The online home of Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood
Hello, Portland. I’ve missed you!
This year has been pretty bonkers, travel-wise, but I wanted to let you know that I’ll be at the First Thursday Art Walk in the Pearl district tomorrow (August 4th) from 5pm – 10pm slinging comics, art, and other treats. I’ll be hanging out with my pals James and Emily in Space 209 on NW 13th, between NW Irving and Johnson:
Here’s a silly image you can share on social media if that’s your speed:
Hope to see you there!
xo
Lucy
If all this Baggywrinkles news has you itching to read the book before it officially hits shelves on September 9th, I have excellent news: the book is now available on ComiXology!
Big thanks to the team at ComiXology Submit for getting the book up and running on the site, and for giving it pride of place in the Indie New Releases section. We also got a lovely shout-out on Dave Carter’s Digital Comics Picks of the Week feature, alongside fabulous titles like Lumberjanes, Island, The Fix, and Howard the Duck! Thanks, Dave.
Buy the ebook edition here.
The Baggywrinkles East Coast Book Tour is still going strong, with three stops left on the docket. Here’s a reminder of those dates:
If you’re planning on heading to New York or D.C., be sure to RSVP and invite your friends on Facebook. Here’s the event page for Fantom Comics in D.C., and here’s the one for the South Street Seaport Museum in New York!
See you soon,
Lucy
What ho, friends! I come bearing exciting news today: the Baggywrinkles East Coast Tour Extravaganza is officially launching this week and I’ve got ALL THE TOUR DATES lined up and ready to share. Here’s the plan:
(Huge thanks to my pal Heather Cummings for helping with design and layout for all my tour graphics!)
As you can probably see above, I’ll be hitting tour stops in Portland, Mystic, Boston, DC, New York, and Ann Arbor over the next couple weeks. Some conventions, some book stores, some comic shops, and some MARITIME MUSEUMS (oh yes). It’s going to be a wild and crazy adventure and I really can’t wait to get out to see some maritime history and meet all you East Coast pals who I never get to hang out with!
Here are more details, listed by event:
I’ll be bringing copies of Baggywrinkles: a Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea to all these locations (not to mention postcards and other treats), and would love to sell you a copy/talk about boats/draw in whatever you have handy.
Not in the area? Still keen to pick up a copy of the book? Here’s a handy graphic you can convey to your local comic shop or book store to pre-order a copy.
I’ll be posting tour stop updates to Twitter all throughout the trip, so keep an eye out there if you’d like to help spread the word about upcoming events!
See you in Portland (the other one),
Lucy
Hey Vancouver, I’m heading your way this Saturday and Sunday for the loveliest comic arts festival on the West Coast: VanCAF!
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!
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:
There is a fabled holiday in the East, my friends. A weekend celebration of comics and friendship SO GREAT, SO VAST it has been known to BLOT OUT THE SUN. Under a single roof one may find the grandest collection of independent comics practitioners in the Western Hemisphere. There is where friendships are forged in the fires of community bonding, where children frolic in the aisles and parents stagger forth laden with armfuls of glorious sequential material.
It’s no secret that TCAF is pretty much my favorite show ever. The audience, the venue, the exhibitors, the panels—everything there is just the greatest, and I’m so proud to announce that Baggywrinkles: a Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea will be making its debut at this year’s festival!
Here’s a sneak peek at the lovely advance run of books that we had printed just in time:
A real book! With a spine and everything! Ahh!
AND JUST LOOK AT THESE COLORED PAGES:
Swoon.
Okay so here’s the deal: you want to say hello? I’ll be on the SECOND FLOOR of the Toronto Public Library this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, from 9-5 and 10-5, respectively. Admission is FREE! My table number is 279, and here’s a handy map of where to find me (along with fellow rockstar neighbors Katie and Shaggy Shanahan, Tony Cliff, Kean Soo, Tory Woollcott, Meredith Gran, and Mike Holmes—dang, y’all):
It’s gonna be a party.
In addition to tabling at Table 279, you can also find me at the following events (during which time I will, obviously, not be at my table—plan accordingly!):
Saturday, 1:30 – 2:30 — Comics 101: How to Start Publishing Your Comics
(Marriott: Summerhill Room)
Reading comics is not enough and your passion for the medium has manifested into the next form — making them! Self-publishing your own comics will be a snap with the helpful expert advice of indie comics pubs and creators Raighne Hogan (2dcloud), Hazel Newlevant (Chainmail Bikini), Lucy Bellwood (Baggywrinkles), Kevin Czap (Czap Books). Moderated by Rachel Kahn.
