Birmingham Zine Festival Fun Times!

I'm not going to say much here because there are a few excellent reviews of the stall day online which are (or soon will be) linked on the Birmingham Zine Festival Website. I need to catch up on adding photos to the flickr, updating the website with interviews and stuff etc but just wanted to give a quick mention here to say thanks to everyone who came and made it such a success! It was a super busy day and lots of fun. I just wish I had been attending as a regular customer so I could have spent longer looking at all the great stuff people had for sale. I managed to grab Bunny's new zine which is super brilliant as well as some of James Nash's comics which I asked him to draw on for me......take a look what he drew-

Look Closer...
Look CLOSER...IT'S ME!

BZF!

This blog post is a bit late but a reminder that tomorrow (well, today- in 9 hours or so) I'll be at Birmingham Zine festival! Birmingham's very first zine and small press festival!

Look at the amazing poster by James Nash-

The event is sponsored by The Brothers McLeod who will be showing animations all day and there will also be acoustic music by Simon Fox, Winston Echo and Bom and his Magic Drumstick! There will also be T shirt printing, zine making, starting your own event and drop in and draw workshops! And goodie bags for the first 100 people!

I got a new sewing machine this week and made bunting for the event-

The colour selection^ I got Pistachio -

My first sewing on the machine! (yep this blog post is fascinating huh!)

And the amateur bunting (looking rather creased hm)

Anyway, this means I can sew some more of the sold out Hairy Midget Elf toys and maybe some other characters!

See you tomorrow!

Influence Map

Wow I certainly spent too much time on this but hey, here is my influence map. Click to enlarge. I'm pretty sure I missed some obvious ones but it was an interesting exercise. I was shocked to discover that more of my influences that I realised were from animation- especially early animations that I used to watch on compilation vhs tapes that my Granddad would tape for me from the TV! (so really Felix should be in there somewhere too) Anyway, the idea came from John Allison's blog but I believe he was inspired by Aaron Diaz's Indistinguishable From Magic blog. A few others have done them too- go see Adam Cadwell's and Joe List's influences.

Comical Animal!

Today is the launch of of Comical Animal with a special preview issue!


The first proper first launch issue will be the 3rd December so this is just a taste of what it will be like! Go over to the website now and sign up so you don't miss out...

Here is a snippit of my page, "Peter and Pauly in Human Land" Inspired by characters and rhyme from the TinyTots annual 1956! but you'll have to go over to the site to read the full story!

Out of This World!

I am one of the artists in this 52 page colouring book featuring 40 Threadless alumni! Threadless are giving away free 16 page versions (see video below) of the book with kids orders (my page is only in the full book though!) Available here!

365 - 214 - Out of this World. A Coloring & Activity Book from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

Cat Odes!

This is the first of THREE blog posts with details of some projects I've been part of recently. The first- Cat Odes! A kitty anthology dedicated to helping out real life cats. 75% of proceeds will be donated to ASPCA® so go grab yourself a copy here!