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.
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.
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.
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!
Emerald City Comicon is upon us in just a couple weeks, which means it’s time for pre-show commission sign-ups!
Here’s the drill: I have a limited number of slots for folks to get artwork done before the show—this means a little more care and attention can go into your pieces, and they’ll be ready to pick up whenever you swing by my table at ECCC! Prices and contact details can be found below.
Speaking of my table, here’s a map of where I’ll be on the show floor [Booth 1214 with the rest of Periscope]:
(Note: I am totally not this buff and tattooed.)
Emerald City is a whopping four days this year, so there’s really no excuse not to swing by and say hello. I’m bringing lots of minicomics, stickers, prints, buttons, and anthologies, plus I’ll be taking preorders for Baggywrinkles: a Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea (due out August, 2016).
So here’s the run-down on commissions:
1. Little Paintings (Full Color /3×4″ = $35, 4×6″ = $45)
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 (Full Color / 9×12″ / $70)
These are larger pieces with minimal background elements and one or two figures. More figures generally equal higher costs, but let me know what you’re after and we’ll work together to achieve it!
3. Ships (Full Color / 12×16″ / $300)
A handsome portrait of a tall ship of your choosing on a calm (or tempestuous) sea! 12″ x 16″, full-color, lotsa rigging guaranteed. These are substantial pieces and make excellent gifts.
[A note on all commission options: if any of these strike your fancy, but you’re on a budget, ask about greyscale or ink-only work to cut the cost a bit.]
Sign-ups are limited since there’s only a couple weeks 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 April 7th-10th.
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.
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!
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.
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):
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!
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.)
