2014 "Birds In Card" Art Giveaway

A little while ago I won a pack of greetings cards in a giveaway from the remarkable Lizzie, of Clay Dissaray fame. Due to a bit of a mix-up, I ended up with TWO packs, so 14 in all. And in an effort to share the love about a bit, I decided to draw inside them and send them on to anyone who sent me an email with a postal address. Despite me constantly miscalculating how many cards I had versus how many requests I'd got, I was able to get them all out without a hitch.

I went with a 'birds' them because of the success I'd enjoyed with the illustration I'd done of Ochrebeak for the Save Three Trees campaign. I was working much faster and looser on these, but I'm happy with them in general. Also accompanying each bird was a pretty broad, unsophisticated personal message, the idea being that you could happily lose that, cut the card down the middle and display both Lizzie's original design and the bird at the same time.

Here they all are, in varying qualities of photograph (I didn't give myself time to scan them). They're presented here in no particular order.

I was so tired when I finished this one that the first typo (HADR) happened by itself. The second one (RDAW) happened despite concious effort to not make any more typos.

My typos continued on.

The next three are screencaps of tweets from where I was in such a rush I forgot to take a photo before sealing up the envelope...

Lastly, I did a dog and a cat for my pal Kate, because we're working on a comic together which is about a dog and cat. Keep your eyes peeled for that, the script's something special, even if my drawing's not.

#quickdrawlive Sep 18th

Last night I went back to the House Of Illustration down by Kings Cross for the second of OffLife's Quickdraw Live events. I think the first one was last March... I could look it up but am preeeetty lazy. The event was a continuation of the Quickdraw that Offlife runs every Thursday night over Twitter where they give a topic and people at home come up with an image for that topic which they share back with the hashtag #quickdraw -- the difference being that on this occasion a bunch of people were in a room together, all working furiously away.

The one drawback was that where the lighting was dimmed for a cozier atmosphere, taking photos of pictures was difficult. And adding insult to injury, the Twitter app on my phone cropped my photos in weird ways. So here are my responses to the themes (paraphrased below...again, I could look them up but...). There's photos of the event all over Twitter -- got to Offlife's Twitter account for a good selection.

How I'd Get My 5mins Of Fame

What's Really Down The Back Of The Sofa

My Dream Job That Doesn't Exist (yet)

What I'd Do On My Last Day Alive

Technology Has Ruined My Ability To... (as displayed on the big projector)

Forget Scotland, I'd Vote Yes For...

By chance, I met fellow Amelia's Magazine Alumni Jenny Robins there. We both took selfies together. This is my attempt, and as you can see I'm not very good at taking them.

Submission to Offlife 10

Click the picture for a version big enough to read the writing

I've been a fan of OFFLIFE for a while now, and have toyed with the idea of submitting something Intercorstal-ish for the past few open submission periods, although have usually backed down, pretty much convinced that I didn't stand a chance of getting in, down to the fact that The Intercorstal is like nothing they've run with before.

For their 10th issue I just went for it, though. I produced a brand new comic, which rips off its panel layout from a Ditko Amazing Spider-man page (which I have been reliably informed by Andrei Molotiu (here and here) that it's his best ever page).

What I instagrammed when I started on the page. Click the picture for the rest of my Instagram, which at the time of writing is very bird-heavy.

Knowing all along that the comic would be a longshot as it was, I decided that for the first time an Intercorstal page should have some text (I'd tried on previous pages to include text -- stuff about flapping listless and beacons dying and teeth teeth teetch, that sort of thing, but it never really worked). As Offlife is loosley based around subversions of real-life, I went with autobiog-comic style moaning, and chose the Internet as my target. I moan about the internet a lot, so it wasn't hard.

My attempts at lettering were WOEFUL and I said so on Twitter, at which point the extraordinary Jim Campbell offered to take a look and give me some advice, which I was bowled over by -- not least when he returned a completely lettered page, which he did, in his words, "in as close an approximation of Tom Frame's old school 2000AD lettering as I could manage." iceI'll be honest, I was amazed by how good it looked -- it had turned a page of swirly swirls into an 80s cosmic space battle. Even now I'm confused by how good it looks.

But long story short -- it didn't make it in. As you'll know if you've followed a link from Twitter or somewhere, because I'll have said so. But I knew it was a long shot, and I'm really looknig forward to reading the comics that did make the cut. And of course looknig forward to the next QuickDraw Live on the 18th, where I'll not have anywhere near enough time to do anything even remotely Intercorstal.