Animal Powers
on March 4, 2015
at 6:00 am
1 Comment
Happy New Year!
I hope you missed me terribly for all of 2014 while I hardly did any updates at all. This year I hope I can bring it back! My plan is to start with one comic update a week here and upload them on Wednesdays.
While I wasn’t doing any My Cardboard Life work last year I was working on my other comic SOPPY. The SOPPY book is out now in North America and due to be released in the UK this week on the 8th January!
If you’re in London come to my signing at Forbidden Planet Megastore in London on Thursday 8th January
or the SOPPY launch party at GOSH on Friday 16th January
Also in Nottingham Luke Pearson and I are doing a signing at Page 45 on Valentines day!
Last year I started a new YouTube channel called Soft Spot which is for animations. Luke and I have made some animated videos together and we’re going to make more this year as well. They do take a long time to make though!
If you’d like to read a newspaper article about me there was a really nice one in The Telegraph by Charlotte Runcie. Here it is.
What other news is there…
I’ve been learning to drive! And I’ve been watching a lot of TV shows on Netflix whist making crochet characters.
I made this diorama for Thought Bubble 2014 (Flickr album of photos here)
Obviously the main news is that I’m working on My Cardboard Life updates again! So do come back on Wednesday to see a new comic.
Thanks so much for all the support through 2014! It was not my favourite year ever. This year is going to be a vast improvement I can already tell. Good luck with all your new years resolutions if you have any!
Happy new (tax) year to you!
So far, 2014 has been quite strange for me. I stopped updating the My Cardboard Life comics towards the end of last year and after five years of making collage comics every day it’s a big change to stop and do other things! For the past few months I’ve been working really hard on one of my other comics, Soppy, which is going to be a book (details of the book deal here!) and also I’ve been moving house. I still live in Nottingham but this time my house has a basement (I’m never going in the basement because there’s a huge spider in there).
I hope that I’ll be able to have some new comic updates around here later in the year. If you want to keep track of the other stuff I’m doing as well as find out when the comic updates, you can follow my Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook page
I have a few appearances coming up and I’ve listed them in the sidebar thing but here they are again:
MCM, London
24th – 25th May 2014
CAKE, Chicago
31st May – 1st June 2014
ELCAF, London
14th June 2014
If you’re going to any of those come and see me! And if you’re from Chicago please tell me good suggestions of things to go and see while I’m there. I’ve never been before and I’m so excited about it!
Thanks so much for all the kind emails and support! I hope you’re all having a good year so far [^ – ^]
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!
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…
