My Cardboard Life

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.

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…