Hey gang! I’m trying out something new for Emerald City Comicon this year: pre-show commission slots! This hopefully means I’ll be able to deliver a higher calibre of work to those of you looking for original art, while prioritizing my time talking to everyone on the show floor rather than hunching over my sketchbook desperately trying to complete larger art pieces. Everyone wins!
There’s a couple different options for con commissions. Read on to find out which is best for you:
1. Little Paintings (Full Color / $20 – $40)
These cuties are done on high quality cold press watercolor paper and measure either 3″ x 4″ or 4″ x 6″. Featuring a bird or animal of your choice with an optional word balloon, they’re ideal gifts or tiny talismans of your favorite beasts.
2. Pin-Ups (Ink Only, Grayscale, or Full Color / $40 – $70)
These are larger pieces (generally 6″ x 9″ or 8″ x 10″, but I’m flexible) with minimal background elements and one or two figures. More figures or full-color generally equal higher costs, but let me know what you’re after and we’ll work together to achieve it!
3. Ships (Grayscale or Full Color / $75 – $100)
A handsome portrait of a tall ship of your choosing on a calm (or tempestuous) sea! 8″ x 10″, full-color, lotsa rigging guaranteed.
Sign-ups are limited since there’s only a couple months before the show, so shoot me an email at lucypcbellwood [at] gmail [dot] com and let’s get rolling! Payment for commissions is due up front via PayPal or your online money transference service of choice. All pieces will be ready for pickup at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle March 27th-29th.
In previous years I’ve been really inspired by my studiomate Natalie Nourigat‘s year-end wrap-up posts, so I thought I’d do one of my own for 2014/2015! I spent most of December in California with my family—my first trip home in a whole year—getting some much-needed perspective on 2014 and hashing out some concrete plans for 2015. Also jumping into very cold swimming holes.
AW YEAH HERE I COME 2015
Taken as a whole? 2014 was a Really Good Year. I became an official member at Periscope, I found a dream housing situation, I got asked to document and sail aboard the last wooden whaling ship in the world, I tabled at shows in Canada, England, and both coasts of the US, I did work that I was proud of…but even with all of that in the bag I still felt like 2014 was a year of reacting to things as they were flung at me. Everything was extremely loud and incredibly close. More often than not I was finishing projects in massive work gluts in between flying around all over the place for conventions and work opportunities. I had at least one trip every month, if not two, and the toll showed in my over-all page count for the year and my general health and sanity.
There was a lot of this.
So for 2015 I want more intention. I want some control. I want the stability of a routine that supports my health, my creative habits, and my heart. I also want to draw a ton of comics. But before we get to that let’s talk about 2014. My goals (personal and professional) were:
1. Find a place to live.
Boy this one panned out really, really well. At the start of 2014 I was long-term housesitting for my studiomates Paul and Anina with most of my belongings in storage in a nearby basement. I didn’t really know where I was going when they got back. Everything was uncertain. Then, in exchange for helping my dear friend Zina by giving her a place to crash while she looked for new housing, we somehow ended up playing grown-up and working with an awesome realtor to help her parents buy a house in Portland. A house that we then got to move into. Words can’t really express what a difference this has made in my life. We live right smack dab in the middle of a lovely neighborhood, the house is just the right size for the two of us, and we cohabit like fucking champs. Looking back on 2014, this is definitely the Best Thing That Happened to Me. Here’s to happy homes.
Goddamn I love this girl.
2. Table at lots of new conventions.
This is really a continuation of last year’s goal to try and figure out what the best shows are for me to prioritize each year. This year was a great mix of new shows and old favorites. I tabled at…
Wizard World (Portland)
Emerald City (Seattle)
TCAF (Toronto)
VanCAF (Vancouver)
SPX (Bethesda)
Rose City (Portland)
Thought Bubble (Leeds!)
