VanCAF this Weekend

Hey Vancouver, I’m heading your way this Saturday and Sunday for the loveliest comic arts festival on the West Coast: VanCAF!

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You can find me at Table C11 with copies of my new book Baggywrinkles: a Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea, along with maaaany other delightful goodies. Just look at these fresh, fresh books!

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So delicious. You can also catch me on the following panels and live podcast recordings:

RE-WRITING HISTORY: RESEARCH & INVENTION IN HISTORICAL COMICS
Saturday May 21 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM
Hosted by Jonathon Dalton
Featuring Lucy Bellwood, Tony Cliff, Rachel Kahn, Steve LeCouilliard, Kris Sayer
From the stacks of the library (or the recesses of online journals) to the page, cartoonists plumb the depths of history for inspiration. In this panel, these cartoonists will discuss their methods – from research to brainstorming – for creating comics rich in, and inspired by, history.

And also:

SNEAKY DRAGON’S VERY TALL PODCAST
Saturday May 21 5:00 PM – 5:45 PM
Hosted by Ian Boothby & David Dedrick
Featuring Lucy Bellwood, James Lloyd
Join the Sneaky Dragon podcast’s David Dedrick (Totally Tintin) and Ian Boothby (The Simpsons comics and CBC’s The Irrelevant Show) as they welcome cartoonists Lucy Bellwood (Baggywrinkles) and James Lloyd (Futurama comics), discussing everything from tall tales and tall ships to the work habits of fairly tall cartoonists.

It’s gonna be a hoot! I can’t wait to see you all there. If you’d like a cheat sheet, just refer to this handy-dandy guide:

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“Bombshells” are Here!

So as some of you may or may not be aware, I sit next to my friend Erika Moen when working at Periscope Studio. She takes a lot of reference photos for her fantastic comic, Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and since we’re perpendicular to one another I’m in a seriously ideal position to photobomb basically all of them.

We’ve been joking about putting together a zine of all these photographic masterpieces, and this month I finally thought “Why not?” and ordered a whole bunch of them. So, without further ado, allow me to present: BOMBSHELLS.

You can grab a copy in person at Emerald City Comicon later this week! The show runs Thursday-Sunday, and I’ll have a limited number of copies on hand to sign and sell. Find me at Booth 1214 with the rest of Periscope, or head to Erika’s table just across the aisle at 1322!

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New Talk: The View from Aloft

I have new video up from my time at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, where I was teaching a class on webcomics and social media earlier this month. (This is the first time I’ve had video footage of my public speaking—thanks, Sam!—which is really exciting.) If you’re a person who makes things on the Internet, or a person who wants to make things on the Internet, or a cartoonist, or a budding creator—this probably has some utility for you.

Things I cover:

  • How I ended up doing what I’m doing now (full-time adventure-cartoonist-ing, most days)
  • How social media has enabled me to succeed in crowdfunding, freelancing, and basically everything else
  • What sailing has in common with being an artist (it’s more than you think)
  • Communities and gratitude economies and how they shape our work
  • My unified very vague theory of How the Internet Makes Us Better People
  • What you can gain by giving your work away for free

I had so much fun teaching at TAW, and I hope this talk distills some of the stuff we were exploring and discussing over the course of my two weeks there. If you enjoyed it and want to see/enable more, feel free to check out my Patreon page! I post a ton of behind-the-scenes, nitty gritty, creative-in-the-trenches stuff there every single week, and I’d love to have you on board.

Teaching in Denmark

Some big, big, BIG news for you this week, friends:

DenmarkBannerThe Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark has invited me to come teach a two-week class on webcomics, the Internet, and modern career options for independent cartoonists. I am beside myself with excitement. I fly in just ten days and there’s a lot to get done before I go, but I just can’t wait to meet this batch of dedicated students. I mean, seriously, go look at the work they’ve been doing here (comics-specific work can be found on this Tumblr). SO COOL.

Logo-sortI’ve also never been to Scandinavia before, so I’m extra thrilled to be exploring a new part of Europe. Apparently there’s nifty cathedral in Viborg, but you all know what I’m really holding out for.

Viborg_2Perhaps. We shall see.

I’m looking into options for capturing and broadcasting bits of the class while I’m there, so if this is a subject that interests you be sure to follow along on Twitter—I’ll do my best to share work in progress and notes from the trip on there!

That’s all for now.

<3

L

 

Hourly Comic Day 2016

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Hello, friends—it’s time for another installment of everyone’s favorite working holiday: Hourly Comic Day! This is my sixth(!!!) year participating which, for those of you who aren’t familiar, involves drawing a panel or two for every hour you’re awake on February 1st. It’s a lovely way to create a time capsule of your drawing style and general life trajectory over time, and I always enjoy to sense of creating something start-to-finish in a single day.

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You can read the whole story over on Medium! Enjoy—I’m really proud of how this batch turned out.

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[Previous years: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and (gulp) 2011.]

Baggywrinkles Ebooks are Live!

