Recently I worked on an 8-page story for the excellent comic publication ink+PAPER and last month it was published! You can find a sneak peek on the i+P site, and it's on sale in comic shops across the whole wide London (also probably comic fairs elsewhere, editor David O'Connell gets around). You can even find it in Foyles! Anyway, it's full of great stuff.

Below are a couple of bits from my strip The Fisher Girl and the Crab, including a panel I call 'man walking like a crab in a forest'.

Update: My story in i+P picked out by Paul Gravett in his best comics of 2012 article! Madness.

Halloweeney update!

These are the first two pages of an appropriately spooky short story I started for the Observer Graphic Short Story Prize.

The style is sort of an extension of what I was previously working on for ink+PAPER, and some of the results on the second page look rather nice. Another result of working fast and loose on these pages are a couple of horrible mistakes - spot them if you can! Also keep your eyes peeled for issue#3 of i+P, in which I have a story. It will probably warrant another blog post when it gets launched but, just in case, you have been warned.

Here is a little thing from the other day that is quite nice. Playing with rendering style and colour for a certain project.

Now I know that there is probably way too much sketchbook work on this blog already, but at the moment the most interesting things I am working on are at the sketchbook stage. Here are some snippets of something that may eventually grow into some graphical short stories (comics).

Hey internet. Realised that, as usual, it has been an age since the last post. In that time I have been working, really. Also realised that blog posts work much better in smaller, more related bursts, so I am about to update with a couple of seperate ones.

So the Forbidden Planet bloggers decided to run a competition to prove that there are still adult fiction illustrators out there, in response to a certain Jonathan Cape employee's comments in this article. This is my entry for it. They haven't been judged yet, so who knows, you may be looking at a winner! #falseconfidence

Been a while since the last post. Here are some rough character samples wot I done. Working on them made me feel a bit like being back in school, drawing moody teenage girls all day, but they started to get a bit more interesting towards the end.

Anyways - rough development work, away!

Have a gawk at this exceedingly rough first draft graphic interpretation of Indian folk tale The Fisher Girl and the Crab. I decided to take up the challenge of telling this bizarre tale in as few panels as possible - as a result it may not make any sense at all. Anyone looking for clarification can consult the excellent Virago Book of Fairy Tales, where I discovered this traditional story of talking gourds, shapshifting crabs and arranged marriage in the heart of rural India.

It is nice to draw some characters within a sustained narrative - the immediate attachment you feel to them, the way you can read emotion in a sequence of panels feels really liberating.

Feel kind of bad about putting up such scrappy drawing in the previous post. Here is some recent sketchbook work to prove that I can still draw - honestly! I was, like, using my left hand or something on the foxes...

Seems that this blog is hitting a rythm of updating about once a month, which is not a bad thing. Here are some doodles of what may happen if you succumb to The Bite Of The Were-Fox (note: not actually the title of an upcoming book or anything).

During autumn/winter of last year I kept a visual journal, which was;
a. lots of fun,
b. surprisingly time consuming and
c. extremely helpful in getting a grasp on sequential imagery and using brush & ink.
It is definitely an exercise that I would like to repeat. I think that some of the experiments were really successful and the super-relaxed drawing style is something I probably don't spend enough time playing with, so it's about time some images made it on to the internet. Here are some choice entries from this sporadic and neurotic little sketchbook.

Welcome to my brain. Here, have a map!

 Remember those two comic pages posted up here a while ago? No? Don't worry about it... here is the complete four page sequence made in response to (but never entered in) the Comica/Observer Graphic Short Story competition.

It was an interesting experiment, the whole of which doesn't hang together that well due to long periods of time between working on each page, however there were some interesting developments along the way that make me want to create some more coherent comic strip narratives.

More illustrations and sketchbook work should be going up here soon, I might raid my visual diary from the end of summer for entries that can be displayed here uncensored!

About time to update this blog. Have a few things going that I don't want to put up online until they are finished, in the meantime here is a sketch of a character inspired by Angela Carter's excellent modern fairytale The Bloody Chamber.