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Thought Bubble 2013 is this weekend (23rd-24th November) and this is the new diorama that I’ve made to display on my table. I had to decide whether to give the dragon a 3D tube body or a flat body. I went with flat. I hope I’ve done the right thing! If you’d like to see some more photos I’ve made a Flickr Set full of them.
Here’s some of the things I’ll have for sale at Thought Bubble! If you’re going to be there, come and say hi and look through We’re Out with the 3D glasses on.
Do you know, I’ve been making My Cardboard Life comics for five years this month. Five whole years. And during that time I’ve always stuck to a regular update schedule of either three or five comics a week, and I never missed an update! I’ve made over 1000 collage comics.
I’m not going to quit on cardboard but it’s definitely time for me to take a break for a little while and make more time for new projects. I will make more My Cardboard Life strips but I’ll upload them as and when I make them rather than to a set schedule. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a new long storyline next year too and while that goes on I’ll go back to five comics a week.
I promise I’m not going to spend the extra time playing games and eating snacks. I’ll be working on new things (and eating snacks). If you’re interested in the other things I do besides My Cardboard Life you can visit my portfolio website.
Also you can follow my Tumblr which I update pretty regularly.
If you have Twitter you can follow me on there to stay in touch (not that I’m going anywhere exactly).
Oh and if you have Facebook you can like the My Cardboard Life facebook page where I’ll post news and new comics when I do them.
Thanks so much for all the support for the last 5 years! Thank you for all the comments and nice emails and for buying my books. I would never have been able to make so many comics with out all this help and enthusiasm backing me up!
Hooray! The We’re Out book is here and it’s available in the shop if you’d like a copy. I’m going to start sending them out next week.
I’ve made 10 bonus pages of 3D images and each copy of the book comes with its own pair of 3D glasses. In the end the whole story plus the bonus pages came to be 100 pages long, so I made it a hardback book and it’s pretty chunky.
I want to do a long blog post about We’re Out soon but right now I’m packing up things to take to Bristol Comics and Zine Fair tomorrow!
Next weekend I’m going to be at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland. My table number is A4-B! I’ll have all my books and mini-comics with me, including a special small edition of Longboy. Also I’ve made some little models. Pauline and Colin will be there too (not for sale).
The additional exciting news about SPX is that my comic Looking Out has been nominated for two Ignatz awards! If you want a copy of Looking Out, it’s available in the Hic & Hoc shop.
So if you’re going to be there, come and find me! And do vote for Looking Out (if you want to) <3
I thought I’d post some photos from when I was making the We’re Out comics. If you were interested to know how it was made, these might provide a bit of an insight.
Before I even finished writing the story, I took a lot of test photos and put together a few test comics to make sure I could actually do a comic with 3D models. Here’s one of the test comics. The techniques I figured out at this test stage were the same ones I used for the whole story, but in the final comics I made the panels less crazily angled.
I took this test photo at my mum’s house. For a while I thought I might photograph all the inside-the-house scenes at my mum’s house because it’s a lot nicer than mine! But then I decided not to be a faker.
This is the 3D Nanny model and the car. I made the 3D version of Nanny before I designed the 2D version.
Here’s a pile of Colins and Paulines. The Colin model has got black wire for arms, legs and a neck. These are sandwiched between pieces of cardboard. For each new expression I had a new Colin head which was stuck on with blu-tac. I made 5 different Colin bodies throughout the whole story because they got damaged after being bent around so much.
For Pauline I made a poseable model by sticking a layer of thick tin foil between two paper bodies. I used new paper heads for each expression. For certain scenes and poses I cut out entire new bodies.
Here’s a selection of the removable heads. All together there were a lot more. Some of them are still lying around in various corners of my house.
Here’s a page of speech bubbles. I would take the photographs for each comic page and then do the speech bubbles after.
The “set” for the 3D version of “my cardboard life world”. Colin’s feet are actually going through the paper at the bottom and into blobs of blu-tac.
Me in the graveyard taking photos of the car.
The set for the glittery world that the army of Paulines built. It’s mostly spray-painted pieces of cardboard and lots of glitter.
This set is the last panel with the flying Nanny. I took several photos, turning the camera slightly each time to make the 3D animated gif.
And here’s one last photo of Colin and Pauline having coffee and a croissant with me after a long morning of taking photos around Nottingham. I went out very early so it it wouldn’t be too busy and I wouldn’t get in peoples’ way. (That’s Luke in the background. He came with me when I was taking photos around town. I think I would have been too nervous to do it if he hadn’t been there!).
I hope that was interesting! It’s back to normal 2D comics for me now. Starting from Monday (24th June) I’ll be doing 5 updates a week. Hopefully I can keep that going for a few months but I’ll probably go back to 3 a week in the Autumn.
I want to make a printed book version of We’re Out too so I’ll also be working on some extra material for that. ***spoiler alert*** I think it’s going to come with 3D glasses…