Beyond conventions I also did a ton of traveling for work projects like Down to the Seas Again, plus I had my first two bookstore events! By a rough estimate I traveled 26,370 miles this year. HOLY HELL.
I make the same face at every con.
3. Draw more than I drew in 2013.
Victory! I drew 91 pages of comics in 2014, over 82 pages in 2013. Granted, I was hoping to hit 100, but some things just don’t work out the way we want. It’s an okay number given how much I traveled in 2014. The breakdown went as follows:
“Bandette” Guest Short: 3 pages
“Oh Joy, Sex Toy” Guest Comic #2: 5 pages
Cartozia Issue 4: 4 pages
Cartozia Issue 4 Extra: 1 Page
“Greening Islam” story for Symbolia: 11 Pages
“Flip the Switch” Float comic for The Nib: 6 Pages
Girls With Slingshots Guest Comics: 5 Pages
Cartozia Tales #5: 3 Pages
Cartozia Tales #6: 4 pages
Down to the Seas Again: 18 pages
“Pacific Passages” with Jim Mockford: 12 pages
“Yeah Maybe, No” documentary: 17 pages
Lube Comic: 2 pages
I also colored 35 pages of a longer nonfiction comic for a studiomate. It was my first gig as a colorist and I had a ton of fun, but I won’t count it towards my year total since it wasn’t “big picture” drawing work.
Damage from my Most Productive Week Ever – 8 pages penciled/inked/toned, 7 extra pages painted, 1 pinup, two figure drawing sessions, and a daily sketch challenge.
You’ll notice that a lot of those projects are for other people, which is great! Collaboration is aces. But I also want to be working on more of my own projects. I think I use freelance comics jobs or collaborations to get around my own fears about owning my material, which is silly and should stop forthwith.
4. Bring in more money than I did in 2013.
So I know there’s been a lot of brouhaha recently about artists sharing their financial figures, but this stuff is important to me so I’m gonna level with you: I was thrilled in 2013 because I brought in about $22,900 over the course of the year (before all my business and living expenses, of course), which wasn’t gads of money but it was enough! I was making it! And this year it’s looking like I’ll have brought in about $3,600 more than last year. Lemme tell you, that feels amazing. It may not be 130k a year for software development, but that’s not my passion. My passion is the thing that I’m stretching and saving to make possible, and if it grows a little bit each year (even a tiny bit!) it’ll put me closer to building a sustainable life off of it.
In addition to the freelance work I was chugging through, I bit the bullet and started a Patreon page, which continues to motivate and humble me every month.
It’s a little over $500 a month right now, and that money is an absolute godsend. It keeps me focused on bringing more of my work into the world rather than chasing down commercial gigs, and I’m so grateful for it.
Of course, most of the new income from 2014 has gone straight back into tabling at more shows, printing new comics, and traveling to do research for future projects, but more money, more problems, right?
In 2015 I start paying for health insurance on my own. I’m also becoming a fully-paying member at Periscope. I’m really scared about the addition of any new expenses because right now keeping everything in balance feels doable, but incredibly tenuous. I’m taking it easy on the travel front. Instead of flying to eight conventions (two of them cross-country, one of them international), I’ll be keeping it local in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of self-publishing expensive color minicomics, I’m going to focus on producing content online with an eye to creating a book.
I know I can do it, and I know there will be plenty of work to go around, but I also don’t want to end up with tunnel vision as often as I did in 2014. As it stands, I feel like I’m making progress towards crafting a sustainable career, which is the Big Goal. Hooray!
(This is from a fun photo shoot I did with my pal Jeremy Francis of Geartooth Productions! Click on the image to see more of his work.)
SO THAT’S ENOUGH OF 2014.
What’s going to be different about 2015? WELL LEMME TELL YOU:
The basic goals will always be the same: draw more comics, make more money. If I can keep upping those numbers every year then I feel like I’m making progress towards success.
