I double dare you.

As promised, I’m continuing to draw daily comics now and again. After yesterdays Latitude comic (which I’m counting as day 101) I’ve decided today is day 102 and all these journal/visual diary comics from now on will be titled Worth Recording (rather than labelled as Hundred Days comics). At some point I’ll explain why and organise this all somehow but for now I’m just running on post-weekend enthusiasm and need a chance to think it all through first.

I think it’s becoming clear I really enjoy documenting my life this way. I found myself sketching away tonight without even thinking about it. There’s something more… permanent about capturing great evenings like this using comics instead of a camera. Looking back over the other comics, it’s amazing how they trigger so many memories…

I may not do it all the time. And sometimes may not share the more personal ones. But I’m going to keep doing these as and when it feels right. Very possible I might challenge myself to do another 30 day run now and again too.

Go listen to Allo Darlin’, Antarctica Takes It! and The Smittens. They’ll put a smile on your face.

A very quick comic about Latitude while it’s all still fresh in my memory.

I had a wonderful weekend with the We Are Words + Pictures gang. Go visit the websites of Edward Ross, Philippa Rice, Anne Holiday and Matthew Sheret right now if you haven’t come across them already. Talented people. And great festival companions.

A massive thank you to you if you dropped by our tent and joined in with the drawing. It was such a wonderful weekend and so inspiring to see everyone throw themselves into creating comics with complete abandon. The WAWAP site will hopefully have a bunch of pics up for perusal with a proper blog about it soon (Update: It’s now online here).

In the meantime, here are some extra bonus sketches. To start with – some drawings I did during the workshops. Most of my drawings from the weekend were sold during a mini-exhibition we held at the end but here are the remaining images…

Actually… a brief explanation: One of the ways in which we tried to get everyone started with an activity was to ask people to draw a comic or illustration based on their experiences of the festival or previous festivals they’ve been to. We wrote simple prompts and provided them to people if they looked lost. Here, by means of providing an example, was my first one…

And another…

This one was just a doodle during the last stretch of Sunday…

Outside of the workshops, I didn’t get much of a chance to sketch. But here’s a quick one of a couple in the literary tent…

And a brief sketch of some people at a nearby bench…

Finally… a few photos! Here’s us setting up and a pic of Anne and Philippa…

A couple of shots of the workshops in full swing (this is during the quieter moments when we could actually take photos)…

Here’s Matt with a hand-made speech balloon (did I mention we had customisable speech balloons so you could star in your own photo-comic?!) and a small section of the make-shift exhibition we had at the end…

Before I go, just a quick mention to say that if you make comics or are interested in promoting comics at all – make sure you get in touch with the WAWAP team immediately. They’re always looking for new artists to work with and new events to organise. Anything to help spread the joy of making and reading comics. So email them right now if you want to help!

Another comic for the 69 Love Songs Illustrated project (see this post for my adaptation of “Absolutely Cuckoo”). This time I’ve interpreted “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”.

It is absurd. But was so much fun to draw. I wanted it to look like an old Sunday funnies style comic from the back pages of a newspaper. It just seemed appropriate after I’d decided on the concept. It was drawn at A2 and then coloured on the computer. Needless to say, my faithful but slightly old computer struggled with the size of the piece so it took longer than I anticipated. When I was happy with the colours I added a filter to give it CMYK dots for that old newspaper printing look.

Listen to the song here while you read!

Due to the comic being drawn so large (I think I might try and print it one day), some detail may be lost below so feel free to check out a larger version here.

The irritatingly talented comic artist Julia Scheele recently decided to start a project in which contributors create comics, illustrations, or poetry for each of the sixty nine love songs on the Magnetic Field’s indie classic 69 Love Songs.

Julia set up the website How Fucking Romantic where you can see all the contributions to date.

Clearly, this is a great idea and I jumped at the chance to illustrate a couple of my favourite songs. The first of which – is ‘Absolutely Cuckoo’.

Listen to it here if you’ve not had the pleasure.

I’ve gone for a slightly different style than I used for How To Date A Girl In 10 Days. Simpler and with an economy of line that I’ve been itching to settle into. I couldn’t really do this with How To Date for fear of making the inconsistency seem jarring but I’ve really enjoyed drawing this comic and feel very comfortable with my inking process these days.

Anyway, without further ado – the comic:

It may be a little small and hard to read – If so, click here to read a larger version.

I’d originally planned to do the comic in stark black and white. While I was happy with the original linework I ended up having too much fun adding colour and settled for the two tone effect above. I’ve included the black and white version below for the curious:

This, similarly, can be read at a larger size here.

I’ll throw up my next contribution for the project soon. In the meantime, bookmark How Fucking Romantic if you’re keen for more Magnetic Fields related comics!

Bit of an odd post this.

A few months ago I started drawing rough ideas for a regular, weekly strip cartoon. The theme was to be music and I drew some very basic ideas out – playing with colour schemes and layouts. For one reason or another I moved on to other projects and forgot about it all until recently. So, here they are (spelling errors and rough drawings included) – I’d be interested to hear what people think of them as this is something I’ve not tried before.

So, somehow I managed to complete the 24 hour comic within 24 hours. I’ve scanned it in and left it pretty much untouched in terms of spelling errors and the like. Editing it in that way seems to go against the principles of the thing. I have, however, made the colours sync up in photoshop. Some of my pens ran out forcing me to adopt different coloured pens during the process. Felt a shame to not correct this. I have to say, it’s fairly bad but I’m just quite elated I managed to make it though to the finishline. Let alone make anything readable.

Was it worth it? I certainly feel the challenge was a useful learning curve that has made me question how I produce comics normally. We’ll see how this affects my work over the next few months…

UPDATE: A limited print-run of the comic is now sold out but if you enjoy reading this, you can show your support and download a digital eBook edition here for £1.50.

And here’s my very own 24 hour comic completion certificate…

Back in June I was invited, alongside three other London-based comic artists, to spend ten days in the Polish city of Lodz. There, we collaborated with Polish comic artists to produce the second issue of ‘City Stories’ (the first issue was a Russian/Polish pairing). The recent comic festival in Lodz saw the launch of the book and the results of our endeavours. The cover image of the book, in all it’s three dimensional holographic glory (which is hard to tell in this picture of course) is below:

The story I worked on – with Polish artist Michal Bedkowski – follows. Michal wrote the concept and coloured the pages. My job was the black and white artwork. I attempted a very different approach to my usual comic style this time. No cross-hatching, just harsh, angular lines which were meant to suggest an East European feel. There are a couple of colouring mishaps (the character’s eye on page two was originally drawn closed) that weren’t picked up on during the emailing process, but overall I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I’ll post my black and white originals up here for comparison.

A couple of months ago, I was asked by a record company who manage a musician named Yoav to illustrate a comic version of his biography for a press release. In the end, it was decided that a comic might not suit his style quite as much as they anticipated.  The files have been sitting on my computer ever since, but it feels like a waste not to give them some sort of exposure, so here they are…

The large areas of empty space were for where the final text would eventually appear.

Here’s a new, completely inconsequential, two page comic.

As always with my comics, it’s just plot, plot, plot…