Saturday, 2:45 – 3:45 — Niche Comics (The Pilot, 22 Cumberland)
Sure we all love comics, but what’s the other thing that makes you light up like an incandescent bulb? Specialization isn’t just key to evolution—it can help bring new focus to your work and encourage readers to learn from (and share!) your enthusiasm. Join Kate Beaton (history), Erika Moen (sex and sexuality), Lisa Hanawalt (horses), and Lucy Bellwood (boats) for a discussion of how niche interests can lead to diverse, vibrant careers.
Sunday, 11-11:30 — Draw-Along Kids Room (Toronto Reference Library Appel Salon)
Bring out the inner artistry of your little ones at the Draw-Along Kids Room! All day, we are cycling in the best of childrens’ comics artists to draw alongside our youngest attendees. Come by and let your imaginations run wild with real, live cartoonists!
SEE YOU THERE, YOU FABULOUS BEASTS.
Something a little different today: a process GIF from a recent illustration commission! This cat portrait was done start-to-finish in Manga Studio with Frenden’s blue pencil and Hairpin Sable inker brushes.
You notice how the cat really comes alive in that last frame when the white highlights in the eyes come into play? Every time I add those to a piece I get this really vivid memory of going to art classes as a kid.
My teacher’s name was Sharon Butler. She was a realist painter from South Africa who painted waist-high stones to look like living cheetahs, crouching in the greenery outside the studio. The two rooms in her establishment were filled with the perpetual, chalky scent of pastels and Prismacolor pencils. We’d get pieces of illustration board handed out every time a new project began, cut down to the appropriate size. I completely lost track of time every session I spent there. My only job was drawing, as well as I could.
This was pre-internet, so Sharon kept a morgue file in the inner room. It was a metal filing cabinet—dull beige and taller than I was at the time—crammed full of photos and magazine clippings. There were folders for horses and dolphins and birds and architecture and chairs and people and costumes. Every manilla folder had a grouping by subject, and since Google simply wasn’t around yet we’d fight over who got the best picture of the dolphin to draw from.
I drew a lot of animals when I went to those classes with Sharon. She’d stop by while I was struggling to render a hummingbird as something other than a crude cartoon, giving suggestions on how I could better train my eye to see what was actually in front of me. The second-to-last touch, before the fixative stopped our pastel smudges from scattering off the page, was to add a dot of white in each eye. She taught us to use a Q-Tip or the back end of a paintbrush.
At the time it felt like wizardry—the amount of life that tiny dot of white could bring to an otherwise flat animal.
It still does, kind of.
Those of you following me on social media may’ve noticed a new series of drawings going up over the last couple weeks! I’m participating in The 100 Day Project, which comes to us via Elle Luna and The Great Discontent. The premise of this project is simple: make something every day for 100 days. That’s all. Could be anything; a written word, a cake, a joke, a drawing, a button. I’ve actually been pitching it as a do anything for 100 days project—so one could even eat an apple a day or something similarly arbitrary. I think it’s the regularity of the ritual that’s important. There’s also value in creating something small every day and using the exercise to break down our inhibitions around perfection, but regularity breeds ritual, and ritual can take many forms.
Anyway, I’ve opted to use up the many, many Scout Books and Field Notes sketchbooks I’ve been accumulating from various events by chronicling 100 objects in my possession with words and pictures.
The format involves a drawing, however crude, and as much context about the item as I can cram on the page. It started here:
And has continued apace for the last couple weeks.
I love projects like this that require relatively little commitment on the day-to-day, but add up to something vast over time. I’m really excited to see where this goes. If you’d like to follow along, take a peek at my Instagram page or follow along on Twitter.
Hi friends,
Just a quick post to let you know that I’ll be appearing at the Alaska Robotics Minicon this Saturday in Juneau, Alaska! The show runs 10am-5pm and is TOTALLY FREE! It’s also got an amazing lineup of guests including Kate Beaton, Tony Cliff, Raina Telgemeier, and many, many more. Here’s a map of where I’ll be on the floor (Table 27):
I’ll also be making a couple of school visits during the day on Friday, which I’ll try to document in some fashion. Really looking forward to talking about scurvy with a bunch of middle schoolers. I think that’s going to go over well.
See you in the wilderness!
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!
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:
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.