Posts Tagged ‘ the phoenix

Tamsin and the Deep starts today!

What the title said! Here’s our first cover! Me and Neill are super excited to get you all into this story! There’s loads of exciting stuff coming…!

118-lorez

Click to check out the Phoenix Comic!

Tamsin and the Deep – and updates!

So, the first half of 2013 was probably the best time I’ve had so far during my 7 years freelance. I had a really great few months and did a lot of new things, and learned a lot of new things. I remember sitting in a Hi Sushi with mates just before my birthday last year when things were going well for all of us and we all held hands and were like “LET’S REMEMBER THIS BECAUSE IT CAN BE THIS GOOD”… which I’m going to remember as hard as I can. The second half of 2013 was the worst freelance time I’ve had since 2008. 2013 was truly a beautiful pie with a base of shit.

I’m working full-time again now thanks to lots of supportive people and a very excellent physio, and I am so grateful for this. Work is everything to me. I live to work! Not being able to do so really drove me into a not-so-great place; I got pretty ill on top of the shoulder problems. Combining not-being-able-to-work with “freelance” is pretty scary – obviously you don’t get sick-pay, it’s a risk you have to take when becoming self-employed – and I’m honestly lucky that the first half of 2013 was so great project-and-money-wise, or my shoulder popping off would have ruined me financially, too :( But it’s okay now… I’m through intensive physio, and I’ve got fine-tuning until June/July, by which time it’s going to be as good as it could possibly be. The bones have more-or-less receded back to where they should be (no more surprise humerus!!), and I can do pretty much everything that’s non-intensive! I’m so happy! ^_^/

Enough about my personal life ^^; I’m working on a project with one of my fave creators!!!!!! Me and Neill Cameron have teamed up to make TAMSIN & THE DEEP – a multi-part series for The Phoenix, written by Neill and arted by me! It’s an urban-fantasy/action tale set in CORNWALL (ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PLACES OMG OMG) and our lead is 10-year-old Tamsin “I won’t take no *&%! from this” Thomas. It’s awesome and I can’t wait for people to read it! Here’s our teaser poster…

It starts April 4th. I’m so excited! I’m still learning to work with scripts, so I hope I can really step up my game by learning new things!!!!!! So far, I’ve been focussing a lot on my naturalistic backgrounds, which I’ve always found quite hard to render in line-and-celshade. I hope they’re improving!

I’m also providing colours for Emma Vieceli and Antony Johnston’s ALEX RIDER:SCORPIA adaptation! We’ve set up a development Tumblr for it, here: http://alexridercomic.tumblr.com/ Check in to see how we’re going with it!

And finally, for those who are aware of the new book I am working on, I’m afraid of course this has had to go on the back-burner even more so than it was. I’m *ALMOST* finished with the thumbnail draft, and it’s looking to be just over 300 pages. Obviously, this is not a paid project, and with the mess my shoulder left me in, I absolutely have to prioritise income right now. The fallout from my shoulder is going to roll over most of everything I do for at least another year, I think. All the money I’d saved to work on my book went into rehabilitation ^^; I’m glad I was able to, you know, of course, but it’s been so, so frustrating to lose that time for so many reasons… I did not comprehend the phrase “time is money” until I went freelance. It’s scary. I can’t remember now how much I’ve written/spoken about it? Anyways, it’s called Faith Says You. I hope to be able to get back on it some day ^^;

Best wishes to all xxx

Emilie’s Turn

OH HI THERE! You came here to read a ballet comic, right? Well, that is super handy, because we got one for you right here:

The nice dudes up at The Phoenix got Emilie’s Turn (written by Neill Cameron, drawn by me) up online for you to read! CLICK HERE! We also spoke at length (well…… actually, I mainly shout (sorry)) to Claire Napier of WWACR about ballet, hot fucking, and motorcycles. And the comic. Shove that on for a listen here (contains swearing, as if you need a warning for that by now) –

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 Enchanted Pool illustrations

Hi! I wanna start posting stuff I’ve been up to recently, starting with these. Phoenix Issue #45 (the Hallowe’en issue) sported an amazing Tale Feather prose story by John Dickinson, which I got to illustrate. I read the story many times over! I really loved it. I was working off notes and direction from the writer, and I wanted to use a different method and style to my usual, so I experimented… here’s the results!


Hope you like them! ^_^

British Comic Awards – Young People’s Comic Awards

Well, wow!! I was super surprised and rather shocked that The Lost Boy is up on the nominee list for the YPCA this year! The other nominees are rather super, so I’m really quite flattered to be up there with them. I wish everyone the best of luck! It’s great that the BCAs/YPCAs are doing ace work getting these comics into the hands of school-age children… it must be pretty fun to be one of the young people judging the awards, eh :D

Whilst the YPCAs have been running sucessfully for a couple of years now, this is the first British Comic Awards ceremony we will see. I am very excited to see who will be nominated in the categories, and so happy to see such enthusiasm and great care taken over UK comics! Go Brit Comics! :D

Events & the tiniest preview!

Hi! Just as a quick update, I’ll be attending NICE along with mah bud Emma Vieceli! We will both have books for purchase and will most likely be sketching, too. It’s looking to be a really nice (sorry, sorry) event, so do come along and give a new show some support, and say hello to us!

Secondly, I got time to spend on something I’m really excited about! I’ve (literally) just finished a 4-pager for The Phoenix, which was written and devised by Neill Cameron. Neill is totally one of my favourite UK creators, and I was so pumped to get to work on something by him. I had *so* much fun making this comic, I can’t even begin to say! I really hope you guys will pick it up — you can get single issues of The Phoenix for just £2.99, delivered straight to your door (just to clear that up, because people always ask). I put up a little tiny snippet (like, really tiny — that section is about two inches high IRL) of it on my grainy Instagram the other day: http://web.stagram.com/n/autojoy I’m not sure which issue it will go out in yet, but I’ll let you know. I’ll be doing the cover, too!

Take care! ^_^/

Bye-bye Jim and Bob.

The (blank) cover I did for Issue 31 of The Phoenix, and a photo of the finished, printed issue! I liked how Laurence (the designer) made the title look as if it was gently uplit. Not long to go now, for The Lost Boy! It finishes very soon! O_O; I finished making it last friday. So… I’m off to work on more projects! I’ll update here when I have solid projecty-based news.

1, 2, 3…

Hello! I can’t really post sneaks of the latest episodes of The Lost Boy, because we’re in the final stages now, and spoilers are all over the place. I thought I’d put this up, from one of the recent issues (#25)…

What does Bob end up doing as the loser? Did you miss issue #25…? Check out how to get individual issues here!

I saw this same rock-paper-scissors gag in an episode of Horrible Histories recently! I got a bit excited and was all “OMG! WE’RE ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH!” I adore the HH tv episodes…! Emma V got me addicted. I had a few HH books when I was a kid… the Egyptians one was my favourite. I used to love the Martin Brown illustrations something awful, drew in the same style to illustrate stuff in my history books, and used to pretend I was related to him because we had the same surname, haha! (I was very young at the time, I want to point out, in case that sounds very creepy……)

Coverboy

Issue 5 of The Phoenix had a cover of The Lost Boy :) Here are the cover[s] without the text on:

This was the initial cover with Jim, Bob and a jungly background…

In the end it was decided it didn’t work, so a new background was made…

…which is the cover you see on the comic :) The sand looks a bit flat, but you don’t see it in the final thing anyhow, so ^^;

Been a bit quiet recently! It’s got a bit busy and has gained the feeling of spinning plates.