Well that was a tough one. I'd done this for the past three years, and it's always tough keeping up with drawing while you're doing the thing you're drawing, every hour.

So this time I thought I'd make it really easy on myself, by just doing one panel representing each hour, instead of a little story each time. Not a good plan. There's just not enough interest or continuity, at least not the way I was doing it; I still suspect with more thought it could've worked. 

And, of course, I had a funeral to go to. I had intended to show that hour, somehow. But I didn't know that the reception would take such a large part of the day (I'm glad, as it was a very very necessary and good thing) and in the end it just felt wrong to put any of this in a comic. 

But I'd started with the morning, and decided I had to carry on even with this massive hole in the middle and even with my dissatisfaction with the whole thing. My heart just wasn't in it, though, and the drawings are more terrible than usual. Why did I feel so compelled to finish?

Might just give it a miss next year! 

There are other things -- including dip pens, special erasers, and google maps -- that have been very useful this year, but below are six indispensible items which have been invaluable to my work. 

​So, those are mine at the moment. What are your favourite tools?

For #inktober this year, I decided I would use the daily drawing to improve in one of my weakest areas - human beings. I would make myself do faces with expressions, and whole-body active postures, and also practise drawing people on old bikes as prep for Two Shillings per Day, the graphic novel I'm working on. But did I manage to achieve this?  Here are all the days' efforts: 

Looking back over the month, I don't think I learnt what I set to learn -- most of the faces ended up just the way I always draw faces, not very expressive at all, nor did I actually do more than a few interesting postures. But there were a few useful results...

- I did get some good practice drawing peeps on old bikes, from looking at reference photos.
- Most surprising, I discovered that biro is really fun! I temporarily lost my fountain pen, and found that drawing straight to ink with biro can be a little bit pencilish - start with very light sketchy marks, gradually emphasise the right ones, and the end effect doesn't look too bad. 
- I still don't really get on with ink wash for colouring. Much prefer watercolour, so I'll stick with that for the time being.  

It was helpful in any case to have a purpose behind my inktober, as it's quite an effort to keep going every day even doing fairly simple drawings. So, roll on inktober 2018... 

One week ago, at the House of Illustration in London, I was attending a masterclass in character and composition with the very fabulous Alexis Deacon. To my surprise, it was all done using collage: cutting out shapes, arranging and re-arranging them. Playing with paper was my most fun thing as a little kid, yet I've never tried collage before, and here we found that simply pushing the pieces of a snowman shape a little off balance can suggest a surprising degree of emotion and intent. 

I think my comic characters tend to stand around in fairly static positions too much of the time so it was a revelation to try out these effects from small changes. Using collage saved drawing and re-drawing and erasing, and also allowed for looser experimenting, letting accidental effects happen. 

Things of course got a little more complicated as we then had to use random cut-out shapes to form new, imagined characters (which I never do, by any sort of method, and found terribly difficult). When I got stuck and admitted I was clueless, Alexis sat down and showed by example; he was kind and helpful and constantly moving round the room to check on everyone's progress with real enthusiasm.   

Finally we had to place these characters against a background scene in a way to express something about the newly created character. Alexis showed us some elements of background composition which included:

- leaving empty space for certain effects
- directing characters' gaze toward other characters or something of note, guiding the viewer's eye
- separation or overlapping unification of silhouettes indicating relationships between characters 
- visual links by echoing colour or shape, grouping elements through use of shared colour pallette
- reader's viewpoint - from character's eyes, or cinematic overhead distance shot near ending... 

These notes are pretty sketchy and some of the concepts probably too subtle for what I do but it was fascinating to learn about how much is going on, probably at a subconscious level, when looking at a beautifully made graphic novel. Alexis was very clear in his explanations, truly an excellent teacher. 

And I think I might even try a bit of collage in planning some panels for my graphic novel Two Shillings per Day. Anything that can help add variety to the look of four people cycling along country roads has got to be good!

It's #inktober again. Every October, artists and illustrators take part in this challenge to make a drawing in ink every day of the month and post online. It was started by Jake Parker as a way for him to get better at inking, so in that spirit I've chosen something I'm not good at, in the hope that a burst of concentrated daily practice will help me improve. 

That thing is drawing people. Faces, expressions, funny positions from different perspectives. I'm much more confortable with inanimate objects, but recent illustration commissions have featured humans and it can't be avoided, really! I'm also going to have some people be on old bicycles, as this will be helpful preparation for my Two Shillings per Day graphic novel. 

This is my entire graphic novel, Two Shillings per Day, all 138 pages of it in rough draft form. Very very rough. Post-it notes in a binder, some not even with pictures, still moveable around if it's too text-heavy in places (very likely) or I just want to change the layout of a page or two (I hope not TOO much of this). 

I photographed the whole thing because I had a lot of trips away in May and wanted to take the work in progress with me, even camping where I was playing music at a festival, and the thought of losing it.....  well, doesn't even bear thinking about. I doubt if I would have the heart to start over again...but I would have to, eventually.... This made it risk-free and I got some good hours on trains to work on it. 

Weirdly, seeing it all laid out like this makes it somehow seem more possible! I even had to count the pages to see if they were really all there. It's a lot, especially as I've never made anything this large before, but I actually think it's going to be doable. 

​Watch this space. 

