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. 

Annual really long blog post, things that I did in 2016. Part 2 of 3

Hi.

so this is part 2 of my yearly round-up of stuff and things that happened to ME. 

It's about ME. Not any debate on whether 2016 was a terrible year or not. 

Actually I did address this issue in part one. 

Go read that if you haven't already, because it also includes fun things I did in the first 4 and a bit months of the year. Including, but not limited to, puffins, getting trapped in a wobbly dolphin, googly eyes, good life advice and REVERSE BATMAN.

I ended that post with: What else happened in MAY 2016 to our intrepid heroine Jenny Robins? Some NICE things I hope?

I can now reveal that this was a joke. Because in May we went to Nice. 

May you live in nice times

2016 really was very much the year of the mini-break for us, the brief sojourn. You know like when I definitely can't complain that I didn't go on a proper holiday all year because I went on so many small ones and that would make me sound like a dick. 

Most of the time that we were there we made jokes about how NICE it was. That literally did not get old for me and I think if I lived there it probably would not. 

Most especially we liked the cemeteries on top of the hill. 

If you are going to the cost of azure I thoroughly recommend visiting them.

Here is Alex choosing some light holiday reading at the Musée d'Art Moderne

Here is Alex displaying the effortless chic of all residents and visitors to the coast of azure. 

Here we are at a beach, It was hot but the sea was not hot. I went in the sea but I was a wus and I didn't stay in the sea long enough to acclimatise myself to the temperature which I've since dwelt on and this I believe is my biggest regret of 2016. Really, if I'd just stayed in another 5 minutes I could have had a proper nice swim. 

I didn't even make the pun on purpose that time. That is what is so great about the nice pun. You make it by mistake all the time. 

Also, it wouldn't have been a PROPER NICE swim, because this beach is in Antibes, not in Nice.

 Also, we didn't see any puffins. 

I drew this for awesome Lucy and Rory's wedding invitation:

You can see a blog about their brilliant wedding here on Down-to-earth Brides. It's worth having a look for Lucy's jumpsuit and cape alone. 

In May I also officially became a godparent to Arthur. 

Arthur is the one in the shorts. He's awesome.

Also we went to Fliss' wedding, the fabulous bride was able to take time out of her special day to salute the sun with Alex and this statue

I went to Comiket and saw nice comic book people like John and Paul and Anna and Kieron and Gareth (who I managed to thoroughly freak out) and Wallis (who gave me bad advice re: freaking Gareth out) and other people I am forgetting now. But also significantly I met Julia again (readers may recall I also met her in March) and handed over my then completed bundles of zines for her to sell through the awesome distro One Beat Zines, including the feminist poster I had designed especially for the occasion. 

I blogged about it here, in June. 

June know what I mean?

On the first of June I painted this winter portrait commission. Those patterns on the jumper were sooooo fun in that way that kind of pressures the edge of the brain because it's really hard. 

Do you know what I mean? 

I remember the first time I was aware of that feeling was at life drawing class when I was 17. Like you can feel the weight of the amount of visual data your brain is processing. It's super satisfying in a kind of cathartic way. 

Might just be me.

Anyway I posted in progress photos of this painting they are here if you're interested. 

Back on a wedding theme, by this point things had been building up to my Sister's wedding for a while, I based the invite around this portrait of her and her then fiancé from his best woman's wedding. 

With the power of clumsily erasing offending details in photoshop, printing the result out and painting back over the top, I then magically turned this into a a picture of them in their wedding outfits which was used on the programmes for the actual day. 

Monsieur I have conjured you a pocket square. Presto. 

They really like that photo. 

Of course they were even more beautiful on the real day, about which more in July. 

Also, with previously mentioned lovely best woman Bella, I was in charge of a joint staghen picnic event which had been cleverly scheduled just two days after the EU referendum. We were tempted to allocate a special Brexit corner where people could vent/crow but opted for a blanket ban on discussion of the topic. A few days later again I posted a blog post in which I said a few fence sitty and yet still I feel, poignant or at least slightly pointy things on such matters. It's the same blog post as the one about the poster, so if you clicked that one don't worry about clicking this one. IF you didn't, here's another chance! 

I just re-read it and spotted a grammar error. Don't worry it's fixed now. 

Anyway, here are some photos from the staghen which was a great and glorious success.

I find this photo a little bit TOO hilarious. Despite my zero f**ks appearance on the right there, I actually did try really hard at egg and spooning. 

