ADL --> MEL

July 13, 2016

This week I thought I'd share my most recent zine which I launched in June as part of a zine pack with Adelaide zinestars Rebecca Sheedy and Simon Gray.

We all went to the Festival of the photocopier this year (I also tied this visit to Melbourne with my first visit to my mentor Mandy Ord) and all wrote zines about the trip.

If you like the comic and wish you had your very own copy, don't worry, you can! You can Find copies on my Etsy store here.

I'm working hard on getting my readable thumbnails finished by the end of this month. (Hopefully) I'll post some soon so you guys can see what I've been doing while locked away in the studio.

What if?

July 5, 2016

Hello!

Here's a little comic for you to have a squizz at. It's about some things I think about sometimes. That's it for this week, sorry it's a short one, but I've got a few deadlines I've been worrying about lately. So once I've knocked those out of the park then I'll be back in your grills, letting you know what's going down.

Hope your week is turning out to be just what you need it to be.

George Rex Comics: The Early Years, Part 2

June 29, 2016

Howdy!

I meant to post this last week while picking up hot comic-making tips from Pat Grant, but I ran out of time. So here ya go!

Let's take another look into my early comic work that to me is so alien from what I do now.

Christmas Reminds Me Of God was my first longer story (16 pages) and was heavily inspired by a BBC 4 radio comedy show called Old Harry's Game (about an super lovely but atheist science professor who is sent to hell and befriends the devil). I've never been religious, I just remember my friend Caitlin once saying "Christmas reminds me of God!" and I thought, "Hey that would be a good title," and then I wrote this.

You may notice that I hand drew thin black lines for all of my backgrounds. I can't really remember why; I have a hunch it was to save ink in my pen.

I was also really proud of how straight I could hand draw lines.

A constant inspiration for comic stories has been my friendship with my pal Kyra. When she went away for her gap year between school and uni, I wrote the following little tale because I missed her. Note how I was very optimistic and thought I would write more issues.

This is also the first time I tried to colour one of my comics. I chose watercolour because I liked watercolours. Unfortunately I have no skill in watercolouring.

Kyra has also inspired a more recent story that you can read in full here. That one was also inspired by her moving away. You are probably picking up a pattern.

Now below we find a rare George Rex Comic sighting indeed: snippets from Gee-nah's (my art pseudonym before George Rex) magnum opus Say Hello To Lapland. It was a girl-next-door rom-com with just a touch of unreality in that when the hero sat on his couch to watch TV, he would be transported into a TV-based alternate reality. Also his two best friends were two sock puppets that he constantly talked to and wore on his hands. Featuring cross-hatching out the wazoo (my favourite artist at the time was Jhonen Vasquez) and more shouty speech bubbles than the Hulk.

Add about 8 years of spare-time sketches and reading a tonne more graphic novels and you have modern-day George Rex Comics.

I hope you enjoyed having a laugh at some of these terrible works of 'art'. I sure did.

See ya next week.

George Rex Comics: The Early Years, Part 1

June 14, 2016

For the next couple of weeks I will be away from the studio, learning up a storm with my mentor, Pat Grant. So I thought for a treat I would share some of my comics from when I was just a young cartoonist trying to make her way in the world. First up is the very first superhero I designed: Menu Man.

Menu Man (he fights food with food!) was a modern-day bushranger (note Kellogg's cereal box helmet and banana gun - it shot grape bullets) with a fondness for Tetley's Tea and the Enjo cleaning line. It was inspired by my best bud at the time, Tom, who would wear the menu board at our school soccer game sausage sizzle. This was a time when I only drew three-fingered hands and the only comics I'd ever read were Tintin and Calvin & Hobbes. This portrait would've been drawn around 2001/2002.

This little beauty below was my first foray into sequential storytelling with pictures - each page a panel. I believe this would have been in my first year of high school, so 2004.

After starting high school, I started learning to play percussion (which I then went on to study at uni). My first percussion teacher, Mr James, also happened to be a comics nerd and lent me some of his beloved comics and sparked my interest in making my own fully fledged stories. Unfortunately for him, I started doing comics all about all the music staff (it was a special interest music school, so we had quite a few music teachers). My very first teachers comic was 'Fashion Victim'.

