I Wrote Two Comics ForInspired'snewest Anthology,Eat Me!(I Was Also Very Pleased To Win The Cover Vote

I wrote two comics for Inspired's newest anthology, Eat Me! (I was also very pleased to win the cover vote this time with my cheerful takoyaki.) The Mysterious Land of Under Noodle went into the anthology, so The Bad Fairy Bakery was printed alone and sold as a mini-comic at Bristol Expo. Since it's only 8 pages long, I thought I'd put up the whole thing for you all to read, like Patience is a Virtue. I hope you enjoy it!

BLURRRRR

Sorry, by that I mean that just over a week ago Sammy and I went to see Blur at Wolverhampton and it was the best thing ever.

The first set includes the... warm-up act? The Bots, anyway. It was a hard-core drawing warm-up, the singer never stood still!

Then I drew a million pictures of Blur. I really liked the sketches, so rather than tidying them up on the page like I normally would I traced or copied them onto different pages. The penultimate picture is the traced sketches, the last one is copied freehand.

I've been doing quite a lot of work that's not ready to show, along with frantically getting ready for Bristol Expo this weekend while doing many, many shifts at a tea room, so here are some old-ish sketches I did in spare time instead.

I don't think Andersen has appeared on here before, but he's a shape-shifting cat who is found by Jessie in a forest, and seems to have been abandoned by his people for some reason. He's mute, but he does understand speech. (Although he doesn't speak English.) It never really comes up in the story, but he hooks his tail over his leg like that because when he was little someone trod on it.

You should all recognise Coda, she's in white because she's participating in a ritual.

As I said, I'm also going to Bristol Expo this weekend with Inspired Comics, I hope some of you can stop by and see us. We'll have our new anthology, and with any luck I'll be bringing a new issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? and an 8-page comic called The Bad Fairy Bakery.

*rush rush panic panic*

This week Sammy was at Manchester MCM, and next Saturday (work shifts permitting) I'll have a little stall at Bristol Ferment Farmer's Market, so I made a mini-comic to give out instead of business cards. Sammy's been doing it that way for ages, and it works really well - people tend not to turn down a free comic. We also made a free mini-zine to promote What's the Time Mrs Woolf?

Anyway, I decided on a miniature Patience mystery, since I'm hoping to get the first full-length comic done before the spring cons next year.

Aside from the new issue of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf? (with a 'hairy' theme) the other things I'll be taking are all original paintings. I'll be posting some of those next week. I'll also have a few copies of Inspired's latest anthologies, and limited numbers of the mini-library Sammy tried at Manchester.

If any of you are near Bristol, I hope you'll stop by and see me!

I forgot I had more paid work to show you! I did this one a few months ago, it's a logo for a baby swimming school. I had no idea how you teach a baby to swim, so watching the lessons was really interesting. Apparently there's a few tricks to it, like if you start before the baby starts trying to sit up then they'll be much more comfortable on their back in the water, and will have an easier time learning to float later.

The swimming school is called 'Dinky Dippers' and it's run by Nadine Santus, if you're reading this from the Cambridge area and you have a child under 4 who could use some swimming lessons.

Whoa you guys it's my birthday today! I'm 23! Do I seem older and wiser?

Not that I have any special birthday art though. These are the final 4 art cards in the fairy tales series I mentioned, finally finished in preparation for the Bristol Ferment Farmer's Market, although I didn't find time to post them beforehand.

The top set is Rapunzel. In the version I had, the witch finds out about the prince because Rapunzel gets pregnant. She cuts off Rapunzel's hair, kicks her out, and uses the hair to trick the prince so she can drop him off the tower. It still has a happy ending though.

The bottom set is Cinderella, which is incredibly gruesome! The wicked stepsisters cut bits off their feet to make the slipper fit. It's also the spirit of Cinderella's mother, in the form of two doves, that gives her the gown and slippers in the first place.

I didn't sell any of these in the end, so I've put them up for sale in my Etsy shop. Maybe you should buy one to make me happy on my birthday! Although I have just made an entire coffee cake which I have all to myself, so I'm already pretty happy.