Holy crap I haven't put anything about Macmillan on here! Bad Mike. Well long story short - didn't win. Anything. But...it was a fun project to do...albeit getting slightly boring near the end and not managing to finish all 12 double page spreads by the deadline.

But dragons were involved so at least I enjoyed myself.

It did start off as monsters but the theme of the story stayed the same - Baby BLANK keeps trying to eat BLANK, parent BLANKS tell baby BLANK not to.

And repeat twelve times.

I kept it simple because it was aimed at such a low age group and yet tried to maintain my own usual work style. I was happy with the results. Macmillan less so. But it hasn't deterred me from entering again next year.

Here are some sneak peeks below, I'll try to scan the three complete spreads when I can.

Initial character drawings.


A story board that didn't quite work out.


A rough of one of the spreads.



The finished front cover of my book design.

Completed pages of my Publication

So this is the outcome of the Publish Project. It became extremely stressful near the deadline and it's the closest to not meeting the deadline that I have ever come.

Receiving the flu on the weekend before said deadline did not help matters.
I was quite pleased with the outcome after all the effort and planning that had gone into it. However, my personal tutor felt the pages displayed an overload of information in the form of photos, maps, lengthy paragraphs and illustrations. On reflection from seeing the work of other students it's clear I could of approached this without supplying such vast quantities of information. The reason I'd chosen to be so thorough with the outcome was to meet the look of an encyclopedia and I feel I did that when comparing the pages to an animal encyclopedia I own.

Anyway, here are a few pages for you to get an idea of how it looked. I haven't put them all up as it'd be 20 pages in all and a lot to take in.

[Keep in mind they're set out in an order that allows pages to be stacked one on top of the other, so single pages won't necessarily follow one another when viewed as a double page sheet.]

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Publication roughs and planning

The following gives an idea of where I was going with the layout of my publication and how I wanted the illustrations and pages to look.

Publish Research Material

The title of the post says it all!
Just a few bits and bobs I found useful for inspiration and padding out the Publish Project. Some of the photos were used in the final publications (be warned a few of the images are of a gruesome nature in case anyone's squeamish).

Very Belated Update

So...It's been a while. My bad. I really should of kept up with this blog but updates have been put off by sheer laziness and I suppose stress; due to more recent projects.

However, I return and come baring presents. First up, here's a scanned down version of the T-rex comic strip I did for the outcome of the Fact Project. It went down incredibly well with tutors and students alike which was a much needed boost to my confidence and working practice.

You should be able to zoom into the pictures if you choose to read the dialogue taking place between the two characters. I may add to the borders and refine the details of some of the drawings at a later date - as was suggested by my tutors. The whole inking process was laborious but fun so I have no problem with the idea of going back to these strips.

Update on 'Fact' Project

Along time, no talk.

Since my last post I've been researching the hell out of the Tyrannosaurus and have come up with a decent list of facts I feel are interesting and lesser known to the public.

I've really been enjoying the project and have made good use of my time, having already started my final outcome. I've chosen to create a comic strip across five A3 sheets. I'm using black indian ink applied via a nib pen over penciled layouts. It's my first time using one but the process is alot of fun, albeit time consuming and at times repetitive.

I've finished the first sheet and should hopefully have enough time to finish the next four before my crit. Hopefully. I've written up a 'script' for the characters involved in the comic strip so all I have to do is copy it to paper. The comic's style is slightly inspired by the Horrible History books with their comedic characters depicting historical events. Looking at the content I've produced I'd say I've settled on a child/young teen audience.

Below is a drawing I did in similar vein to Peter Blegvad's 'lion' shown to us in the fact brief. I've also done an imagined image and quite a few observed drawings, but this one is fresh from this afternoon's lecture.

What? I got bored. At least I did something productive!

More coming soon...

More Photos from Oxford

I took alot of pictures of things I really liked yesterday. Only seems fair to include some more.