Bent Drummer Comics. Yep, I thought that was a good art name to sign my works by. I really did.

Each teacher had their own alter ego/superhero that they turned into and most of them had at least one strip to themselves. Mr James and Ms Kwok were the most keen (and most represented in the comics) and would photocopy each new comic and have a folder on their desk. This unfortunately encouraged me to keep making these (painful for me to read) comics.

My teachers comics went on for three years (years 8-10). By the time I got to year 11, however, either I realised how big a nerd I was by making comics about the music staff or study just took too much of my time.

In the end there were about 40 teachers comics. Some short, some long, some I never wish to read again. At one point a chicken (who was an evil mastermind) became the main character and the volleyball unit tried to get rid of the music department (it was also a special interest volleyball school).

Anyway, that's it for part one of the early years. Next week we see snippets of the comics of my late teens, experiments with colour and my overuse of cross-hatching.

See ya then!

In which our hero checks in

June 7, 2016

So guys, I thought I would check in with you. We are about 6 months through the year and I thought you might be interested in how I am going with this graphic novel project -- you know, using hindsight and stuff.

Part one: The goals.

Even before I started going part-time at my day job, I wrote down what I wished I'd ideally be able to achieve with this GN project by the end of the year. They are pinned to my studio pinboard, sitting there waiting to be forgotten about.

Some of these goals were achievable, and I have actually been keeping pretty well on track with what I was hoping to do -- with one, tiny, difference: instead of finishing the whole book by the end of the year, I'm only planning to finish part one (of three).

I soon realised that I couldn't conceivably do research, write, thumbnail, pencil, ink, colour and edit 200+ pages by the end of the year when I only had two days in the studio a week.

Part two: Starting a blog / keeping a studio journal.

At the very start of the year, I thought to myself that I should keep a weekly blog and a studio journal. Not only so I know what I need to do, but also to remind myself how much I have actually achieved. I didn't want to get lost in the project, going down the wrong rabbit holes.

As I am queen of list making, I also made daily (which turned into weekly) To Do lists. I stuck these side by side with my studio diary so I have both a list of things I did and my feelings about those things (and other things floating around my brain).

Part three: Mentors.

As part of my scholarship, I organised mentorship from two radical Australian cartoonists: Pat Grant and Mandy Ord.

Mandy: I'd never met Mandy before; I just wrote her a letter and asked if she would consider mentoring me. I couldn't believe it when she said yes. I was terrified to meet her for the first time.

We have now met a couple of times and have been sending each other a sketchbook through the post.

It's been lovely getting to know Mandy (and getting mail!) through writing comics to each other. I'm hoping in the second half of the year that I will be able to spend some dedicated time with her going over thumbnails & pencils and figuring out ways of story telling.

Pat: I had met Pat last year at the Comic Art Workshop in Tasmania.

Next week I'll be in Wollongong, doing a two-week visit to Pat's studio and hopefully gaining all the comic knowledge and pulling apart my script for Part One. I am still a little terrified of what Pat will be doing and worried that I'll be painfully shy for the first few days. So I thought I'd take a sketchbook with some things I want to talk about with Pat (so I don't forget them or can get him to read them if my words fail me) and also fill in the pages while I'm there -- in other words, keep a little comic record of the trip.

Part four: Story structure/scripts and getting my teeth stuck in.

Now, what did I get a scholarship for again? Oh yeah that's right, writing!

For the first few months of this year I did interviews with family and Rob's carers. I wrote down stories & anecdotes about my childhood growing up with Rob on post-it notes and colour co-ordinated them into types of stories.

Then, under the recommendation of mentor Pat, I started thinking about the story beats. I also started thinking about who I wanted to read the book (I would ideally like it to be like a good Pixar film: for kids but adults can get something out of it) and what I would like to get them thinking about.

From writing all this down, I realised that my stories all fitted into three bigger topics: Communication, Obsessions, and Fears.

