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Friday 21 December 2018

Looking Back at 2018

It's my last few hours at work before taking a break over Christmas and New Year and I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the last 12 months. If I'm honest I'm not where I expected to be when I started the year.

 

Work on Gamish has progressed well but at a rate much slower than I ever expected. My self-imposed writing deadline came and went some time back in March and I was still miles off.

It wasn't until August that writing was finally complete, and even then it was a lie, with a bunch of rewrites to do to fix things that had been bothering me for months.

Still, it was a major milestone, and from there I got to work storyboarding the comic, working out thumbnail versions of each of the book's 164 pages. It was an exciting period of work, a nice change from the pace of writing and a chance to see how the decisions I'd made during the scripting process were paying off nicely now that the visuals were coming together.


By the start of November I was finally able to move on to pencilling the book. Again it's slow, but as of the end of the year I've drawn most of the first two chapters. There's still about three quarters of the book to go, but it's moving at a pace now that feels exciting. I'm really looking forward to sharing more over the coming months.


Elsewhere, things have been going well. There are some exciting science comic projects in the works, and I've already started to think ahead about the next couple of graphic novels I want to work on.

In January I was able to fulfil a longtime dream of mine and visit Angoulême in France with my publisher Éditions çà et là. It was an amazing time, intimidating and inspiring in equal measure to see the wealth of comics that the rest of Europe has to offer.



In September I self-published a comic for the first time in five years. B-Sides & Shorts is a collection of shorts including some recent poetry comics I've created in collaboration with poet Russell Jones.


I also created two short video games, which you can play here.

And throughout the year I've continued to visit schools across Scotland to give talks and workshops to young folk. It's always a nice change of pace, and very rewarding to see young illustrators working on their own comics.

So, onto 2019.

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