Since Bella was secretly pregnant at the time, I was drinking for two. 

This is my beauuuuutiful sister and me on the bus between the park and the pub. 

I made us hats. I made a lot of hats. 

Here is a photo of Hazel and Tristan that I clumsily photoshopped into McDonald's for jokes. 

Like, it's funny if you know them. Probably. 

That same blog post where I said pointy fence sitty things and wrote about the poster is also where I launched the new project, which was drawing lady folk coming out of cookie cutter shapes, and is still functioning under the title of the 3.52 Billion project. Although I would like to think of a new name. Or at least, I stated a vague intention to do so. I more officially launched it in August.

So I guess more about that in August, and I'll just carry on sprinkling them into the text whenever I fancy till then. 

In the real world of the present this week (which is to say the past by the time you read this, of mid January 2017) I am channelling Almas quite a lot, having both finished my tax return and drawn portraits at a queer performance art night. I encourage you too to embrace your inner Almas. 

Would I July to you?

So pretty much the first thing that happened in July, a week before I broke up from my teachy dayjob for the summer, was the actual wedding of Hazel. 

Obvs all of the stationary and signage was on point

I was chief bridesmatron, here is a really excellent photo of my extended family making funny faces. 

And an excellent one of just me and my parents looking very joyful.

This one is pretty great even though I am not even in it.

Also (because although this was obviously not MY day, this is MY blog) on the topic of me, I gave a really excellent speech. As well as being all touching and personal and shiz, it had a whole paragraph of alcohol puns in it, which I will share here because it doesn't have any mushy stuff in it:

Hazel and Tristan have chosen to celebrate their wedding in a place that symbolises what is most important to both of them; Alcohol. It’s good to see them giving love a shot, it may seem a little whisky, but if their relationship is ever on the rocks, I hope they can keep their spirits up, and when they’re apart, absinth will make their hearts grow fonder, until they cognac together again.  

It was a really lovely day.

But it was only the beginning of my dress wearing and three course meal consuming summer, as during July we also attended two further weddings. 

And I'm not saying Hazel's wasn't the most important (double negative, can't nothing please me) but her's didn't include an adventure of going to a place other than the one I grew up in. #justsaying

So one week after the family wedding, we were off up to Yorkshire (EAST Yorkshire) to attend another happiest day, that of our friends Dom and Paula. 

I was so organised  I made the card before we even left and so was able to scan it. 

Now, I want to stress clearly that I was very happy with how things went down. but there was one tiny detail that I was not entirely happy about. 

We were on our way to Yorkshire on an evening only invite. And I had no beef with that. I had a plan, to go see puffins on the cliffs during the day, and come to the dancing at the wedding in the evening. We had done the best thing ever to do for friends weddings that are far away, which is rent a big house near the venue with 10 other friends. And of those friends there were 6 of us in on the puffin plan. But on our way to Yorkshire we got a message offering us a bumped up position as day guests. This is the second time this has happened to us btw, we are a very first reserves kinda couple. So obviously we were like yes please to singing in a church and eating a tasty sit down breakfast. And it was a lovely wedding of lovely people with pinwheels and the sea and a good joke about black holes and bubbles. But on this occasion. 

No Puffins. 

See look how pleased we look to be in the church. 

No beef

But no puffins guys. 

Also, I really like Yorkshire and now I had been there 2 times ever and Andrew drove us through all of it and we saw lots of power stations. 

Also in July I drew some cool commissions like this one of Adam and Emma

Which was for an anniversary, but still obviously, basically a wedding portrait.

And this one of Michelle and Sean

Who have since gotten engaged. So like, no theme here guys.

It was the year of LOVE. In my diary anyway.

Back on a more usual theme, I got some bird prints into GingerWhite gallery in Bethnal Green in July also. 

And after drawing a few more Real TV Wisdom pictures, I finally had enough to bring out the second edition of the zine of the same name. 

available here yo.

I went to another Broken Frontier Drink and Draw and drew this dystopian coffee shop.

At some point in July I drew this:

based on a true story, of course. 

Then it was time to go on another adventure to Ireland for the wedding of my amazing cousin Jay. 

She's the one in the white dress, it was 1920s themed so we all got dressed up and stuff. 

We used to hang out the four of us here when we were kids and stuff and we were super cool cousins. 

Here is an action shot of my parents dancing to the Irish band.

