Monday, January 12, 2004
Well, you know, I've tried to keep diaries in the past and started up a blog once before too. Not sure what will happen with this. It might slightly improve my typing speed I suppose.
I suppose one thing I'm intending is to record what I mean to achieve in my work so that there's something down in writing that I can beat myself up with at a later date if I've failed. So on that score, where do things stand at the moment? I've been full-time freelance as an illustrator/cartoonist/whatever (I've not settled on a particular label) since July 2001 and since a little under 2 years ago the bulk of my work has come from working for Eaglemoss Publications on their Horrible Histories Collection magazine (licensed from the books by Terry Deary and Martin Brown). This has been a good thing in that I was lucky to gain a regular client pretty early on but the nature of the work is somewhat restricting in that I have to make my drawings look at least a little like Martin Brown's style. Ideally I want to find some new outlets for my work and soon (not least because HH has a limited life: there's about a year of it left to run).
I've contacted a friend of a friend, Liz Johnson at Orchard Books, to tentatively suggest that I might send a children's book proposal her way at some point and she's said she'd be happy to take a look at what I come up with which is as much encouragement as I could reasonably expect at this stage. I've a couple of ideas for stories but they need fleshing out a lot before it'll be clear whether they'd work or not.
I'm also committed to producing a new 4 page comic strip for Listen, an anthology book being put together by (mostly) the same crowd of people who put out Sentence a year or so ago. There's no money in this, of course, but I do love comics. I'll talk more about the idea I'm working on for this just as soon as I've worked it out myself. At the moment my intention is to largely forgo any real story content and just work on evoking and sustaining a particular mood but this may well change before its done.
I was hoping to put something together for Anthology '05 too but I'm not sure if I'll have time now, even though it'd only be a couple of pages. I'm a bit skint at present so I'm rather wary of taking too many non-paying commitments on for fear of eventually having to choose between welching on those and taking on whatever paying jobs may come up.
Something I'm trying to seriously get to grips with is learning some basic HTML and getting my sorry website into some kind of respectable order. Should have some time to spend on this in the coming week but I'm aware that what the site will need most of all is content. Which is largely how I've found myself here: as I write this is a private blog but I may make it public and link to it later. If it stops being boring. Enough for now, work to do.
I suppose one thing I'm intending is to record what I mean to achieve in my work so that there's something down in writing that I can beat myself up with at a later date if I've failed. So on that score, where do things stand at the moment? I've been full-time freelance as an illustrator/cartoonist/whatever (I've not settled on a particular label) since July 2001 and since a little under 2 years ago the bulk of my work has come from working for Eaglemoss Publications on their Horrible Histories Collection magazine (licensed from the books by Terry Deary and Martin Brown). This has been a good thing in that I was lucky to gain a regular client pretty early on but the nature of the work is somewhat restricting in that I have to make my drawings look at least a little like Martin Brown's style. Ideally I want to find some new outlets for my work and soon (not least because HH has a limited life: there's about a year of it left to run).
I've contacted a friend of a friend, Liz Johnson at Orchard Books, to tentatively suggest that I might send a children's book proposal her way at some point and she's said she'd be happy to take a look at what I come up with which is as much encouragement as I could reasonably expect at this stage. I've a couple of ideas for stories but they need fleshing out a lot before it'll be clear whether they'd work or not.
I'm also committed to producing a new 4 page comic strip for Listen, an anthology book being put together by (mostly) the same crowd of people who put out Sentence a year or so ago. There's no money in this, of course, but I do love comics. I'll talk more about the idea I'm working on for this just as soon as I've worked it out myself. At the moment my intention is to largely forgo any real story content and just work on evoking and sustaining a particular mood but this may well change before its done.
I was hoping to put something together for Anthology '05 too but I'm not sure if I'll have time now, even though it'd only be a couple of pages. I'm a bit skint at present so I'm rather wary of taking too many non-paying commitments on for fear of eventually having to choose between welching on those and taking on whatever paying jobs may come up.
Something I'm trying to seriously get to grips with is learning some basic HTML and getting my sorry website into some kind of respectable order. Should have some time to spend on this in the coming week but I'm aware that what the site will need most of all is content. Which is largely how I've found myself here: as I write this is a private blog but I may make it public and link to it later. If it stops being boring. Enough for now, work to do.
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