Joanies

I had a whole spare afternoon today so I decided to paint Joanie from Mad Men. Wholesome fun. Here's my sketch and then my finished Joanie! It was a rare outing with the brush, I had a lot of fun, I will do more brush and watercolour pics when I have time.

A prisoner of the past

I've been thinking about my old books and reprinting them again. I worked out how to do it. My plan is to assemble books 1&2 into one volume, and 3&4 into a volume when 4 is out of print. I can't assemble 1, 2 and 3 together for fairly obvious format reasons.

It's difficult to gauge demand for reprints like this and the books would be, due to their 400+ page counts, more expensive to produce than my usual books, which means more cash up front. But I do feel like it would be responsible of me to put them into print again - I think I frequently lose sight of the fact that someone might have discovered my old work last week, to them it is engaging and new.

I can't start looking at this until the last of the Scary Go Round books has broken even, as that is where all my money is right now. Maybe I should apply for an Arts Council Grant! But I think the Arts Council frown upon rascals like me.

Annotated Weekender 1st Birthday

Yesterday I attended a party for the first birthday of Joe List's Annotated Weekender, the blog that draws all over the Guardian Weekend magazine! It's one of my favourite websites and I was delighted to be able to attend this select gathering.

Here are a few of my favourite drawings I did, I've put up all 22 on my Flickr with explanations if you like these.

Young REM, meet old REM:



Syd we need you man, Meddle is boring:



Self explanatory:



Blowhards 1: Moore



Blowhards 2: Coulter



Sooner or later Bob, Columbo is going to find out:

uStream Friday!

I'm drawing live on uStream right now (Friday afternoon GMT)! Come see me scrawl, hear some eclectic jams from the sonic underground.

UPDATE

After I was done with the comic I took quick sketch requests and people wanted me to draw the old SGR characters as kids, so I did them! These are in the order they were requested. (Sadly the images of goblin birth and Len at Wigan Casino in his vest were accidentally saved over).

Like old times

I have been working on a new tea towel, these were something I enjoyed making and they are actually useful, which I find cheering. I think what I drew is all right, it seems innocuous enough, no one is going to take offence and call the cops. It's just some dames gassin', man, just gas-baggin'.

Captain Scott

Just a quick piece per a request.

Book 8 runs into a problem

Here is my hilarious tale. My comic files are coloured in photoshop in RGB, then placed in an RGB Illustrator file to get they balloons on, then I stick em up on the web. When I do a book, I just open the illustrator files in photoshop, convert to CMYK make some tiffs, stick em in InDesign and go away rejoicing. It's not a perfect way of doing things of course(it's not very professional). But on this occasion, the same printer who was happy for me to do this twice before has told me that the panel borders and text have to be 100% black (not the loony rich black that working in RGB gives you). I think they figure that it might not register perfectly. They managed it fine before but I imagine they were cursing me the whole time.

I can open up the RGB Illustrator files (with their placed, unlettered PSDs) in Photoshop, convert to CMYK, and convert all the blacks in the file to 100% with relative ease, but that leaves me open to trapping errors. I can't use the BPelts trapping plugin to fix this because I use a lot of rich greys that confuse it. As far as I can work out, I am going to have to individually edit every single file, probably by selecting the text in the balloons and the borderlines and painting over it with 100% black.

I don't see a way to rectify this that doesn't involve days of work. Just writing about it was complicated!

Ha ha ha! Aaaargh. This is particularly infuriating because this the the printer that did such a good job of books 6 and 7 at a pretty unbeatable price.

Decisions Decisions

I'm writing the end of the current Bad Machinery story and I have to decide what to do next. I can either plough into another one immediately or do one of my other projects for a bit while I work out another complicated 100-page arc. The only other project that is fit for purpose is "Esther Project", let me dig out the piece of scrap paper again...



Yes you see the scrap of paper is still in rude health. I think I accidentally already used Daisy Minter's hair on another character though so I will have to work out a new look for this highly developed character.

While Bad Machinery has not been to everybody's taste (and has proved thus far to have a more selective appeal than some of my earlier work), it has turned out how I wanted it to and I wanted to thank people who have written in support - here, on Twitter and via email, it has really helped me to not go too mad, especially early on when ratings were tumbling.

Small commissions gallery

I've posted some of my pre-Christmas '09 small commissions up on Flickr. Click away!

Hourly Comic Day

Here's my hourly comic for John Campbell's Hourly Comics Day. I found making it quite exhausting! I feel glad that today is not an hourly comic day. Yesterday was quite hourly enough.










I apologise that it was rather a dull day, but Mondays are always like that, I get through the boring stuff so the rest of the week has space for thrills and spills. Whatever day of the week it is, you can plot my circadian energy curve based on this day.

