Tag: sketchbook

Activism, Ojai

Sketchnotes: For the People

An illustrated page of portraits and quotes from For The People's informational webinar on library structures.

Notes from a recent informational webinar run by For The People, a fantastic team aiming to get more people actively involved in defending and championing libraries. This was well-timed, since I wanted to check out volunteer opportunities with our local Friends of the Ojai Library organization, but Katie, Mariame, Tara, and their colleagues inspired me to dig deeper. This call was aimed at enrolling people in their incubator project, which offers weekly Zoom calls to help elected or hopeful board members navigate group dynamics, stand up for free speech, and strategize together. It’s an incredibly smart and well-run operation.

How do library boards work? In 2023-2024, For The People: A Leftist Library Project undertook a massive data survey of all 9,000+ public library systems in the United States, and collected - with the help of hundreds of volunteers - information on the governance of more than 7,000 systems, information not available anywhere else. FTP’s research showed that the majority of library board seats in the US - 83% - are appointed positions. Those appointments are usually made by other local elected officials (city councils, county boards of supervisors, etc). The remaining 15% of seats are directly elected by voters.

True to their word, I found the documentation online for the Ventura County Library board to be pretty opaque, but with a little digging I was able to locate the one board member who lives in Ojai. I reached out and she kindly agreed to give an informational interview on Friday, so we’ll be chatting about how things get done in this corner of the world. I’m very curious to see what she has to say about the process.

If you’re a library enthusiast, I can’t recommend For The People enough. Sign up for their newsletter, check out their fantastic resources page (especially the Public Libraries 101 zine), and see if you can get more involved in your own local library community.

Blog, Seacritters

Laid Low

I’m sick in bed the week of Thanksgiving, which is mostly bothering me because I was looking forward to using the holiday lull to finally get some work done.

This sounds bad, I know. But my family doesn’t even do Thanksgiving! My whole life I’ve made do with (and enjoyed, to be fair) turning up at other people’s celebrations. This year I’m starving for a secret pocket of time instead; one of those interstitial spaces that nurture creativity. I’ve been thinking of the days I’d bike to my studio in Portland having forgotten, in my freelancer’s fog, that it was a public holiday. The roads were empty. The traffic was quiet. No one was asking me to work, so I could actually work. And my work, of course, sits in the strange dip between play and purpose.

I wrote a little on Patreon this week about taking time off of penciling the graphic novel to design a new character. It has felt intolerable do this kind of thing when the spreadsheet looms and I’m constantly berating myself for how long this book has been taking and I want to see progress and I want to know how long it will take and the work of designing something new is anything but predictable.

And yet it IS predictable! I went from tentative sketches to a properly captured character in about three days! That’s barely any time at all!

Anyway, top of mind these days: how making a career of a creative practice does, eventually, impose a sense of constant dis-ease. The catch-22 of needing a sense of spaciousness in order to indulge the kind of experimentation and noodling that allows one to actually, y’know, create, but existing in a world full of deadlines and invoices that require foreknowledge of exactly how long something will take. There’s nothing new about this gripe, as evidenced by the very thoughtful and validating comments I got from other comics peers on that Patreon post, but I’m feeling it keenly right now.

At least I’m getting to draw a lot of outrageous lizards.

A dense sketchbook page full of goofy lizards.
Delights

Moananuiākea

Hey! The gorgeous double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship Hikianalia are setting off on another circumnavigation!! LOOK AT THIS VOYAGE MAP!!!

A map showing Hōkūleʻa's voyage itinerary.

I’m heartbroken this year’s trip to Juneau falls a month before the launch date, but also so excited to see these upcoming plans. I hope I can catch the vessels when they’re further down the US coast. (If you’ve never heard of Hōkūleʻa before, it’s worth skimming through her history on the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s website.)

Here are some drawings I did back in 2017 when I got to visit Hawai‘i for the first time and fell in love with the history of wayfinding. (Ask me sometime about why Disney’s Moana is basically a true story.)

Three sketches of Polynesian canoes.
Illustration

Redwood Live Sketches from Portland Center Stage

Every so often the cartoonists of Portland get an open invite to a local theatrical production. Sometimes it’s the children’s theater, other times the opera. Occasionally it’s something with extravagant puppets. We get free tickets to whatever’s on in exchange for producing a batch of frantic live sketches, which  then get used to promote the production. 

This month the call was for a world premier play called Redwood, a story about race and heritage and relationships, intergenerational and otherwise. I’d gotten a mailer for it a few days earlier and really wanted to go, so when the invite to live sketch a dress rehearsal came in I was all over it.

Lucy holding a pair of clip lights up to her head like a pair of antennae.
Thank you JJ for this very good photo.

They issue all the cartoonists with these goofy clip lights and send them to sit in a row towards the back of the theater. We then have to do our darndest to draw like the wind throughout the entire show, capturing gestures, faces, moments, scenery—whatever we like. Here’s what I came up with! These sketches were all done straight to ink with a Pilot Carbon Desk Fountain Pen (the least well-named implement in my arsenal).

It’s a challenge for sure, but one I always come away from feeling surprisingly accomplished. It’s also nice to be drawing for folks who aren’t visual artists themselves, because anything you produce seems like wizardry.