1. Draw more than 100 pages in 2015.
On the note of not doing so many projects for other people, I’ll be pitching a bunch of shorter comics to The Nib this year. It’s a great platform and supports a lot of the nonfiction/adventure work I love doing. It’ll also help get me over the hump of worrying about pitching my own ideas. I have a handful of stories already bubbling away, including a longer Baggywrinkles installment about the history of scurvy and the culinary arts of the sea, all of which I want to run on Patreon on a monthly basis in addition to putting them on The Nib. My patrons are all rockstars, and I want to treat them as such.
The elephant in the room is A Longer Project, which I have a few ideas about. Not saying too much until I know more, but the desire for it came up a lot this year so I’d like to start moving in the direction.
2. Ask.
Earlier this year I joined a couple of my studiomates in a monthly practice where we discuss our accomplishments and challenges from the previous month and our goals for the upcoming month. GAME-CHANGING. I strongly encourage any of you reading this to start a check-in group of with some friends or colleagues—”accountabilibuddies”, if you will. It keeps me focused and forces me to admit that I’ve accomplished things when I feel like I’m drowning in work. It also stops me from procrastination on Big Picture projects that might otherwise fall by the wayside.
Too much stuff!
However: I want to keep that specificity and intention going in other parts of my life. I am terrible at asking for things. Asking myself what I really want and need on a regular basis, asking for help when things get to be too much—I’m just not great at doing that kind of work. After playing around with some of the prompts in this year-end workbook, I decided that my challenge to myself for 2015 will be to ask more. This includes checking in about my goals and whether I’m pursuing them to best of my ability, checking in with my friends and loves to figure out what they need and how I can best support them, and ruthlessly jettisoning anything that doesn’t fit into those two pictures.
3. Read 50 books.
Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, 2007.
I’ve finally gotten over my post-undergrad reading phobia, which means getting serious about devouring more books. Zina and I are putting up a giant list between our rooms where we can record the titles of books we read this year and I’m super excited. I want more fuel in the brain tank. Currently I’m about a third of the way into Moby Dick and just starting Blue Latitudes by Tony Horowitz. On the other “various stages of completion” nightstand there’s Sex From Scratch (by my rad hometown friend Sarah Mirk), The Power of Habit, Show Your Work, Welcome to the Monkey House, and a few others I can’t think of right now. Lots to choose from. I go fast when I get going, so the goal now is just making time.
4. Create an ideal day/week.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of changing days rather than years. Resolutions never work so well for me, and with so much upheaval in 2014 I really just yearned for a consistent week-to-week schedule that could keep me grounded. The days when I go to bed thinking “Man, that was a Good Day” generally include waking up early (6:45-7-30ish), creative time first thing in the morning, the completion of small, concrete tasks, exercise (dancing, riding my bike, yoga), recuperation (knitting, writing letters, reading, TV), home-cooked food, socialization of some sort, and early bed. With that in mind, here are some things I’ll be trying out:
Not looking at my phone for at least the first hour of every day. This means getting an analog alarm clock and charging my phone downstairs instead of beside my bed so I don’t wake up to tweets and emails.
Writing a page in my journal every morning rather than waiting for “enough” time to do a proper entry. Anything further is frosting.
Going to yoga once a week. Just once. Anything further is also frosting.
Devoting the first three hours of the workday to brain-heavy creative tasks (scripting, thumbnails, pencils).
Devoting two hours post-lunch to admin work (filling orders, writing blog posts, categorizing finances, promoting stuff on social media).
Making time for 30 minutes of reading before bed so I can fulfill my goal of finishing 50 books this year.
Doing a proper weekly shop on Sundays and cooking two meals that I can dole out for lunch when I don’t have time to cook throughout the week.
5. Keep developing my sketching practice.
The view from my hosts’ house in Villars, France.
I did a lot of sketchbook work this year, which felt fantastic. In 2015 I’d like to be finishing sketchbooks every six months or faster, which means taking time to draw out in the world, doing studies when I get the chance, and committing to figure drawing (at least) once a month. That last one will feel really good if I can do it consistently.
