education – Page 2 – Lucy Bellwood

New Comic: Mappin’ the Floor

Hi friends!

It’s been a busy week here on the island of O‘ahu. After completing our three-week ocean crossing aboard R/V Falkor last Monday at 8:30am, the ship immediately went into prep mode for a host of different events to help promote the results of our cruise. Chief among these was getting the gallery show at The ARTS at Marks Garage open, which meant getting my land legs back as quick as I could in order to hang all my completed pages from the comic I’d just drawn at sea.

The opening party on Friday night was a truly fantastic time, and I’m so grateful to everyone who came out. It was also Chinese New Year, so we had a visit from some dragons!

If you happen to be in Honolulu, the show is up through February 3rd, and features all the original artwork from my comic and work from all the other Artist-at-Sea participants from the last three years. There’s painting, animation, fiber arts, music, and (my personal favorite) A KNOT BOARD MADE OF ETHERNET CABLE.

Ethernet Knotboard by Colleen Peters — Ethernet Knotboard by Lead Technician Colleen Peters (who supported *Baggywrinkles* on Kickstarter and led to my joining *Falkor* in the first place!)

My inner fancywork nerd is screaming with glee.

SO: now that all that’s over, and I’ve taught a variety of classes to high schoolers and kindergarteners at local schools, it’s time to release the finished comic online. CUE TRUMPETS:

You can read the entire comic and learn all about multibeam mapping right here, and the PDF is free to download on Gumroad (just enter $0 at checkout and you’ll be able to download it without paying a dime). In keeping with Schmidt Ocean Institute’s open sharing of information policy, the comic is licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Attribution, so you can print it, color it, share it—whatever you want, as long as you aren’t turning a profit and you provide credit to the original source.

Physical copies of the comic will be available in the next few months. If you’d like to be first in line to know when that happens, you can sign up for my email list here (I send out updates once a month).

Thanks, as always, to my stalwart supporters on Patreon, who directly enable me to take these trips and bring back educational comics for you all to read and enjoy.

News

New Talk: The View from Aloft

I have new video up from my time at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, where I was teaching a class on webcomics and social media earlier this month. (This is the first time I’ve had video footage of my public speaking—thanks, Sam!—which is really exciting.) If you’re a person who makes things on the Internet, or a person who wants to make things on the Internet, or a cartoonist, or a budding creator—this probably has some utility for you.

Things I cover:

How I ended up doing what I’m doing now (full-time adventure-cartoonist-ing, most days)
How social media has enabled me to succeed in crowdfunding, freelancing, and basically everything else
What sailing has in common with being an artist (it’s more than you think)
Communities and gratitude economies and how they shape our work
My unified very vague theory of How the Internet Makes Us Better People
What you can gain by giving your work away for free

I had so much fun teaching at TAW, and I hope this talk distills some of the stuff we were exploring and discussing over the course of my two weeks there. If you enjoyed it and want to see/enable more, feel free to check out my Patreon page! I post a ton of behind-the-scenes, nitty gritty, creative-in-the-trenches stuff there every single week, and I’d love to have you on board.

News

Teaching in Denmark

Some big, big, BIG news for you this week, friends:

The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark has invited me to come teach a two-week class on webcomics, the Internet, and modern career options for independent cartoonists. I am beside myself with excitement. I fly in just ten days and there’s a lot to get done before I go, but I just can’t wait to meet this batch of dedicated students. I mean, seriously, go look at the work they’ve been doing here (comics-specific work can be found on this Tumblr). SO COOL.

I’ve also never been to Scandinavia before, so I’m extra thrilled to be exploring a new part of Europe. Apparently there’s nifty cathedral in Viborg, but you all know what I’m really holding out for.

Perhaps. We shall see.

I’m looking into options for capturing and broadcasting bits of the class while I’m there, so if this is a subject that interests you be sure to follow along on Twitter—I’ll do my best to share work in progress and notes from the trip on there!

That’s all for now.