I’m really glad I made time to go see this production—it was powerful and moving and laugh-out-loud funny. You can catch it at The Armory here in Portland through November 17th!

Comics

Hourly Comic Day 2018

It’s time for another installment of my favorite comics holiday: Hourly Comic Day! Every year on February 1st, creators around the world draw a panel (or panels) for every hour they’re awake. This is my eighth year participating, and I love it more and more each time around. It’s a great opportunity to reflect on where I’m at in my career, what’s changed in the past year, and how I’m feeling about the future.

(Full disclosure: while I penciled all eight of these pages on February first, I inked and painted about five of them on February second. I always want to watercolor my hourlies and never let myself do it so this year I got indulgent. Worth it.)

These were all drawn on 6×9″ Strathmore mixed media paper with a mix of Kuretake and PITT brush pens, Daniel Smith watercolor, and a 2H pencil.

Thanks for reading! You can check out my previous entries for Hourly Comic Day at the following links: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.

Conventions, News

SPX Comin’ Atcha

This is it, friends! My last convention of 2017! If you’re in the D.C. area, come on out to Bethesda, MD for the Small Press Expo this Saturday and Sunday. SPX boasts an amazing roster of indie comics folks, and I’m so excited to be returning this year. I’ll be camped out at Table K9-A alongside the team from Cartozia Tales. You can check out the full exhibitor list and floor map here.

I’m also appearing on a panel on Sunday at 12:30pm:

Balancing World-Building and Character In Kids’ Comics

Laura Terry, Ben Sears, Janet Lee & Lucy Bellwood all create elaborate worlds for their colorful characters to dwell in. They will discuss how to balance the immersive quality of world-building with the development of character and story, particularly as it pertains to comics for kids.

Sunday, 12:30pm, White Flint Room

So what am I gonna have on hand? WELL.

I just picked up these extra shiny ✨new sketchbooks✨ from my time in Iceland. If you want 24 pages of watercolor studies, life drawing, and landscapes from two weeks in a totally unreal and gorgeous country, this is the book for you. (It’s also available as a PDF if you swing that way.)

Here’s a look at some of the artwork inside:

If you’re not going to be at SPX, these books will go up for sale in my online shop around the end of the month. You can keep an eye out on Twitter or sign up for my monthly email newsletter to get the drop on that.

I’ll also have a limited selection of miniprints from the 100 Demon Dialogues series, and the plush prototype for folks to get a handle on.

If you missed your chance to order a book or a plush toy through the Kickstarter campaign, there’s now a pre-order store where you can do all of that! No deadlines needed. Just for kicks, here’s a look at the letterpress print design I’m working on for the campaign:

In addition to these new treats, I’ll have gold foil box sets of my first 100 Day Project, A Life in Objects, which sold out in record time at last year’s SPX. (Don’t worry, I’m bringing a lot more this year!)

I’ll also have assorted travelogue minicomics and softcover copies of Baggywrinkles, if you somehow don’t own a copy yet. PHEW. Lots of goodies. Oh! AND. I’m also giving away copies of Mappin’ the Floor, the comic that came out of my three-week stint in the Pacific aboard R/V Falkor. Learn some stuff about oceanography in 12 bright and charming pages—fo’ FREE.

Okay, I think that’s legitimately it from me. SEE YOU AT THE SHOW!

Art

A Life in Objects: PDF & Print Edition

Cover

As you may’ve noticed, I’ve spent the last three(ish) months working on The 100 Day Project, a creative game of sorts where participants try to create something every day for 100 days. I chose to illustrate meaningful objects from my life with little vignettes of text.

The final collection, A Life in Objects, is now up for sale! I’m printing a facsimile edition in three, 40-page pocket notebooks—the same size as the originals (3.5×5″)—with a fancy belly band.

100DayConceptNoCase

The books will be printed locally in Portland at Eberhardt Press, and I’m hoping to debut them at SPX in September.

If you absolutely can’t wait to read the whole thing, why not buy the PDF edition on Gumroad? I promise it’s got all the same treats inside.

PreviewAll

I’m incredibly proud of how this collection came out. More news to come once the printed books are on their way!

Art, Illustration

The 100 Day Project

Title

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.

Notebooks
Notebooks from Linework NW (designed by Lisa Congdon), XOXO (designed by Brendan Monroe), Reid Psaltis, Scout Books, and Erika Moen.

The format involves a drawing, however crude, and as much context about the item as I can cram on the page. It started here:

1

And has continued apace for the last couple weeks.

Preview800px

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.

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.

DemonsHalf

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:

CrapComics

Followed by this additional doodle:

DemonPunch

(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!

Art

31 Days, 31 Outfits – 2015

Those of you following me elsewhere on the Internet have probably already seen this year’s 31 Days, 31 Outfits challenge, but I finally got ’em all scanned and uploaded into a tiny army, so I figured it was time for an official post. If you’d like to compare notes with 2014’s 31 Outfits, you can take a peek at those right here.

(The Goblin Interlude was brought to you by Evan Dahm and Goblin Week.)

Outfits2015-Vertical

I hadn’t intended to make this an annual thing, but it’s been really fun both times and I dig getting to see my progress year-to-year, so I guess I’ll be seeing you with another batch of these in 2016!