It’s my birthday today! I still need to work, but I thought I’d do something fun, so I’m planning the layouts and title pages for Fish & Chocolate ^_^/ It’s going quite well!

It might be too small to see in the scrappy scribbles in my sketchbook there, but the total page count stands at 144! O_O; That’s bigger than I first planned it. I’m pleased! :D I’m excited to have a fat book.

I have ideas for poster images for each story. I would really like to make them as promo pieces (perhaps get them printed as postcards…?) but it’ll depend on time. If I do it, it’ll probably be after the book has been sent off to print, so I wouldn’t be able to put them in the book.

At least, not for the first printing… ^_~

Welp, I’ve dragged the prints around in my portfolio for some time now, and had them up in various places on the net… in fact, everywhere but my own place on the net it seems, ha ha ha. I guess most people have seen these by now, but oh well! Here they are once more… these are the first 9 pages from ‘The Cherry Tree’, Fish & Chocolate’s second story. It is trés pink! I hope you like the look of them… I’m really going to try and get the book done and dusted for the end of January!

I’ll put these up on my site at some point.

Apologies for not mushing the double-page-spread together. I… have no excuse. Anyway. I picked this section as it’s one of the (possibly the only) readable sequences that doesn’t give anything away or is too long to be considered a preview. The book is about 128 pages, but as it’s three individual stories of roughly 40 pages each… you know, they snap on at a fast pace.

Gotta get this baby DONE. NOWWWWW!

In other news, Mr Awesome + Awesome = Neill Cameron and I are off to the Dragon School tomorrow to do some… stuff! We are not quite sure what it is yet. It’ll involve comics, of course :D Yesterday we hit up Banbury school for some comicking goodness. It’s like Kate & Neill week. Wooo! (I’m so knackered).

Horribly grainy photo, but it’s a horribly gainy photo of COMPLETION. Almost. 99.9% of completion. (I’m going to re-draft a page from The Cherry Tree entirely, because I hate it and it doesn’t work. But other than that… completion!) According to my wonky note on the last page I drew, I actually finished drawing on 15th November… but then our scanner broke and we had all sorts of fun and japes, and I’ve only just finished scanning in the pages as of this moment.

I’ve completely finished colouring and lettering The Cherry Tree (apart from the page I want to totally re-do), finished all my touch-ups and re-draws, and it’s all coming together how I expected, more or less. I took what I had of it to show Emma Hayley (who nominated me initially for the Arts Foundation Fellowship) and Shelley Warren of the Arts Foundation a couple weeks ago, and I think they liked it. I’m looking forward to giving them the printed book.

Still looking at a late Jan/early February release date. Roll on!

(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!

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