Skulduggery Pleasant Panel

Well, today was the skulduggery pleasant panel day, I sat with Nick Lake (editor) and Derek Landy (author) and watched as the crowd were in thrall to Derek (who really knows how to work his crowd)

I mostly tried to hide behind my ipad and made occasionally funny remarks.

Then we did a signing, and I suppose after doing stuff like this for 16 or so years, Derek has become really really good at crowd work. Good big queue, bodes well for the book. They’ll be doing another yay! with a different artist! boo! (don’t worry if they keep going, at some point I’ll do another)

Derek and Nick and team are keen to see as many different artists interpret that world as possible, so hopefully the next person will be able to turn in artwork very different to me (but if you’re reading this different artist, make it just a little bit not as good? cheers!)

Spent time at the venue then back at the hotel, and I’m learning something not great about myself, I’ve almost no bravery when it comes to exploring. I could’ve got a cab back to cheltenham proper, but I sat at the bar had a dinner (on expenses) and ate and then came to my room and slept.

If my wife were here she be making me get in a cab to go in to town just to see what’s there. (And then heading back for 9:30 to go to sleep, and I’d be sat here blogging and drawing and mumbling about how I could be doing this at home)

Now I want to go home, but won’t be able to do it until tomorrow.

+++

Did a inktober helltober thing this morning, but drew it in a silly cartoony style, which took seconds so decided to colour it too.

Am I tempted to do this again but make it proper serious? Yes. Will I? No. Because I am lazy. So very very lazy.

A month of pages

Well, I’m not going to do any drawing tomorrow, but let me tell you – phew, what a month.

In the end, I pencilled 47 pages and inked 49.

It felt good. It breaks down like this:

Week BeginningPencilsInks
2 Jan 2023 128
9 Jan 2023511
16 Jan 2023291
23 Jan 2023124
31 Jan 2023 (so far)05

That included two episodes of the Leopard from Lime Street and finishing chapters three and four of Bad Magic (the Skulduggery Pleasant graphic novel written by Derek Landy). Next month I have the final two chapters to complete.

If you’re a patreon member you can see and follow the progress of the work I’ve done over the last month, and I intend to try and keep that format of weekly updates with photos of my work journal.

StreA page from the Leopard from Lime Street in the comic Monster Fun.

I’m feeling pretty good about not only how much work I did, but the quality of it (and idiot might say “fast pages aren’t good pages”, but I’ve always maintained, for me, the opposite is often true – fast pages frequently are ones I’ve felt confident about, slow pages are the ones that I’ve had to labour over).

Last time I hit a burst of speed like this was for the second volume of Dept of Monsterology (and I’m still really happy with a lot of those pages).

One worrying factor is if I DO the same next month, I’ll literally run out of work – but then, I can always start looking for more. Certainly, like an idiot I’ve started to turn over the idea of a commando digest style comic as a possible project. That’ll pass. I’m sure that’ll pass. I think.

Anyway, hope you had a good start to the year, mine has been great!