Waterpistol

Auction ends Saturday at around 4:05pm GMT.

It's 12x12" on canvas board.

Cover version

Here's the Book 8 cover!

Bubble and scrape

I have been working very hard on editing Scary Go Round book 8, which now has a title - "Recklessly Yours"! I hope to have it out in April but you know how these things slide. I've fixed dozens of pages that were either rushed or put out in a state of high vexation, cut a few pages, drawn some new ones and redrawn bits and pieces, it has been a dickens of a job. You cannot imagine how many times I had to nudge an errant eye six pixels in one direction or another.

Some pages (like the girls' various fanzines) had to go because they were full of copyrighted photos. A few pages were makeweights to pad out a week or missteps that I was pleased to cut. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that a difficult year of comics to make was a lot more together than I expected it to be.

(In a lot of the more grave cases the finished article was only about 15-30 minutes tinkering away. I think I had tunnel vision for most of the last year of the comic)

I suppose you can look forward to three or four abortive attempts at the cover next. Covers are very hard! Maybe I'll just ask Chris Ware to do it. "Recklessly" is a much longer word than "Yours". I'm going to need help... from the professionals.

Wendigo Love

One of my favourite characters I have created is The Wendigo. I draw him all the time, but he has changed a lot since he appeared in Scary Go Round a couple of years ago. He's less dribbly and vile. This was a picture I did for my Twitter page.

Rock, rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over

Ukes Not Nukes has been problematic to draw. the original sketch (in yesterday's post) was a red herring, as neither of the items involved are actually that shape, and hours of rearranging the real things produced nothing pleasing. But my many, many experiments to try and get it right did produce a hula cutie (left). Ain't she a darlin'? Swit-swoo!

First of the year

It's my first t-shirt workshop of 2010! I was a bit slack in this area last year but I promise that this year I will back up to scratch with some good designs.

Here are the roughs I am going to work up today. Will I succeed? Will I fail? I predict that the end result will be an exciting mixture of both.









(There was another version of this last year that proved unpolishable, but this time I think I know what to do.)

Book 8 update

Work is heavily underway on Scary Go Round book 8 now. Going through the material from August '08 to September '09, it looks like I'm going to have to do a lot to get this stuff up to scratch. I can easily spot all the work I did on weeks when I was ill (which was a lot, diseases had it in for me in 2008/9!) and there are places where the art is clearly rushed and the writing more so (there were pages where I genuinely couldn't work out what was being said - and I wrote it - I must have been completely delirious!) So i will take a few weeks to go through these comics, redraw and rewrite bits, throw out the really ropy ones, and make something that will reward re-reading.

There were several comics where I drew them a tablet PC and it just threw me completely. New equipment always takes a few weeks to warm up to. Here's one I reworked today (the original is below).

Worming up

I haven't made comics for more than a week, so I had a little drawing warm up this morning. It's "Eggy Hepburn". I used the Breakfast At Tiffany's poster as a resource, on which she is depicted as being roughly 8 feet tall with an eight inch waist. Good old Eggy, whenever I draw her she always ends up looking like Jeggy Garner.

2010 album chart of the year part 5

4 WOMEN - Women

"Cameras"



"Shaking Hand"



This scraped in, it was released in January '09 in the UK!

3 VECKATIMEST - Grizzly Bear

"Two Weeks"



"Ready, Able"



Two of the year's best videos! THE BEST

2 SIGNAL MORNING - Circulatory System

"Overjoyed"



"Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant"



1 HUNTING MY DRESS - Jesca Hoop

This record only came out about a month ago so video is thin on the ground! Here are some wholly representative live jams from a stellar LP.

"Murder Of Birds" (live)



"Hunting My Dress" (live)



For all that 2010 seemed a thin year, I enjoyed all the records on my list a great deal and there were several others in contention right up to the end, all worthy of investigation:

ESPERS III - Espers
WOLFGANG AMADEUS PHOENIX - Phoenix
BITTE ORCA - Dirty Projectors
LIFE AND TIMES - Bob Mould
FITS - White Denim
JEWELLRY - Micachu & The Shapes
THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

2010 album chart of the year part 4

8 WIND'S POEM - Mount Eerie

"Between Two Mysteries"



Perhaps this fan-made video should try to be more painfully literal ho ho

7 THE GOLDEN SPIKE - Sky Larkin

"Antibodies"



"Fossil, I"



Sky Larkin are a fantastic band, I hope they get their chance.

6 THE HAZARDS OF LOVE - Decemberists

"The Rake's Song"



5 FEVER RAY - Fever Ray

"When I Grow Up"



"Triangle Walks"



A thrilling act! In conservative times, we need more artists like her.