Unsold bits

I have four A4 watercolour drawings unsold from the UK Webcomix Thing (how nice not to have to mention that awful nerd-baroque name again this year). They're all pictured below. Price £42 (incl. £2 shipping), please email me if you would like one and I will tell you where to pay. First come first served!

Charlotte & Shauna - SOLD - £42



Shelley Boots - SOLD - £42



Esther Prancing - SOLD - £42



Zombie Shelley - SOLD - £42

Thing bits and Thing bobs

I'm sorry for the lack of blogs this week but I've been busy making things for the UK Webcomix Thing in London on Saturday the 27th! Here are some previews:

Watercolours

Beach Boys 1969 print

More to come!

The Hairy Boys

I recently collaborated (my half of the collaboration was some smudgy sketches and the most inept "turnaround" ever) with the amazing Feltmistress on some wendigos! Rising several feet above the call of duty, she provided not one but two takes on the beloved hairy boy.



Louise and Jonathan recently filled the window of fancy boutique Start in London with an astonishing array of critters. I feel lucky to have had the benefit of her mastery of needles and pins.

Art day truncated

Today was meant to be a super day of art and drawing, painting and creativity, but sadly I had too much to drink on Friday (bacchanalia fans: sadly we are not talking about very much at all here) and the part of my brain that deals with drawing is the first to shut up shop and the last to reopen. I did three A4 drawings though that you are welcome to email me if you'd like. They're £30 each, first come first served (email me here). ALL SOLD

DERANGED 4 U - SOLD


WATERING CAN - SOLD


YELLOW CUP - SOLD

Commissionaires' Carlotta

Hey commissionaires! I realised that a contemporary pen and ink drawing by me is kind of a hard thing to know what looks like. Here is what it looks like. It's not far off what comes out of the Sketch Fiesta. Here's where I sell these things if I have answered your question.

New Sketch Fiesta

Shelley wisdom
Originally uploaded by scarygoround

I've uploaded loads and loads and loads of drawings to a new Sketch Fiesta on Flickr! This might just be... the best batch yet.

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.