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.

Have a few character pieces! That's right, my drawings of children have sprouted into some illustrations. These character studies are of Freya - the main character from Francesca Simon's new book The Secret Army. I have also been working on some black and white interior illustrations based on the book which will get put up here when I have finished a decent run of them.

The first image needs a bit of explanation - Freya is realising that her legs are beginning to turn to ivory.

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