I'm an occasional volunteer for the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing and mentoring space for children in East London and I was delighted to be asked to help with their picture book project. Seventeen kids each wrote a story, and seventeen of us illustrators met them last month and worked out characters and rough layout.  I was paired with a nine-year-old who'd written an imaginative action story as my comic style would suit it well. Then we had about a month to do fourteen pages or seven double-page spreads - quite a lot in a short time!  Mine involved a mansion, a lab, a robot, armour, the White House, and other things I'd never drawn before... All the words and pictures are now at Penguin Random House, which supports the Ministry and is printing the books. 

Looking back at these hectic weeks, here's what comes to mind: 

1. No matter how much I wanted to draw in simple bold shapes - this is a kids' book, after all - detail kept creeping in. Maybe that's something that can't be avoided, and I need to accept it (at least for now) instead of trying to fight it. The book designer I'm working with assured me there's no problem with detail and I know my own kids liked it, but it still felt odd not being able to draw in any other way than the way I always draw. 

2. There is nothing wrong with using reference photos, not even putting them on the lightbox under the drawing paper to get the White House accurate. Okay, I knew this already, but had a strange resistance -- it's "cheating" if I don't create everything myself! But figuring out a sweeping staircase in perfect proportion and perspective would've taken forever and still might never be right. And of course nobody really cares how it's done, just that it's there. 

3. Everything takes a ridiculously long time. Yes I knew this already, too, but still get caught by surprise again and again. Rough drafts are quick, second drafts are fairly easy, but commiting to the actual final inked lines is another matter entirely. And then the colouring-in, which looks like it should take a matter of hours but somehow takes two days...

4. A big project with a tight deadline is probably not the ideal situation for trying a different fountain pen ink, but I'm happy with the new one - dokumentus - which is very fast drying and properly waterproof, not smearing when watercolour is added.  Unfortunately it's not as free-flowing as what I'm used to, needing a bit of nib pressure and an extra second to start a line, but even on Bristol board I had no smudging problems which was a huge time-saving benefit and well worth the trouble. 

​5. As always, the first rough sketchy draft looks better in a lot of ways than the finished picture.  A sense of fun in the lines, the feeling of life and motion - it's so difficult to define and difficult not to lose this as the final draft gets tightened up. Though I did find myself having to make last-minute additions by eye, free-hand, on the final artwork so maybe that'll help... 

Oh, and one more, actually. An important one. 

6. My usual method for drawing in perspective -- draw it by eye, come back and look at it later and move any lines that don't look right -- just won't do for large-scale whole room scenes. Being a little bit off with one part obviously affects everything else in the scene and there's a reason people map out the vanishing points and all that before drafting. I tended to work from my earlier drafts and didn't notice some parts weren't quite right until trying to neaten everything up for the final... and then time pressure meant I couldn't just start over.... yikes. Next time, a little more planning. While somehow keeping the spontaneity!

Can't wait to see the printed copies at the launch party next month!

On the first of February, it was again Hourly Comic Day, a silly and difficult challenge for recording ones entire day as it happens, and posting it on social media. Naturally I had to do it - for the third time. My two previous years can be found on the comics page. 

Naturally you can't just draw yourself drawing hourly comics. Even though that's what the day end up feeling like! But every time you do something more interesting, especially away from the house, you fall behind. I'm sure I'm not the only one who pretends to go to bed a bit earlier than is really true! 

Here, then, in my day condensed to one minute. 

First I went to meet with a couple of people at Refugee Radio to find out how they work. Maybe I could show a true life story of difficulties faced, and how people are being helped.  But as I thought about it, I wanted to aim for persuading the average person to get involved and with each draft I simplified the scenario to make this message clear. As it happens, I have a little experience with community radio myself (though my programmes only featured enjoyable chats with musicians) and the inset portrays my own initial reaction to being asked! I wanted to show it's not really too hard. 
​
Having worked out a rough layout, this still kept changing as I tried to draft a final version to ink: it didn't work to show all the tech gear that's really there, and I even hid the presenter's mic as it just looked too messy with two. I hope the background figures convey the idea of a listening audience. This wasn't made any easier by thinking about the importance of doing it really well, especially considering it would sit alongside contributions from some truly great artists...

I won't go into the difficulties of scanning watercolour without it ending up either too light or too dark, with colours nothing like the original. Suffice it to say final tweaks took an absurd number of extra hours. But I made the deadline today, and am looking forward to seeing it with everyone else's beautiful work up on the website soon and printed in a book after that. 

Update 21 February: the website is now live at http://drawthelinecomics.com/ Check it out! 

I'm outing myself here in the hope this will help keep it going: I've started drafting a graphic novel, based on a 220 page book written in 1897, with hardly any conversation to quote and not much in the way of suspenseful story arc either.

T.H. Holding combined two of his great passions -- cycling and camping -- and set out to try a short tour by bicycle in Ireland. He went with three friends, carrying a tent he'd made himself, although only two of the four rode machines we would recognise as bikes today. 

It's full of detailed observations and social history, not to mention the fascinating differences in how camping was done, told in a firmly idiosyncratic author's voice which I am using exclusively for the text. 

This has been in my head for the past two or three years, though I honestly had no idea of how I could possibly do it when I first thought of it, and probably still don't, really. But I'm going for it anyway, because I'm excited by it and want this story to be told.

I'm grateful to the Camping and Caravanning Club's archivist, mentioned in previous post, for helpful additional material.