So that’s it!
If you made it all the way through this: CONGRATULATIONS! You are like this noble capybara—a champion among mammals. Bask in the adoration of your monkeys.
Long-haul readers of the blog will recall that I have a habit of drawing 100 Hands every now and then, thanks to an exercise set by my mentor Eben Matthews ages ago . Last week I finished my annual pilgrimage, which I now present here for your viewing pleasure. References include: Pixelovely Reference Tool, Animopus Hand Reference Post, and the inimitable Jordi Lafebre.
I like mixing photo reference with work by artists I admire (especially animators) since it keeps me thinking in terms of what can be simplified and exaggerated. There are so many masters to learn from, and the mechanical act of replication plus an awareness of form can work wonders on your technique.
To everyone who looks at this exercise and says “Wow, I could never do that!”, remember that a) all you have to do is draw one hand at a time, and b) even though this batch was drawn in a handful of days, this practice is a process that was set in motion over a decade ago. I really wish I had scans of the very first set of these I ever did in 2003, ’cause lemme tell you they didn’t look so good back then. Heck, they still don’t look so good to me right now, but they’re better. And better is what matters. Here’s some from a little over two years ago, here’s some more from two and a half years ago. Now: a little less stiff, a little more expressive.
A couple months ago I was delighted to receive an email from Glenn Fleishman, who some of you might remember as the fella who interviewed me for The New Disruptors earlier this year, asking if I wanted to work on an article about an imaginary friend for his publication The Magazine.
I love the idea of imaginary friends, even if I never had one of my own as a child, and as soon as I received the list of this friend’s characteristics from writer Lisa Schmeiser I knew this was going to be a lot of fun. You should really just go ahead and read her essay, which does a far better job of explaining Black Hand than I ever could.
But since this is a blog about my creative stuff I thought you guys might like to see a little step-by-step process of the creation of this piece. The graphic below was created for one of my weekly Patreon Process Posts, which I put up every Friday with updates on my current projects and behind-the-scenes info on how I get stuff done. If you dig it, why not subscribe? It only costs $2 a month, and helps ensure the creation of bigger, better comics just for you!
I created this piece start-to-finish in Manga Studio 5EX. You can see my initial sketch with the pencil tool, which actually went through three versions. First I’d given Black Hand these loopy bellbottoms, but Glenn asked for something a little more like Morpheus from Sandman, so I added bulky Goth boots and snugged up the pants—tight jeans or flowy sweats. We ended up going for the latter.
After the sketch was approved I went in with the Hairpin Sable inker and laid down some lines. Glenn wanted a psychedelic, dream-like color scheme, so after blocking in some bright colors with the fill tool I added shadows (on a separate layer set to Multiply) and highlights (on a separate layer set to Screen) before going in with a watercolor brush and adding splotches and clouds on the background.
And there you have it! Again, you can read the whole finished article here, and tune in for more weekly process posts like this one over on Patreon.
A Real Thing That Actually Happened at Thought Bubble (don’t worry, I washed my hands).
You guys know I’m posting a lot of stuff every week on Patreon, right? Head over there if you want front row seats to all the latest comics and behind-the-scenes info.
Well well well, December already and I’m back in the States! I hope you all had a fabulous month.
England and France were absolutely spectacular. I had a sell-out show at Thought Bubble, met a load of great UK creators, explored some of London’s best museums, decompressed in the French countryside, and ate waaaaaaay too much cheese.
(Just kidding. You can never eat too much cheese.)
This is just a quick post to let you all know that my shipping deadline for holiday orders is THIS THURSDAY (December 4th), since I’ll be out of town visiting my family in California for most of December and won’t have access to my stock. If you’ve got a maritime enthusiast in the family, why not get them some quality nautical comics? You can check out all the stuff I’ve got right here. Be sure to request if you’d like me to sign ’em to someone special.
