Posts Tagged ‘ photography

Here be board-games.

Wow! I can’t believe we’re at issue #62 of the Phoenix already! Time flies! It’s doing so well as a comic, and I’m so happy for the team behind it, they have worked so, so hard to get the Phoenix going and spreading the word about it, and getting it into shops across the country (and internationally!)

Issue #62 features the start of a new boardgame series I’m doing: MEDIEVAL GAMES! I had, er, quite a LOT of fun making these. First up, we have “Who Can Steal a Scale from the Dragon?” in which you play as knights in a test of valour (and silliness) pit against one another to fetch the Key from the dungeons, and unlock the Door to the Dragon’s lair in order to steal the scale and prove you are the bravest! Will you make it past the traps? Will you avoid being turned into a troll? Can you reach the Door first…?

These games are designed so you can just open the centre spread, and play. All you need is a couple of dice (or dice-substitutes) and something to use as tokens… pennies, jelly-beans, or the downloadable-and-printable tokens I made, available on the Phoenix website. If you play it, let me know how you got on! There are more Medieval Games to come!

The Boss and The Bob

Here’s some pictures from the launch of The Boss – written by the amazing John Aggs, drawn by the fantastic Patrice Aggs and published by David Fickling Books as part of The DFC Library! The Boss is one of my favourites (if I’m allowed to play favourites, for a minute) so I really recommend this volume! :)

Here’s a button to press whilst you peruse these pics: instantboss.org

Cakes! :D~

Some guy who might have been a bit important at the launch party (that’s John Aggs, DON’T YOU KNOW) and a spectacular furry thing atop his shoulder… what IS that!?

There he is again!

Well… he likes the comic! Gentle readers: this is Bob. He used to belong to Sonia Leong, who passed him to Emma Vieceli, who passed him recently to me! His full name is Floppy Genghis-Bob (on account of having three mistresses and three different personas, haha) and he’s accompanied me to all recent comic events. He might also have his own Facebook page… (even I don’t have a Facebook page!)

My books. Let me show you them.

They are heavier than I thought they’d be. They feel dense and good to hold. And COLD! Checking through the boxes my hands got really chilly! I guess it must have been very cold in the delivery van, eh? But I’m happy with them. And I’m glad I got that error on the back cover sorted out. ALSO! MPG Biddles I do recommend! Serious customer service and good value for money. A+!

I will put them up on my site for sale ASAP! I want to get out contributor/special copies first, and then they’ll go up. Don’t forget I’ll be at a few conventions/events this year with a number of copies, so please check out the “news” section on the front page of my site, and maybe see you there! <3

(Ahaha, they look really dull… I was messing about with filters in Photoshop… probably not a great idea but I got carried away! I’ll put the unedited photos on the sale section when they go up. The cover merges from banana yellow at the edges to pale lemon yellow in the middle. I can almost see them in the dark, haha.)

Epic paper-cuts.

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!

NYCC

I have a lot of stuff to catch up on in terms of blogging. I’m very behind ;3; Probably the next few entries will be a bit scrappy, but I want to get stuff down, at least. So!

Typically, I got a cold on the plane back from NYC so that, coupled with the cold I had before leaving for the trip, and the actual trip itself, means I’m about a month behind work ;_; I honestly think my immune system is having a laugh. (And then choking on its own phlegm).

I need to say, quickly, that New York Comicon was awesome. Everyone in NYC was so nice O_O; It made me feel like I wanted to be more polite than usual, haha. Also: I’m a real home-person… I stress if I leave the house for long periods of time, even, but I actually felt sad coming home from NYC. I liked it that much there. I really hope I have the chance to go back again!

Neither Paul or I had much of a chance to look around the convention (or NYC itself), but what we did see was great. We had a tiny amount of time to do like an obstacle course race round the Artist’s Alley… which in itself was staggering. The art there was like being in some kind of sweet-shop. It would be good to go there as a punter one time, so we could just look around.

Talking is less interesting than looking (I think), so here’s some pics under the cut…

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TSM launch!

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 under the cut…

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