Quirkyjoe

The Anteater That Didn’t arrived from its first print run in the form of 500 hardback copies. And people are buying it! There are copies available via the website http://theanteater.co.uk/shopping-cart/ and on the shelves of several bookshops in Brighton & Hove including Waterstones and City Books. It was quite exciting walking into City Books and seeing The Anteater on one shelf and then seeing the Rattle Tales anthology (which I appear in) and the Nightwriters anthology (which I created the cover for and have stories in) on the next shelf along. But it’s more exciting knowing that copies of these books are going into peoples homes and that they are being enjoyed. Feedback has been heartily positive so far.

I’ve been sent a copy of ‘Bland Encounter’ from the author, Donald Wightman. It’s a book I created the cover illustration for and he wanted some of the tone and imagery to resemble Viz comics, or the covers of Tom Sharpe books like ‘Wilt’. I guess I was thinking of Beryl Cook too and British postcard humour. The book is published by Matador Books and available here.

The cover is an image of characters working on a train and at a train station with a few train spotters, passengers and escaped zoo animals mixed in.  Donald had provided me with a rough image of various representations of characters from his story, dotted around a drawing of a train platform, and I redrew these until we were both happy with how they looked. And it looked like this…

We’re running out of time. In terms of our Kickstarter for The Anteater That Didn’t, written by Greg Allum and Illustrated by me. We’re really hoping we can find enough funding to print the book before the deadline. To find out how you can pledge for a copy of the book and other rewards – follow this link 

Because it’s a story that features so much tea and cake, and a run down cafe with its disheveled proprietor, Les Crumple, we thought we’d make use of tea stain textures throughout the illustrations. This has meant I’ve had quite a lot of fun rolling teabags across paper and squeezing them to drip and splatter across the page. The images below show something of the process – with the tea texture layer being created separately from the drawings and blended with the colour image (of Les in his cafe) at the end. I like tea.

The Anteater That Didn’t is the fully illustrated story of Nigel DeMontfort, a purple anteater who very much prefers cream teas to ants. It’s a project that writer Greg Allum and I have been developing together since the start of the year and now we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of the finished book. It’s the story of how an eccentric anteater attempts to help a cafe owner out of ruin. It’s aimed at readers 8-years and older, approximately 10,000 words and features 20 full-colour, tea-stain-textured illustrations (like the one of Nigel below) and 20 line-drawn illustrations.

500 hardback copies are available for a limited time via kickstarter – take a look 

We’re really proud of the story and characters that have developed through the writing and drawing processes and we’re looking forward to sharing more about the project as the campaign goes on. For now though, here’s Nigel on Brighton beach….

I’ve started submitting comics to Off Life magazine, in the hope that I can have one published in the free bi-monthly comic anthology that appears in bars, cafes and public places across Bristol and London. My first attempt was a three-page comic called ‘Out The House’ about someone who struggles to engage with the world outside. I’d tried to keep it down to two pages but even after a lot of culling of images and words it still feels a bit cramped. And there are too many words and it suddenly felt like I’d made the mistake of being far too ambitious with the amount of story I wanted to tell. Next time I’ll be aiming to create a perfectly balanced one-page comic.

Below are the initial sketches for page one of the comic. It’s interesting how I pretty much start by doing a page that looks like a storyboard. Still had my animation head on. Below that; some character designs for the ‘human friend’ and then the actual comic. Let me know what you think 🙂