Also, because I feel bad that I don’t have enough time to do a full, in-depth write-up of the trip: have some pages from my sketchbook! (If you’d like to see absolutely everything I’ve done each month, there’s a Patreon tier especially for you! Supporting me making more comics gets you access to exclusive high-res PDFs of all my sketchbook stuff month-by-month.)
In case you haven’t heard, I’m on my way to England! I’ll see all you US cats in three weeks. The laptop is staying here in my absence, so please expect some delays on email communication. I’ll be around on Twitter, most likely, and posting art as I go. If you’re around London on the 20th there might even be a sketch meet-up. Keep your eyes on the web for more details.
If you’re in the UK this month, be sure to come say hello at Thought Bubble in Leeds November 15th and 16th. Otherwise I’ll catch you when I’m back in the States at the end of the month.
Huge thanks to all you Patreon supporters and kind-hearted Thought Bubble Fund contributors. You made this happen. I’m so grateful.
P.S. Want some comics to tide you over till I return? Down to the Seas Again is up in its entirety for free on The Nib! Check it out here.
Happy Friday, comics friends! I come bearing tidings of a new Baggywrinkles installment. Pacific Passages is a historical story that’s been in the works since earlier this year. It’s written by R.J. Mockford, a maritime historian who’s done a lot of work on the history of the original Lady Washington, and illustrated by me!
If you’d like to order a print copy listen close: I’ve only got 20 of them available right now and I’m flying to England next week so the order window is only open between now and Monday. You can get the individual issue here or the five-issue Baggywrinkles bundle here. You can also get a shiny PDF version on Gumroad!
And now, without further ado, THE COMIC:
Many thanks to all of you who have been supporting me on Patreon! This comic couldn’t have happened without you.
I’m sitting on the couch scarfing pomegranate seeds and ice cream while my gentleman friend looks up from doing the crossword.
“I’d love to see you draw Sexy Lucy. I mean, if you want to. If you think it would be fun.”
I laugh through a mouthful of dessert. “What? Why?”
“Well, I saw you draw Happy Lucy today and that was really adorable, and I’ve seen Grumpy Lucy and Goofy Lucy and Tired Lucy, but you never seem to draw Sexy Lucy.”
Some of you may’ve already seen the essay I posted last week on Medium about setting boundaries in autobio comics, but I figured I’d post a link here too just in case you missed it. This is a question I’m always navigating in my own work, but it took a particular conversation to get me to articulate my feelings on the subject. How do we skew our lives in their presentation online? Can I craft an alternative reality in my work that alters who I am in the physical world? What right do my readers have to my innermost thoughts?
Give the whole thing a read and let me know what you think. I’d be really curious to hear from any of you (especially women) who handle questions of intimacy in your autobiographical work. Where do you draw the line and why?
After many long weeks of toil, I’m thrilled to announce that Down to the Seas Again, my travelogue comic from this summer’s trip aboard the Charles W. Morgan, is officially at the press and available for pre-order and PDF download! Pre-ordered print editions will begin shipping September 22nd. They’re 20 pages, full color, and (if I do say so myself) totally gorgeous. Colorhaus did a fantastic job on the printing and I can’t wait to start getting them into your hands.
If you’re attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD this weekend, you can catch the official print debut and pick one up in person at Table C14, or you can find me at Rose City Comic Con next week with additional copies!
You can also get more of a behind-the-scenes experience by pledging as little as $1 a month over on my Patreon page, where I’ve been posting a lot of process stuff and background info with each page.
Photo by R.J. Mockford
Finally, thanks to all of you who came out to the Sequential Art Gallery show opening last week. I had a great time chatting with you all about boats and process and upcoming plans. The pages will be up all month if you missed the party and would like to go take a look! Here’s the gallery’s page with more details.
Hope to see many of you in the next few weeks at SPX and RCCC!
