Monsters

Over the Summer I worked on a short comic with Karen Bielharz. This was part of a second anthology of comics, this time written for children, and crowd-funded through Pozible. The project was fully funded and is now in print! Wooooooooooooo
It's called "Monsters: an anthology of short comics for children"

Below are some in-progress shots of some of my artwork. There's also a colouring-in book!

A giant flower, a book finished and the MCA Zine Fair!

No, none of the items in the title of this post are linked. They are all quite, quite separate!

The MCA Zine Fair was towards the end of May and I hung out with the Sydney Comics Guild (SCG)! My lovely friend Alex runs the group and we have much fun making comics and selling them together at events like this. (I think the others do a bit more comic making throughout the year than I do but that's just the way it is at the moment!) In the second photo down there are the two short comics I did for the SCG anthologies over the last two years (which can also be read on this blog in the 'pages' section), which my wonderfully supportive and charming father printed off for me, while I was finishing and scanning the illustrations for Fearlessly Madison (and which, incidentally, got sent to the printers last Friday)!

Below are shots of my workspace and some partially completed illustrations for Fearlessly Madison. I'm very excited about this book! I love the story, by Penny Reeve - it's just as good as the first in the series and very much a story in it's own right, while still connecting to Wonderfully Madison in subtle ways. It should, like the first book, be available at Koorong or via the publisher (CEPstore site) once printed.

And did I mention giant flowers? :)

Blog blog da blog!

So, I've been pretty busy lately, and I have been doing some art stuff - I intended to put up some pics of the couple of oil paintings I finished in July, but I forgot to take a photo of the finished paintings before I gave them to my friends who commissioned them  - oops! I will do this... one day... when I go to visit them. 

It's funny, because so much of the art I do these days is not my own projects, that is, it's usually illustration work to be published, I feel funny about putting up pictures of the illustration work on my blog or facebook. Which is why I haven't (not counting photos of the printed book-covers of Wonderfully Madison, of course). Someone is paying for the exclusive right to reproduce it, after all! (the fact that I can say this makes me feel very special and blessed as getting paid to do illustration work was one of my dreams when I began uni...)

Below is something though that I'm working on that is one of my own projects. It's the rough draft layout of my 8-page submission for the Sydney Comics Guild 2013 anthology - exciting! Though it's due pretty soon, so I should get a move on and draw this thing...

The theme of the anthology is 'the locked door'. My story actually features two characters I have been wanting to write comics about for a long time, so I'm particularly excited to use them... Chloe and Navet. Hopefully these two will see many more adventures together!

 

Maddy and her Horse

This is an 8-page comic I drew for the Sydney Comics Guild's 2012 anthology - theme: 'Fantasy'. I've created a separate page for it which can be viewed here. It's based on one of my housemates that I lived with last year. She owned a bunny and also suffers from depression. While founded on real people and circumstances the comic is a fictitious account of a morning in her life and the mental battle she may have gone through.

Kinds of Blue

It is a curious fact that during my time in France last year I illustrated my first five-page comic. It was written by Karen Bielharz and was called A Friend In Need. It was one of a thirteen-comic anthology on the theme of depression, titled Kinds of Blue. Almost a year after I emailed the final art back to Australia I am excited to say we're on the verge of publishing it. Karen and others have been working very hard sending the anthology to publishers but without success (although there were many affirmations of the high quality of the work). Now, we have turned to self-publishing and today Karen launched a crowd-funding campaign on Pozible. The book is excellent and I encourage you to both read it, support the campaign that will give us the money to print it and buy it! (You can read it for free on the Kinds of Blue website.)