It’s drawing things like this that makes me realise how much one needs to know about the human figure in order to parody it effectively. (In my case, I don’t know it well enough X’DD)

Made for the CPCBF! I had a lot of fun at the Festival last year. I’m unable to get to it this year, though I’m so pleased it’s going ahead, and I hope it becomes a regular annual event! (Especially since both last year and this year I was able to draw some really fun monsters! :D)

If you’re able to get along, you should check it out! ^_^/

(So… obviously missing a lot of production notes due to the database deletion. I’m just going to continue).

Finished the pages for The Piper Man, the first story in Fish & Chocolate (though it was the second story I drew)…

Meh. I had a hard time with this one. Had one of those “yeah that’ll look awesome!”-times in drafting it, and then getting round to actually drawing some of those “awesome!” things was… like, not so awesome. More like headache-inducing. I test-coloured a couple of pages at the beginning, though I’m not really sure if I like how they came out. They’ll prbably look a bit better with text on. I’m really not sure I like that first page much at all, anyway. Oh jeezuz, here I go with the happy XD

A little bit about The Piper Man! So, I think this is technically the newest story to add to the bunch. It’s about 3 years old now? It’s been through a few drafts. Not too many. I had one of those “complete visions” of the idea for it one night, and had to write the whole thing down in case I forgot. At one point it was going to go in an anthology, although that fell through. Kinda good in a way, as I get to mash it together with the other two F&C stories, and it sits quite nicely alongside them.

I’m going to be interested to see what other people think about it. I have a firm idea of what it’s about, although when I showed the draft to Paul, he found rather different things to say about it. I think that’s cool. I will be fascinated to see if people see it from his point of view, or my point of view, or a totally different thing.

Anyway! Currently, I’m about 10 pages into doing roughs for Matryoshka. So, 30-odd pages to go, then I’m done with the pencils! Woo!

I think the party went really well! \^_^/ Many, many thanks to those who helped put on such a cool show! I was really happy that it was in Oxford, as so many people who wrote/drew/made/produced The DFC are Oxford-based. So I felt like it was a real proper DFC celebration!

We raffled off a large print of one of the original DFC covers of The Spider Moon, and also of course we had the auction… I was VERY happy with the result! We raised a lot of cash for Mind and also, in a rather cool twist, the winning bidders turned out to be the lovely folk at The Story Museum, which is about 10mins walk from our flat! If you live nearby you should keep an eye on this place. It certainly looks awesome. Oh, I love Oxford so much :D

Lots of my most favourite people were able to come along, so it was just such a cheery event! In a total surprise, some friends from Devon drove all the way up for the evening. It was super-awesome as I’ve not seen those guys for such a long time. My editor for The Spider Moon (a.k.a. Lovely Ben) was able to come as well, which was super-awesome too!

Here’s some pics that Paul took:

Setting up! I love how Blackwell framed the images. The Bekka-sitting-on-the-moon cover was the raffled image. It went to a lovely family home :D

Books!

All the DFC Library books together! It was great seeing them like this. Please do look out for Vern & Lettuce by Sarah, Mo-Bot High by Neill, and Monkey Nuts by Bob & Lorenzo out later this year! They’ll make great Christmas presents, won’t they? Eh? Eh? *nudge*

Crowd! (Including Philip Pullman! He’s just this guy, you know? somebody I admire a huge amount, so I was totally overwhelmed to meet him. We spoke about a few things, including my boots. I hope that I did not make a fool of myself.)

We had sketchbooks and drawing materials out on the tables! They were well-used! (Would like to point out here that David Fickling was making bowties cool long before Doctor Who ;p)

Paul is probably making a masterpiece! ;D Or could he be drawing a certain shining knight…? ;D

Also! Please do check out my friend Lisa’s collection of photographs from the event. She’s very talented! :D

The rest of the weekend was spent with friends playing video games and MtG and watching silly things on YouTube and eating nice things and talking about comics and books and films and basically everything we all love. Couldn’t be better! :D

Private commission for a client ^_^ This was really fun to do, though rather challenging, as the client requested a scene from a dream that she had had the night before, and we both tried hard to re-capture it on paper :D Everything in the image was as carefully represented as possible. She was happy, so, I’m happy! I really missed doing illustration. It always shocks me how different it is to comics (in my opinion).

In other news, The Spider Moon has been nominated for The Northern Graphic Novel Award 2010 *^_^* I am totally shocked and thrilled *^^* Though I can’t find anything about the award yet online, the results will be given at Thought Bubble this October. Typically, I can’t make it to TB this year ;3; I don’t know who else has been nominated, either O_O; IT IS A MYSTERY!

EDIT: The other nominated titles are: MeZolith, The Wizard of Oz, Sliverfin, Good Dog Bad Dog and Beasts of Burden. I heard my hopes fizzle away down the drain when I learned of the other nominees XD Congratulations to these people! :D

Okay. Sigh.

I had several mishaps regarding my blog going missing/losing databases/files going AWOL/previous hosting fucking my stuff up. I’m too bored of the situation to complain about it any longer, and it won’t do anyone or anything any good! So. I’m just going to start again. I was thinking about re-writing special entries for prominent events that are now lost in the internet-ether, but I think it would be a bit strange, so…

Here we go again! I’m going to try and post something nice in the next couple of days to cheer the space up! ^^; In the meantime, I spent a while making my main site look new and nice. Unfortunately I’ve not had anything to update it with for a long while, since I’m up to my ears in half-finished comics!