Author: Lucy Bellwood

Art, Main, News

HERE IT COMES!

Hey everyone. So, in honor of my birthday (which is today), I’m releasing all my exciting news in one fell swoop. We’ve got new comics, reprints, a fan page, and a convention appearance all up in here, so read on!

First, and most importantly, Baggywrinkles #2 is FINALLY HERE!

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It’s been too long in the works, but I’m very proud to see it out in the world at last. This volume, as those of you who have been following its glacial progress here on the blog probably know, is all about traditional sailors’ tattoos. Superstitious ones, useful ones, boastful ones, all in there. Eight pages, like the last one, but this time I’ve switched it up with a BLUE cover.

Oh yes. Bold strides.

Both issues will soon be available for physical purchase in the following fine Portland establishments: Guapo Comics and Coffee, Reading Frenzy, Floating World Comics, and (hopefully) Powell’s Books!

I’m also offering a deal through the site and at the Portland Zine Symposium in August: Both issues of the comic and a bonus nautical button for 5 bucks! Saves you a dollar. Everyone likes having an extra dollar. Check out the Emporium for more info!

SECONDLY:

Tales from the Fragment has been reprinted and is ready to ship!

If you remember way back last year when I first wrote about this project, it’s a sculptural foldy comic which incorporates its hand-cut wrapper into the storytelling process. Silly meta stuff, but I had so much fun with it that I wanted to make some more to share with folks. They’re going at 5 bucks a pop to cover all the arthritis surgery I’ll need one day from going around all those tricky stalagmites with my X-acto knife.

THIRDLY:

If you’re the kind of person who likes keeping up with news via Facebook, Baggywrinkles (and, by extension, my other artistic adventures) has its own fan page! My understanding is that if you “Like” it you get sweet updates on all my comics-related doings. Hot damn!

AAAAAND FINALLY:

I’ll see you all in person at the Portland Zine Symposium on August 6th and 7th! It’s free, and there will be a ton of awesome folks there, so you really have no excuse not to come.

Thanks for sticking with me, folks. I know this isn’t the most regular of update schedules, but I’m really excited to share all this stuff with you.

Art, News

Slew of Stuff

Well well well. It’s been a while. I know. Believe me. But things have been happening! Good things! Some of them are even comics related!

So let’s get on with that.

If any of you happen to pick up a shiny copy of the IPRC’s July + August catalog in the next couple weeks, you’ll be able to see my work on the cover! The illustration basically encompasses what I wanted to be doing back when Portland wasn’t cooperating with the whole “Summer weather” routine. Fortunately those days are over. Time for sidewalk chalk and lemonade! …and comics.

Here ’tis, reproduced on the web for your viewing pleasure.

I’ve also secured a table for the Portland Zine Symposium in August, where I’ll have Baggywrinkles 1 and 2, well as some copies of Tales from the Fragment (remember that?), and maybe some hand-bound blank journals. Woop woop!

However, I have to admit that these last couple weeks have involved very little drawing. As may not be completely apparent from this site, I spend a hell of a lot of time social dancing when I’m not making arts, and summer in Portland means huge dance events all the freaking time. I’ve driven to and from Colorado for Aspen Blues Recess, a week of dancing in marble quarries, aspen groves, pedestrian malls, and artisan hobbit holes, placed second in the local Jack and Jill competition with the ever-talented Kai Hayashi*, and danced over 8 hours a day (often until the sun rose over Mt. Hood) for four days during the Portland Blues Experience.

Needless to say, having limped home from the last of those events on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m., I’m a little shattered, but hopefully the next few weeks will bring recovery and lots of artwork into this magical internet of ours.

*For those of you who don’t know what blues dancing is, or are just interested in seeing the competition, here are a couple of videos from the finals!

Art

Stretching

Trying to keep my drawing muscles in shape while I work on the script (yes, SCRIPT. WITH WORDS. Crazy, I know.) for Wherefore. I’ve been so inspired by re-reading (and re-re-reading, and re-re-re-reading) Jen Wang’s Koko Be Good that I’m considering adding some watercolors to my linework for the final product, so tonight I started doing some small studies.

I’ve also been meaning to try drawing more animals, so there will probably be more of these in the future. Couldn’t be arsed to scan them, since my computer is reaching the point where merely thinking about opening Photoshop sends it into a panic attack, but rest assured they’re all transparent and watercolorey in real life.

(Reference photo credit for the extraordinary bird on the right goes to the phenomenal Andrew Zuckerman from his book…can you guess? Bird.)
Art

The Figure: Semester Recap (NSFWish)

Yes, yes, it’s another figure drawing post so, y’know, the occasional boob may have snuck in. Be warned.

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Since it’ll be a few days before I get around to properly photographing the Wherefore container, I thought I’d entertain you all with some coursework. Here’s a selection of gesture drawings, anatomical/foreshortening studies, and a series of longer poses exploring midtone paper from this semester’s Figure class.

And, as a bonus: CANDLE FINGERS! This was our final project, which centered around modification of the body. I built the double-ended finger candle from casts of my own digits, recast the whole thing in beeswax, then lit it on fire during critique while giving a reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig”. For whatever reason, horizontal candles burn much faster than vertical ones, so the final state of waxy carnage (pictured at right) probably only took about 15 minutes to fully achieve.

Stay tuned!

Main

Baggywrinkles #2 Inks

Hey, y’all remember when I was doing that nautical comic thing way back in the day? The one I said would be finished “in a few days” about 6 months ago? (At least, that’s what it feels like…) Well, hopefully I can make good on the promise soon, but just to prove I haven’t utterly forgotten: some inks! Half of them, even! (Easy to say when your story’s 8 pages long.)

There are technical tweaks left to be done on the blackboards, since I need to make them, well, black. But apart from that they’re pretty well finished. I’m trying to move beyond straight “line art” into something that’s a little more dimensional, so critiques are welcome. The latter 4 pages are more complex, so I’ve been procrastinating on them for some time, but the plunge will come sooner rather than later, I assure you.

Shutting up now so I can get on with the last few projects of the semester.

SO CLOSE, YOU GUYS. SO CLOSE I CAN TASTE IT.

Art, Main

More Wherefore Stuff

(Because I love you.)

Essentially, these are preliminary images from the project I’ll be doing over the summer with this here (not really very) hefty (but still insanely and awesomely useful) scholarship. I tried to take climactic or iconic moments from throughout the storyline and give them a bit of illustrative weight. Numbers 4 and 5 appeared in a previous post, but I’ve added them again here for the sake of continuity.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Art

Reactionary Figure Drawin’

Splitting this update into two posts, ’cause image gallery settings in WordPress are silly and I can’t display things the way I want unless they’re in separate posts. SO.

The greatest (and most stressful) part of the qual was getting to focus on nothing else for 10 days. Unfortunately, having missed a huge amount of class in the preceding weeks due to being deathly ill, this left me pretty screwed over after I turned in my materials on Monday. With a large-scale figure drawing project due the next morning at 9, I loaded my thermos with coffee and trekked into the studio at 10:30pm. Fortunately, I was home by 3am, which I consider a miracle — and even more miraculous was the fact that said project wasn’t a pile of poo! Isn’t it great when a plan comes together?

“Gettin’ Outta Dodge,” as it was ultimately titled, involved large rolls of craft paper, black and white charcoal, and a very sharp box cutter. Oh, and some strategically-placed scissors installed by Russian studio stylist D. Lemeshchenko. Brilliant man, but his prices are astronomical…

Enjoy the boobs!