked me ("everyone" is a gross overstatement in both cases) because we like to introspect and be challenged really right?

Anyway I photographed everyone's drawings that they said I could so here they all are. Everyone interpreted it differently cos we're an awesome community of creative people. I did my best with the shop of photo, but some are a little hard to see the detail sorry. 

  

  

I had to choose a winner which was hard, but I chose this one. It's by Olivia Sualdea.

I'm a sucker for a high quality deadpan. That face is so good. 

Obviously I relate, being on the shorter side of stature myself, but strangely this label didn't occur to me when I was making this illustration of myself and my labels which I plan to put at the back of the comic when it's printed. Identity is weird like that. Since I opened up with some mild personal stuff in the Hourly Comic Day, here is some other stuff about me. 

But just so we're clear, I'm also short. 

Because I was on holiday the next day I also went for an additional drinks at a theatre bar. There was a really good drag act of Disney medleys and then everyone sang bohemian rhapsody. So that was pretty perfect. 

For these two events which I have just told you about, I decided to print a zine version of all (most) of the #3point52billion drawings which I had been kind of being indecisive (classic bisexual) about printing or not for ages. But when you are minorly acclaimed you gotta have something to sell that looks like you are moving forward with your projects. 

I am you know. 

Moving forward with my projects.

So that's a thing and you can buy them now here

yay!

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?

Ain't no cure for only 2 weeks left of Summer.

The last few summers I've been doing this whole thing where I pretend to be self aware. 

"Summer is stressful for me", I say to friends and colleagues who ask me what my plans are, "because I always want to do 3 things - have a good rest, get loooooaads of work done, and see all of the friends. I could probably do two out of the three, but I'm never going to do all three to my satisfaction."

And mostly this elicits the expression it deserves - shut up whiny teacher who has massive paid holiday at the time of the year when it's awesome. Or, from my teacher colleagues, shut up whiny part timer what do you even know about getting looooooaaads of work done. 

My friends don't actually say these things to me. Except for the really good ones. 

(the best friends are always the most verbally abusive)

So I have less than 2 weeks of holiday left, and a to do list with teeth, but I'm going to write a blog post today. Because that's probably a good idea for self aware people. 

All of these typography drawings were done whilst supply teaching by the way. Not that supply is always boring enough that you sit there writing blah over and over for fun. Just that it sometimes is.

You may know I took the current two years off of regular self promotion, in order to spend more time working on my ongoing comic project. So in the last 11 months I have only been doing work from clients that get in touch with me. I was making a concerted effort with instagram for a while, but that has completely fallen off over the summer. I've still been tweeting fairly much and in  the last month and a half I randomly revived the facebook project to do 5 portraits.

Which I just photoshopped together and realised they have a pretty similar colour palette. 

I wonder if the pink and blue theme is a subconscious expression of any life decisions we're supposed to be making. (not whether to have a sex change guys, whether to procreate).

But social media is kind of a weird place now right? Because our news narrative has changed but for most of us our lives haven't really. How do mechanisms built for narcissisms function in such interesting times? Some days I don't have the energy to contemplate it. I have a feeling I might not be writing a year round up blog for 2017.

Do you think that we'll break faith with the online in our lifetimes? Find some way to decide whose word we can trust? Retreat back to the printed word? 

Well luckily if we DO need to distribute our truths manually, the small press comics scene is thriving and ready to take on the mission. 

this is a drawing I did at the Broken Frontier panel at ELCAF in June.

Did you know that in addition to reviewing comics for the Quietus I now also review them for Broken Frontier? I am entirely open to you sending me your comic for free for me to (probably) review it.
Especially ones that are both good and not very long. And not too delicate to read in the bath. 

I'm not going away away this summer, although we did got to Cologne for a family meet up which was lovely. Because we spent all our money on a big holiday at Easter that I really should have blogged about because I took a lot of good photos. Although this was definitely the best one.

If you don't post photos of your holiday. Did it actually happen?

Yes. Yes it did. 

Since then I have become kind of obsessed with drawing tourists though. So in Cologne I mostly took more photos of people photographing stuff than of the stuff itself.

Is that creepy? I feel like it might be. A lot of the girls coming out of cookie cutter pictures come from photos of people I sneakily took in London. For some reason that feels way better to me than using photos found on the internet for pose or expression inspiration. It's like, I'm not stealing something that someone else made ever (even a random candid photo), but I am stealing tiny bits of strangers' souls. And tourist locations are THE easiest place to take photos of other people without them noticing. And I need a lot of people for my comic and they look better if I use reference, even if I change it a lot (which I mostly do).

These drawings of tourists taking photos of each other are NICE though, you have to admit it guys. It's a LOVING kind of creepy. Right?

Oh did you want to hear about how the comic is going? hmmmmm, nah I'm done with writing for today. I guess I could share a few sneaky pages that have already seen light of social media day.

Remember Jess?

Here are two pages that come from that.

This is the first time I'm even showing anyone these guys.
They are definitely going in the book (probably).