Sketchavember 2012 - Part 1!

Sketchavember 2012 - Part 1!

I missed doing Inktober because I was super-busy, so I decided to try to ink all my Sketchavember pictures instead. Last year I tried to draw all my characters, in age order, so I picked up where I left off. Then sort of wombled off topic. Anyway these are:

1 - Blackthorn, an elf in the Tolkein mold. I never did much with her but I quite like her design.

2 - Louise! She's got her own tag if you want more pictures of her. She lives in a pre-industrial time and has many encounters with fairies.

3 - Louise again. I was reading Hemlock and tried to draw her in the same style.

4 - And again! I'm not sure what happened to your face here Louise but I promise I'll never do it again! Louise is one of my characters in an arranged marriage, but she and Edward get on quite well. He doesn't believe in magic before they marry, and is much more uncomfortable with magic and the supernatural than she is.

5 - Franz, who doesn't appear very often on account of being hard to draw. He's very proud and hates showing any kind of weakness. He probably checked nobody was watching before blowing on his hands like that.

6 - Jemima, who appears more often on account of being fun to dress up.  She has very low self-esteem and is bullied by her 'friends'.

7 - And then it was Friday so I drew Marceline the Vampire Queen!

8 - Lucas didn't come out great last year, so I tried again. This is much more on-model, although I still haven't worked out where his scars go.

9 - This is Lucas's sister, Lena, who has the gift of prophecy.

10 - At this point I'd started watching Gundam Wing, and had to try very hard not to just draw fanart for every subsequent picture. I could not resist drawing everyone's favourite pilot though.

Part 2 next week!

(Yeah yeah I know Sketchavember was months ago, but my scanner is old and senile and it took me a long time to get these onto my laptop.)

Behold, what I've been doing for the past few weeks! I kind of burned myself out making new postcards for Thought Bubble (I'll post those later, for now there's a photo of them on the stand), so once they'd been sent to print I decided to do something entirely different. I transformed my computer desk into a sewing desk and set about making a dress from Josceline Fenton's lovely webcomic, Hemlock! It's the first one we see Lumi wearing. Eventually I'd like to make all of these four, but I think I've done enough dressmaking for the time being. There's also a picture of the finished dress! Also of me awkwardly standing with Josceline trying not to seem creepy, which is hard when you just spent three weeks slavishly recreating someone's work in cotton form. She said it was very accurate, which makes me happy.

There's the Inspired table, with Sammy behind it because we used my camera this time, my postcards, 5 issues of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf, my art cards hanging out with some new ones by Sammy and Shaz, a shot of my side of the table, complete with Patience, miniprints, Bad Fairy Bakery etc., and a portrait commission I did! If you look really closely in the back you can see a little drawing of Patience that Sammy gave me. It's so cute! I seemed to do pretty well at Thought Bubble, and we certainly did well as a table. I also bought about £80 of comics, and John Allison said some very nice things about our work, so I'm very pleased with how it went. There'll be a write-up of Thought Bubble on the Inspired blog soon as well, now that I've got round to sending the photos to Sammy.

My thoughts exactly.

P.S. Why 'Anna'? Gerda is hardly a weirder name than Belle or Ariel. 

Until I'm done with a few projects, have some more thank you letters! I seemed to have so much more success getting them sent on time when I drew pictures on them that I decided to keep doing that.

They did turn out thematically more boring than the birthday ones though, on account of my spending all the money I got on the same thing. Oh well, it was expensive!

These are the other five postcards I made for Thought Bubble, in my 'dolly' style. These are all my own characters as well, but they're not all as well developed. I was still aiming for a limited colour palette with these, and I think I was fairly successful. I definitely like my own work more with fewer and duller colours.

There's Coda, a young princess who suffers from an arranged marriage and is moved from her home in the mountains to her husband's kingdom, which is largely forested. Then there's those two creepy edwardian children from the Danse Macabre postcard, perhaps this is where they found their skeleton friend. Then Lena, sister of Lucas and possessor of the gift of prophesy, following a ghost lantern. A little witch in a field of eyes. Lastly, young Nettle and Spider, enjoying a psychic tea party (the best kind). Possibly Spider will read their tea leaves when Nettle puts the cups down.

In other news, I'm incredibly tired and I don't know why. The weather? Not wanting to go to work? My house being really cold? Tis a mystery.

What's the Time, Mrs Woolf is once again looking for submissions! The deadline for the Jan/Feb issue is provisionally set at January 31st, so you have lots of time! We don't have a theme for this issue, but as it's the January/February issue if you want to do something related to New Year or Valentine's Day then that's fine. As usual we're looking for articles, illustrations, comics and questions for Poppet. (Especially articles! We also accept short stories, poetry and reviews.) However we're NOT looking for a cover this month, as Meg Guindon has already volunteered one. submission guidelines are as follows:

the zine is printed A5, black and white

all files should be 300dpi, preferably jpegs or tiffs

we recommend leaving a 5mm safety margin within the A5 page

WTTMW is currently by women, for women

please email submissions to whatsthetimemrswoolf@gmail.com, or to myself or Lilywoolf directly.

P.S. Lilywoolf and I assess suitability on a case-by-case basis, but in general try to keep it PG-13 as far as violence or nudity goes.