I started using the 'Milk Bottle' way (again a suggestion from Pat) of tackling the project. Chipping away at a little bit every day, using the first part of the day (the cream on top of the milk) to do my main thinking and story nutting out before tackling all the other things in life (emails and admin and the stuff that you want to do less).

So I started writing for at least 15 minutes a day, then moved on to writing at least one story a day in script form (describing what visually will be in the panels as well as the text). I found that I tackled writing the script-writing best when I was in a cafe.

I seemed to be drawn to the stories about communication and started focusing on writing those, my goal being to finish part one of the book (which is about communication) by the end of the year.

Part five: Time struggles and Leave Without Pay (LWOP).

Time is a funny thing. It doesn't matter how much you think you have, or how well you manage your time, you always seem to run out. I mentioned above that I knew I would not have enough time to finish the whole book by the end of the year. I soon started worrying/realising that I might not be able to finish even part one if I kept working a day job.

I would have my Monday and Tuesday in the studio, start getting on a roll and then, bam! I'm back at work. It's really hard to enjoy work when you've got a comics project sitting in your studio waiting to worked on.

So I sat down, did some sums and lots of thinking and figured I could live comfortably for 6 months without working. After sleepless nights and bundles of nerves I got up the courage to ask my manager about taking LWOP for the second half of this year. To my surprise, it was approved. Which means as of this week, I'm doing comics, FULL TIME. It's pretty exciting.

I am of course terrified that I will fall into bad habits of watching re-runs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and falling asleep on the couch. But hopefully my willpower will prevail.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Phew, this was a wordy one this week, sorry guys!

Hope your day has as many sparkles as you want it to have.

Colour me unsure

May 31, 2016

Writing a comic comes in many different parts because it involves not only writing a story, but drawing it too (and in my case colouring it as well). Fortunately for you, dear readers, I am not editing my own work, because it would be filled with many many more spelling mistakes if I was.

Writing a long-form comic (I'm aiming for 200 pages) is new to me and hard. Drawing something with so much information will be a challenge but the thing that is bothering me at the moment is how I'm going to to colour this comic.

I'm just not sure what to do. There are a lot of options and issues: digital colour or hand colour? If I pick hand colour do I use watercolour or coloured pencils or copic markers? What happens if I mess up a panel or page? How will this scan in and print out? Will it look alright? What will I lose in this process? (Watercolours don't always scan great.) As much as I would love to have the beautifully finished, inked and hand-coloured pages to hold as a physical object, the stress of almost finishing a page and then stuffing up the last panel might take me to an early grave.

So, I've been playing around with digital colouring for this blog and I've been working in two styles:

1) Full colour:

And 2) Screen colour:

Full colour is fairly self explanatory but I thought I might break down how the screen style of colouring works because I'm loving the look of it (you may have noticed from my previous posts).

Step 1: Inks.

I draw my inks by hand and fine-liner on paper. Then I scan them in pure B&W and do any clean ups/spell check necessary.

Step 2: Greys.

In Photoshop I add a second layer to the file for the greys. I try to keep the greys palette to a maximum of about 5 shades. I set this layer to 'Multiply'.

Step 3: Colour.

I add a third layer, set to 'Screen'. I turn off the 'Inks' and 'Greys' layers, pick whichever colour I like the look of (in this case a shade of pink) and use the paint bucket tool to fill the entire page with the colour. I turn the other layers back on and hey presto:

Or maybe I should do full colour.

I love the screen effect for my short works but I worry that for the longer book it might be better to use full colour, to keep the readers' eyes engaged with the book.

What are your thoughts? What do you prefer reading, full colour or screen? Do you have any other colour suggestions I could try out?

I hope your day is filled with your favourite colour.

Pink is the new black

May 25, 2016

Rob has always had a fascination for the colour pink. Pink food, pink material, pink cartoon characters. If it was pink, Rob probably liked it. It all started with pink foods.

Then moved to his clothing and beloved items.

And finally overtook his entire room.

I, in my my attempt to be everything that wasn't stereotypically girly, loved red. I don't know if this was because Rob loved everything that was pink or because of my tomboy tendencies (probably a bit of both).

