Comics – Page 3 – Lucy Bellwood

New Comic: A Week at Sea with OHP

I’ve put a new comic up this month! To fight off the winter chill, here’s a travelogue from my week of sailing aboard the Oliver Hazard Perry back in August/September.

This trip with OHP was a great opportunity to refine my practice of joining organizations as an embedded cartoonist, merging the duties of a deckhand (line handling, climbing aloft, maintenance, etc.), educator (teaching classes on scurvy and nautical trivia with Baggywrinkles as my de facto textbook), and artist (frantically sketching the students and their activities at every turn). Each trip I take I feel like I’m getting a better handle on this format, and how best to adapt it to different kinds of experiences.

You can read the whole comic online right here, or purchase a copy in print via my store.

While I completed all the artwork during my time aboard, getting the scanning, cleanup, and formatting squared away in-between all my traveling from August to November proved tricky, hence the lengthy lagtime. I’m thrilled to finally have it all put together. Here’s a look at the trip in photos:

The Oliver Hazard Perry is America’s newest sail training vessel. You can learn more about her and her programs at OHPRI.org.

Big thanks to my supporters on Patreon for making this comic possible! If you want to join them and get a behind-the-scenes look at these pieces as they come together, head on over here.

Comics

New Comic: Sail Cargo Resurgence

Hey friends,

Fittingly, I’m writing this blog post from the deck of the Oliver Hazard Perry, a new tall ship in Rhode Island that I’m currently working aboard as a visiting artist. But that’s secondary to the following exciting news of the day: I’ve got a new comic up on The Nib!

For the last few months I’ve been researching and illustrating this brief introduction to the modern world of sail cargo—a movement driven by environmentalism, optimism, and countless volunteer hours. There are a surprising number of operations around the world working to convert tall ships into viable cargo-carrying vessels—or build new ones from the ground up.

It’s a trend I find deeply fascinating, and my only regret was not being able to fit more of my research into this introduction. The sailors working on these vessels are the embodiment of enthusiasm and dedication, and I really enjoyed talking with them during my research.

Of particular interest right now: Sailcargo Inc. are launching their Kickstarter to build a dedicated cargo vessel (Ceiba) from scratch in Costa Rica! Keep an eye on their website for details on the launch.

Fairtransport are also making great strides in building a coalition of sail cargo vessels around the world. Their website has a wealth of information, including vessel tracking and more. View all the ships in their network here.

Tres-Hombres-foto-Hajo-Olij-1 — Brigantine Tres Hombres, Photo Credit Hajo Olij

Of course there are also efforts being made to implement modern sailing technology on existing container ships at a grander scale. To learn more about the DynaRig technology behind parts of that movement, check out this article. There’s some fascinating stuff afoot, and even though it’s moving slowly, progress is being made.

I’ll have more news after my week aboard the Perry, but until then, enjoy the comic!

Fair winds,

Lucy

Comics, News

Baggywrinkles Available on ComiXology

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

Comics

Hourly Comic Day 2016

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.

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

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

Art, Comics

Inktober-In-Progess: Dealing with Demons

As you’ve probably all noticed, this month’s Inktober challenge has morphed into something of a themed exercise for me. I’ve been illustrating my horrible little self-doubt demon in his many forms, trying to name some of the fears and anxieties that everyone deals with (in one form or another) when they sit down to make work. Here’s a selection from the first half of the month.

If you’d like to join in, please do! I’m trying to keep an eye on the #drawyourdemons hashtag and I’d love to see what your little jerks say and how you respond to them.

This character came out back in 2012 when I was stuck in an art rut. A bit of digging in the Ancient Bellwood Archives revealed the original:

Followed by this additional doodle:

(I can also guarantee the little bastard’s been plaguing me since long before I started making comics about him.)

Anyway, I’m contemplating putting all these illustrations together in a little minicomic when the month is done. If you’d like in on that, keep an eye out on Twitter. Happy Inktober!

Comics

New Comic: Scurvy Dogs

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.

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.

Comics, Illustration

XOXO Livesketches

This past weekend I had the exceptional pleasure of being hired by Medium to live sketch all the speakers at XOXO, an annual arts and technology festival run by my pals Andy Baio and Andy McMillan here in Portland. I’d heard great things about XOXO in the past, but this was my first opportunity to check it out in person—and BOY HOWDY IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT. Yes, I felt like my arms were going to fall off after each day’s sketching (20 minutes per speaker, with seven to ten people each day of the conference), but I met so many fascinating folks and got to hear some really wonderful presentations. Here’s a truncated image of all the speaker portraits from Saturday and Sunday (not including the pull quotes from each talk, which you can see over on Medium):

Crazy.

And now it’s time to gear up for Rose City Comic Con this weekend, where I’ve got a new comic making its print debut! Expect a post about that in the next couple days.

I’m also planning to collect some more complex thoughts about what XOXO meant to me once I stop being socially hungover from non-stop connections and late nights over the weekend, but that’s a story for another time. In the meantime, check out the full post on Medium!

Comics

New Comic: Rim to River

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.

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.

(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.)

Comics

New Comic: Salt Soap

This is a short piece that I’ve been meaning to draw for a few years now—glad to finally have it finished. You can find it in print in Irene #6 later this year. Enjoy!

If you enjoyed the comic and want to see more, why not chip in a couple bucks a month on Patreon? Your support keeps me drawing—thanks!

Comics

True Believer PDF Free for FCBD 2015!

Happy Free Comic Book Day, everyone! I thought I’d celebrate by making one of my most meaningful comics available for you all as a PDF at no charge. True Believer (for those of you who’ve only arrived at this blog in the last couple years) was an autobiographical story I completed as part of my thesis at Reed College in 2012. It was my first “real” comic—a meditation on why we make space for creation in our lives and an homage to my teacher Dylan Williams, a legendary local comics publisher.

I’ve been meaning to release the PDF of True Believer to the general public for free for a while, and what better day than today? This comic and the Kickstarter that went along with it were huge early career milestones for me, and I realize a lot of the folks following me now maybe don’t know about them.

So download the comic for free here, and thanks so much for all your support through the years—this was where so much of it started and I’m really thrilled to still be doing it as hard as I am.

(If you want to keep helping me make more comics, check out my Patreon page! There’s lots of new content going up there every week.)