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Dearest Bags and Wrinkles: I am so, so, SO excited to announce that the ebook edition of Baggywrinkles: a Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea is now available for purchase!

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If you supported the Kickstarter campaign, you can find a download code to get the files for free in this update, otherwise it’s $7 for a bundle of two versions—high-res and slightly-less-high-res—so you can read the book from any of your devices with comfort and ease.

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Thanks to your sterling funding efforts, and the hard work of colorists Joey Weiser and Michele Chidester, the book is coming to you in full color for the first time ever! You’ll also be enjoying the publication design efforts of Allyson Haller, who did a fantastic job of wrapping the whole book in the loveliest branding a girl could ask for. This ebook also includes the complete guest art gallery with work from a stalwart crew of amazing artists. Here’s a brief selection:

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Ready to hop aboard? You can buoy (GEDDIT?) a copy for yourself right here:

Thank you all so much for your patience, enthusiasm, and support during the production process. Next step: printing the physical book! Stay tuned on the Kickstarter page for more news about that as the year rolls on.

Love and boats and comics,

Lucy

New Comic: Scurvy Dogs

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That’s right! My latest comic, an examination of maritime history’s deadliest deficiency, is now live! For the last few months, Eriq Nelson and I have been hard at work researching the ins and outs of scurvy in the Golden Age of Sail, and now we’re bringing our findings to you in 18 pages of informative, entertaining comics.

There’s even a Napoleonic Capybara. No joke.

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I’ve had such a blast working on this piece—even if the production timeline was somewhat delayed by the Kickstarter I ran this summer. Speaking of which, this comic will round out the hardcover collection of Baggywrinkles comics I’m publishing in 2016! What’s more it’ll be in FULL COLOR! Gosh I’m excited.

Anyway, you can read the whole thing right here! I do hope you enjoy it.

Rose City Comic Con This Weekend

Hey Portland friends!

Just a courtesy notice that I’ll be tabling at Rose City Comic Con this weekend and celebrating the print debut of my newest comic, Rim to River!

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If you want to try before you buy, you can even read the whole thing online right here. I’m so thrilled with how these puppies came out. Come snag one for yourself! Here’s the details of where you can find me and the rest of my compatriots from Periscope Studio:

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As you can see here, I’ll also be appearing on the Comics Journalism panel on Saturday morning at 11am in Room 5. Should be some good discussion around bringing real-world stories to life on the page. More details on the Rose City Comic Con site. Hope to see you there!

New Comic: Rim to River

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Hi everyone! It’s been a minute, huh? As some of you may know, I recently returned from my second whitewater rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. I went as a “voyage cartoonist” with Arizona River Runners, a Flagstaff-based rafting outfit, to document one of their seven-day motorized whitewater trips down the Colorado River.

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You can read the whole story here (or pick up a print copy at Rose City Comic Con in a couple weeks), but suffice it to say I had an amazing time—I’m still reeling from the experience. While I was gone I penciled and inked sixteen pages, then colored them all in the week that followed. It felt so good to crank out a completely new piece of material on the heels of Kickstarter madness last month (THANK YOU, by the way, for making that such a colossal success! More news on that soon), and I’m excited to get back to drawing new content in a big way.

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(This comic wouldn’t have been possible without the support of all my kind folks on Patreon, so if you’re looking for a way to help make even more art happen, check that out here.)

 

Baggywrinkles Now LIVE on Kickstarter!

The day is finally here, friends! Baggywrinkles: A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea just launched on Kickstarter and it’s time to get this sucker made. If you’re already on board and you wanna get straight to the business, here’s the page!

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Wait, what’s a Baggywrinkle?

A Baggywrinkle is furry, cylindrical device used for preventing chafing between a ship’s sails and the surrounding lines. It’s one of the most distinctive features of a ship’s rigging, made all the more ludicrous by the fact that you spend a LOT of time explaining what it is to visitors—a hard sell when it’s got such a weird name.

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But it’s also the namesake of my educational, autobiographical series about the time I’ve spent sailing on 18th-century tall ships!

So, you’re making a book?

THAT’S RIGHT. Baggywrinkles has been running in little micro-installments for five years now. With 90 pages of content under my belt I’ve finally got enough material to bind everything together into a really handsome 6″x9″ softcover collection.

I’m funding this book on Kickstarter because it allows for some really thrilling opportunities to do this collection right. You can check out the campaign page for full details, but the most important thing I want to tell you about is that if we exceed our funding goal of 15k by just $5,000 I’m going to hire Joey Weiser and Michele Chidester to render the entire collection IN COLOR.

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I cannot express with words how excited I am about this possibility. LOOK AT THESE LOVELY COLORS! THE BOOK WOULD BE SO AMAZING! I mean, it’s gonna be great either way, but I’m really gunning for color.

So go check out the page and take a look through all the rewards. There’s lots to enjoy—prints, original art, special PDF bundles, and more. And thank you for being such stalwart readers and supporters. You all mean the world to me.

FOR BAGGYWRINKLES. FOR GLORY.