Colour for me has always been key to a good day. Even when I was a teen who couldn't dress herself to save her life, I would take my time to carefully match the colours of my socks and shoes to my shirts and shorts. I still take my time every evening to lay out my clothes for the next day and I feel unsettled if my underwear does't match either itself or the outer layers. Colours make a difference.

And despite despising the colour pink and all its female connotations (I have since learned to embrace pink and now own at least two pink tees, although muted autumnal colours are more my thing), I still coveted the pink-coloured candy treats, strawberry being the queen of all the candy flavours. Whenever I got a strawberry treat all to myself, I treasured it.

Did you have a favourite colour as a kid? Did it define the food you ate? Have you still got the same favourite colour? I'm currently running a three-way tie with red, green and blue.

Stay excellent and see you lovely people next week.

Gxx

Our hero on communication

May 24, 2016

As part of the research and planning for my graphic novel (more on that in a later post), I decided to split my stories into three categories: communications, obsessions and fears. When writing down my anecdotes about Rob, I realised that after a while my writing seemed to focus mostly on the communication stories.

Communication is important. And weird. And difficult. It helps people understand what's going on inside the minds of others and builds connections.

I have often found it hard to meet new people; I can be shy and get overwhelmed in situations with lots of new people. Parties that are 'goin' off', we can safely say, are not my forte. However, the one-on-one connection with my good friends is really important to me and an integral part of my personality. Just because I can't socialise for more than a couple of hours without feeling tired and needing a break doesn't at all mean I don't want or need to hang out with people.

Communication isn't just being able to talk in social situations. It is being able to empathise and put yourself in other people's shoes.

Unfortunately, Rob -- literally and figuratively -- never wore shoes. I was never really on his radar. I wasn't in charge of the food like Mum and would only be asked to make toast if she wasn't around. It's hard to keep trying after a while.

My folks tried lots of things to help Rob communicate. The top three were:

1) Speech Therapy:

Rob would go regularly to speech therapy sessions with an old friend of Dad's (who was an ex-speech therapist, now photographer) down at Goolwa (a beachy small town in South Australia).

Rob didn't learn much from these sessions. He would learn enough to say, for example, 'apple' a couple of times and then he'd never say it again. He would revert back to one of his favourite sounds. Things that sounded like words but were just echoes of language.

2) Compic Cards:

Once Rob was at school the staff tried a few different communication techniques, including Compic Cards. These were little plastic-coated cards with pictures of words or phrases or activities that the staff would show Rob to help him understand what they wanted him to do. They of course also encouraged Rob to use them to communicate with the staff and hopefully at home with his family (me, Mum, Dad).

Rob never really used them. I don't think it was an issue of not understanding how they worked, more an understanding that it was quicker to get us to make him vegemite toast by tapping the vegemite jar. Also tapping the vegemite jar didn't come with 'No' cards.

3) Sign Language:

Rob was also taught some basic signing at school. This was probably the most successful out of the communication attempts, although he didn't see the importance in learning our names. The sign for food, on the other hand, was learnt in an instant.

Of course Rob learnt it on his own terms, which ended up being a similar way to how he talked, using one sign that he knew, over and over again for different words.

He did also manage to learn the very important sign for toilet. Rob only ever learnt as much as he needed to to communicate with us to get what he needs.

I, on the other hand, was jealous that Rob was being taught all these rad ways of talking, particularly sign language, which I thought cool since I saw Linda Bove teach sign on Sesame Street.

That's it for this post. It's been a bit of a hectic time at the moment but I'm hoping to have some exciting news to announce soon, so keep those peepers peeped.

Gxx

Artist Spotlight on... me?

May 10, 2016

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to be interviewed by the Adelaide University Art History Club for their artist spotlight blog. I was honoured to say the least.

To say more than the least, even though it was just a series of fairly easy to answer lovely questions I was really struggling to get down in words what I wanted to stay. So I sat down and tackled it like the visual learner I am, in comic form! I found that the answers, originally stiff and dull and using too many words, just flowed from my pen.

So for this week's post I have my comic interview response. It's a fairly simple comic but I was happy with how my creative process section turned out.

This interview was originally published on the Adelaide Art History Club blog, which you can find here. You should check out all their artist spotlights; there are some real interesting reads!

