Hourly Comic Day

Hello all, so on Thursday I made the last minute decision to join in with Hourly Comic Day instead of calling in for supply work. So in order to justify this guys, we have to make sure this makes £130 worth of social media impact. Can we quantify that? Cool. Thank you to Andy Oliver for alerting me to the day being the day, cos I always miss these kinds of thing. Guys I guess that's what it means to be part of a (Broken Frontier) family and be looked out for and stuff. Tears. Heart thump. 

The idea is you draw all day about what you're doing, like a visual diary. 

I literally do not have time to scan all of these pages in, guys the scanner is in a different room to the TV, you understand.

I did convert the photos to greyscale though so they aren't so distractingly subtly different shades of bluey or orangey not white on account of having been taken in different places and at different times of day. Let's all take a moment to appreciate the infinite human capacity to process colour and translate completely different actual visual information into understanding consistent with the complex memory symbols in our heads. Which I think is why children/non artists can fairly accurately copy the tones from a photo of a face in shadow and still leave those eyeballs creepy ice white, or somehow fail to notice that they haven't coloured in the holes inside the letters of a text piece even though they are literally the only uncoloured thing on the whole page. 

I digress. 

Anyway you can read all about my day here super easily. At the bottom I'm going to link to some other people's awesome hourly comics. 

I feel a bit cheeky that clearly some of this is more like hourly illustration or hourly sketchbook which might cast doubt on my comic chops. But what is the medium if not endlessly flexible? 

So that was my day. 

Sorry for any bits where you couldn't read my writing. 

If you want to see more of my actual comicy comics work I recently updated the comics page on my website, it has pages from the 3point52billion/Biscuits (assorted) project you won't have seen. 

These were some of my other favourite #hourlycomicdays that other people did that I saw.

I love how they are all so different. 

Composing this list was definitely more laborious than it should have been. You have to come out of the picture viewer to click on the links to the twitter. 

Ugh formatting whatever. 

I'm not doing it again. 

@AnnaLandin

@beemure

@davevaleza

@emmelinedraws

@fletcharrow_

@hamishsteele

@aoife_duffy_

@hirosemaryhello

@careydraws

@jabberworks

@JAM_WAH

@melgillman

@KitDraws

@Lizzlizz

@neilslorance

@pamwishbow

@PeopleIKnow

@playground_park

@rachael_

@roystoncartoons

@joedecie

@mockduck

@iliadtea

I hope nobody minds me sharing, 

it's a weird territory of self exposure and joy I'm trying to not think about. 

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?

Goeiedag, Good News,

Hello hello hello, bonjour, guten tag and indeed goeiedag.

Reasons to be famous, completed projects and all sorts of illustrated high-jinks abound in this springtime season of newness and tidying.

A short while ago I made this first page of a comic about what Europe might be like in the future, and sent it along with a summary of the rest of the story to the nice people at Friedrich Naumann Stiftung for their Europe Fast Foward competition.

Along with six other comic artists I have been commissioned to complete the story and then go to Brussels for an awards ceremony and the launch of the book of our comics. Which is cool.

I'm not going to share the story with you, because I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise of what European culture will be like in the future. Because I am that prescient and clever that I have figured out what that will be. 

ALSO, I want to tell you that drawing lace is really enjoyable and I want more excuses to do so.  

In other comic news you can see a review of the second issue of Meanwhile... featuring my found text comic (Loved and Found, the serendipitous love story) on the Forbidden Planet blog here. Which is quite exciting. 

Also and as well, a somewhat longer time ago, the magnificent Christopher Kear of The New Tabloids commissioned me to produce some collagey artwork and designs for the album Good News including a full colour 12 page lyrics booklet in the found text style.

It is now a real thing in the real world and I went to the launch party although I think I missed my shout out which is a little bit embarrassing. 

The music sounded really good tho, you should check it out. 

Here are some of the lyric pages

I love the mix of serendipity and intention that is in all creativity but comes out especially much in abstract collage. The materials and colours that I used related to the theme and mood of each individual song, with a theme of using newsprint and jagged edges throughout, relating to the idea of the band's name and ethos of fractured journalism, commenting on modern life seen through the bottom of a broken bottle, dancing in the wreckage of the scene. You know, that sort of thing. Right? 

I've been doing lots of other fun drawings for fun and profit, much of which I am not sharing yet. But here are some sneaky, cheeky, peeky work in progress (or #wip to those in the know, or #itk) pictures from the new edition of What Birds are Really Thinking I am working on. 

It is going to be so so so good. Probably.