We went for some additional adventures in county Limerick and Clare before the wedding and then in Dublin afterwards. This was my first time in Ireland so that was super awesome.

Me and Alex and Hazel and Tristan reflected multiple times in a sculpture thing in Dublin. 

Cool spooky church we stopped and explored.

Also we went to the cliffs of Moher.

There are meant to be puffins at the cliffs of Moher.

We didn't see any. 

It was pretty tho. 

I have quite a lot more puffin drawings in my backlog I can do that to btw. But on most days I accept it's not a thing to not see a puffin. Though I would be into it if one just came at me one grey London afternoon. You know like how in post apocalyptic films the animals have always escaped from the zoo so there's just giraffe's chillin in the park? Not that puffins would survive an apocalypse. They are  evolutionary culs de sacs for sure. 

That's part of why they are so great.

August is the proper summer

So come August I was into the proper summer. Which is to say, there were no weddings in my diary (until September anyway). I didn't have to go to school 3 days a week like I do most of the time (love my day job btw) and I could get down to some serious drawing and stuff.

I had a plan, and I had already put some of it into motion.

So this is kind of awkward to talk about, but I actually find school holidays kind of stressful.

I'm always trying to balance the three aims of resting, seeing friends and also getting lots of work done. Because I rely on my freelance work to fund anything outside of mortgage, food and bills I also feel under pressure to make the good money while I have the more time on my hands, which often leads to me spending more time scheming and cold calling than actually making anything (such is the freelancer life). But hanging out with so many comic book people was starting to rub off on me and I'd been feeling like I needed to put some serious time in to my personal work. So I came up with the plan. Which is this: In term time, I would start doing supply teaching work on the days when I didn't have a paying illustration client, starting in September 2016. In July I had done the getting the agency teacher job part and I was set to go for this. Now because I knew that I had that extra money coming in in September, I could spend August doing my own work without feeling guilty that I wasn't pitching or stalking art directors. I have a network to the extent that work trickles in, sometimes the flow is light and sometimes it's heavy, if you pardon the period parlance. But I had basically given myself permission to not worry about it. Which is pretty great. 

And I had bought myself August to do things like do some work on my Etsy shop after attending a really cool speed dating style shop critique session run by London Local Team. 

Also excitingly I got around to something I've been meaning to do for ages, which was to set up and film all of my personal sketchbooks from since I started having one, which was like, in 2001. So a LOT of random stuff that I drew/collaged/painted in my spare time in the intervening years. 

You can read more about this in the spiel I wrote on youtube here. 

You can pause it to look at individual pages, but I feel obligated to warn you that in the early 00s I drew a lot of boobs. There's some pretty embarrassing stuff in there tbh.

This is the classy professional setup I made to film them:

Bunny was executive producer.

There are a lot of pages though that I still love  a lot. 

That's a lot of years of making pictures, and when I'm stuck for inspiration, they're almost as reliable as Pinterest when I look back through them. 

I also drew some strong Facebook portraits, and by some, I do mean 2.

This is Julia

This is Julian. I really love drawing pinstripes by the way. 

But mainly what I was doing in August was putting in time on working on a plan and starting to put that plan into action for me making a book. A big part of that plan is the (name still under discussion) 3.52billion project. I spent a lot of July and August drawing these ladies. As of the time of writing (now slightly later in mid January 2017) I have done almost 50 of them. For most of August I was posting them DAILY guys, on the gram of insta, I slowed that down to 3 a week once I went back to work and now they are as and when. 

 

 
 
 
 

They are basically really fun to draw and caption. I could do a book just of these pretty easily, but because I am a) a masochist b) creatively ambitious c) obsessed with doing a comic d) interested in telling deeper stories than can be told in a glib one liner e) still figuring out ways I can do this project and somehow not look like an arrogant white feminist because that's what my internet bubble tells me to worry about f) all of the above, obviously, I am going to use them as part of a bigger book project that will include comics and stories. I estimate this will take me about 2 years to complete if I am able to be strict enough with myself with my time allocation and not get tempted into little side projects and low paying commissions that sound fun. 

Which sounds pretty unlikely, so maybe 3 years is a safer bet. 

There's still more stuff that I did in August, but I feel like this has got super long and super late already. So  I'm going to continue that in the next instalment.

What to expect:

books, hats, blogs, more wedding stuff, more Yorkshire misadventures, and the most exciting new addition to our small family.