That's all for this week! See you next Tuesday!

Sense & Sensory rooms

May 3, 2016

The more I write about stories of my life growing up with Rob, the more I remember and the more I realise how similar my brother and I are. Our tastes in foods, books, TV, colours; our cheeky personalities. But something big I've only recently thought about is how we both are sensitive to various sensory experiences.

Here's a graph of Rob and my heightened senses:

You may notice that my two main senses are vision and touch, whereas Rob has all his senses turned up full blast (except for smell, but really I just can't know what his sense of smell is like). In this post I will mostly be talking about sound and touch (as they are the senses I relate to my bro) and I will only 'touch' on the other senses.

Rob has always been sensitive to sound, more specifically other people's sound. It's one sense he can get rid of fairly easily, by blocking his ears with his fingers, which is why most photos of Rob look like this:

I know how overwhelming situations (particularly social ones) can be and I often feel like holding my hands over my ears so I can focus and hear myself think. Unfortunately, not having ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), I was expected to not cover my ears when talking to people. I was always a little bit jealous of Rob being able to skip a few of the social niceties that I found pretty tough being a shy kid who liked reading and drawing.

Just because he didn't like other people making noise around him doesn't mean he didn't like making noise himself. Whenever he watched a video he yelled with excitement at the TV screen (I do a pret-ty goooood impression). The same was true when he played on the hammock swings: screams of delight would emanate from the backyard as he swung higher and higher. He never once hurt himself on the swings and it was really quite amazing the kind of acrobatic feats he could achieve on the swings.

Of course, the moment other people came to catch him, he would stop and his fingers would go straight into his ears.

Both Rob and I find material and the touch and feel of things important. Rob loved his bright pink body tube and would play in it and wear it (in and out of the house).

He also loves to be covered in pillows or mattresses and being squished, absolutely loving a big ol' bear hug. He doesn't, however, like being lightly touched or tickled.

One of Rob's favourite 'words' was 'tickle'. However, Rob had a very different point of view of what 'tickle' meant. Instead of lightly touching your fingers on his belly or the bottom of his feet, he would get you to almost stab him with your fingers; he thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately for me, this meant that I never really learnt how most people tickle and when I got older and started tickle-flirting with boys, their appendixes were in for a rude shock.

At school Rob would have his sensory room (at home we called it his playroom) where he could go when everyone else was a little too much for him. When photos like the one below came home with Rob in his visual school diary, I would get super jealous that at school he got to spend so much time in comfy pillow-filled rooms. I wanted to have autism so I didn't have to sit at my school desk all day.

On my account, I was more of a safety blanket babe -- always dragging around my current blanket of choice (I had many as I would wear through them so quickly from always having them). It all came down to the feel between my fingers, softness on my face and the smell.

My addiction to safety blankets started young.

My favourite thing to do with my safety blanket was to rub it on my cheek, Linus from Peanuts style (it calmed me down when I was nervous), and between my fingers, again giving a calm feel. I still rub lots of materials between my fingers and most of my t-shirts are bought if they pass the between the finger rub test. Often on my bus ride home after a tough day at work, while listening to my jams, I will feel a corner of my leather satchel between my fingers.

For a fresh summer look, why not drape your blanket over the shoulder?

I also used to roll those cheap chalky lollipops around my lips before I ate them; I'm not sure why, but I still do it whenever I eat one of those lollipops.

As I grew older, I didn't always have my safety blanket at my side (I still like to have it near my bedside at night to help calm my overactive mind into sleep) but I did upgrade to the larger knee rugs and quilts. The more layers, the better, in my opinion. Covering my eyes so I don't have anywhere to look helps me calm down too. Sure, I could just shut my eyes, but physically covering them with something just gives you that extra level of sensory dulling.

It can be hard not knowing what will overstimulate and stress Rob out. Both of us find solace in surrounding ourselves in pillows and blankets or dulling our overactive senses. But where I have some control over my reactions to stimulating events, Rob has very little control. Of this, I am not jealous.

Whatever our sense sensitivities though, we both loved cuddles in bed with Mum.

See you next time. xx