The online home of Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood
(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!
Ladies and gents, though I am sick as a very sick dog, I have spent the majority of my Spring Break slaving away in order to bring you new visual goodies. AND HERE THEY ARE. Well, in part. A couple larger illustrations from my final project for the IPRC program. The story, which I’m trying to get a grant to finish over the summer, deals with belonging and language through the lens of dual citizenship. Keep an eye out for more of these as the week goes on.
OH, THE MELODRAMA!
To tide everyone over while I scramble around for documentation of other recent projects, here’s a quick one page comic for a zine the IPRC class is putting together. The theme was “revolutions.” Churned this out in a couple hours with no reference, so on the one hand I’m proud of the bits where all the figure drawing I’ve been doing pays off, but on the other there are some heinous liberties being taken with space and anatomy. Ew.
But hey, boobs!
Those of you who have been following this blog since its inception will probably remember a very enthused post I wrote back in August extolling the virtues of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Well, it turns out that this week there’s a push on the raise awareness about the programs they offer and the extraordinary caliber of the people involved. Fortunately, this is something I hardly need an excuse to do. As is often the case with small programs (even ones as miraculous and epic as CCS), drumming up a diverse and talented pool of applicants is often as difficult as raising funds to keep the school afloat in the first place — and arguably more important.
My experience at CCS was incredible not only because of the excellent instruction I received, but also because I was surrounded (for the first time in my life!) by 36 other people who all loved comics. And not only did they love them, they made them. And they all meant business. That experience alone, the process of being inspired by work so different from my own, the camaraderie of powering through page after page together in the studio late into the night, was worth more than I can say. The best professors in the world are only as good as the students they teach. A class who will dedicate themselves to the material at hand while pushing each other to new heights of creativity and exploration is crucial to the continued existence of any institution — and CCS is no exception.
So this is for all those aspiring cartoonists and makers of things who spend their time creating while thinking that what they really need is a group of people to bounce ideas off of, be challenged and inspired by, and stay up all night kicking ass with. Go here. You won’t be disappointed.
Someone’s inking a comic! 
Also: taught a comics workshop at Reed this evening that went super well! Had an awesome group of students and even though I know I probably talked too fast, they seemed to dig it. Looking forward to showing the collaborative comic we came up with. Good stuff!
More on the backlog of things I’ve been doing in the past month! One of our recent assignments was to illustrate a script written by one of the students in the prose class. I was fortunate enough to get paired with Michael Heald, a very talented writer who nonetheless had the merciful impulse to keep his script short and sweet. I am forever in his debt.
Heed no rumors of my demise, Internet. It’s just that glorious time of year known as “Finals,” and I have been a very busy bee. To prove that I am not just bluffing about this, and that even in the heat of papers and exams, I am still finding time for comics, here’s a very messy collection of thumbnails for Baggywrinkles Vol. 2, which will be penciled (come hell or high water) by the 13th, inked over winter break, and printed in time for Stumptown! Excitement abounds.
As time permits, I’ll also be rounding up photos of the book I illustrated, typeset, and printed this past month, featuring a poem by the insanely talented Hallie McPherson. The IPRC program has also had me hard a work on various assignments, of which there will be more evidence later.
For now, enjoy some nautical sneak peak material!
(Oh, and for those of you who care about layout and page spreads and that sort of thing, it’s worth noting that I was dumb when I started drawing this in my sketchbook and didn’t lay out the pages to reflect their appearance in the final printed pamphlet. Thus, pages 1 and 8 will appear on their own, and 2/3, 4/5, and 6/7 will be spreads.)
Less smudgy versions to follow as I get these onto Bristol!
It’s been a long haul, folks, but here we are:
I don’t want to contemplate how much time I’ve spent folding and punching and sewing this week, but the net result is 100 copies of my very first minicomic ready to be flung into your waiting arms — and I have to say, it looks pretty awesome. 3 bucks gets you 8 pages of nautically-themed goodness on attractive paper with a handsome cover and hand-stitched binding.
The next mountain? VOLUME TWOOOOOOO!
(…and a crazy letterpress edition of a friend’s poetry, several smaller comics about mythology and my colossal clumsiness, and a proposed project dealing with displacement and the dual citizen experience.)
STAY TUNED!
Well, as a reward for having laid out Baggywrinkles at long last, the Universe decided to bless me with the magical gift of a Facet Joint Syndrome flare-up last week. The details are unimportant, aside from that fact that it involved lots of pain. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of modern medicine, I’m slowly recovering motion in my neck — just in time for my trip to California! So, of course, printing will be slightly delayed. Again. *sigh*
The compensate, here’s a comic! This week’s IPRC assignment was to create a silent how-to comic in 9 panels. I chose a knot, of course, because who doesn’t love knots? Communists. That’s who.
Wow. Apologies for all the photos in this post, but there didn’t seem to be a better way to convey all this. Thank goodness for WordPress slideshows.
So here, in its entirety, is Tales from the Fragment. The first part of the slideshow is a walkthrough of the final product. Each new image corresponds to a folding out of one of the tabs or panels, if that makes any sense. The rest of the shots are all production related because, let’s face it, there’s something mesmerizing about seeing your work duplicated. Also: black toner hands of DOOM. It took forever to scrub that shit off.
There are few things that needed tweaking, spacing-wise, which will be corrected when I print a second run to (shh) sell through the site. For now, though, those copies will be going to the other members of the class.
[slideshow]
And as if that weren’t enough, I shirked academic duties today in order to stop being a wuss and finish laying out Baggywrinkles #1! The covers look amazing and I can’t wait to get it all assembled in the next few days. I’ll be sure to start squealing with glee as soon as it’s up for purchasing in the Emporium. Until then, no running with scissors!
