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As part 1 in my ‘GET STUFF DONE THIS YEAR’ plot, I’ve been working furiously with the lovely Calico Jacque to bring you our first go at a weekly web comic!

Minnie Gunn and the Gentlelady Thief

(You might recognise the seeds of this thing here…)

We’ve been having a lot of fun working on it, I hope you have as much fun reading it.

In other news, I have a whole bunch of Workshops in the pipeline, focused in North Yorkshire. Watch this space for more details.

Have a good one, shiny happy people!

Okay then, 2010.

I’ve skimped out on doing a ‘review of 2009′ kind of a post, due to running around like a mad thing for most of the holiday period. But there have been some awesome things over this last year.

Such as:

• Doing loads of workshops, both in art and joining the ranks of Shooting Roots. More is going on the workshop front, so watch this space.
• Getting nominated for the Society of Authors’ Educational Writers prize and tripping down to the House of Commons for the reception. I didn’t win the prize but it was an  absolute honour being shortlisted, I was up against some stunning work. Plus I got to chat to Nick Sherratt and that’s just cool.
• A lot of making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. There are some very inspiring people in my life right now.
• Got to see Shooglenifty and the Edward II reunion (twice in the latter case) which would tie for gig of the year, but I also got to Michael Marra again.
• Took some script writing classes and they’ve really sparked me up. Learned a tonne more about web design and photoshoppery. While I haven’t managed as much art or writing as I would have liked, I think I’ve been improving in what I have done.

Not bad for what has effectively been a down-time year.

Of course, there’s been some rough stuff along with the good, but most of it was beyond my control, a long time coming, or just serving as part of the spark to power some much needed arse-kicking. It’s been a weird one, but as it is the future and all, I decree 2010 to be a year of getting it together.

Last time I did a ‘this year, I resolve to…’ post, it jinxed it all so I’m not going to. But I have some fun plans and projects I can’t wait to share with you guys.

All right people, lets do this thing.

Have a good one.

Calico Jack and I are terrible influences on each other. An extended session of taking the piss out of the up-and-coming game Bayonetta led to creating our own terrible version, then mashing her up with another joke character idea from a party a few weeks previous… which led to Jack writing a script, me doing some images with actual effort put in, and then us getting horribly, horribly carried away, fleshing out a full cast and ending up with a story we actually quite like.

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

If you’ve done much colouring in Photoshop, the chances are you will have come across selections and masking at some point—using the lassos and magic wand tools to cut out areas to work on to save you having to worry about colouring outside the lines and so on. In this set of tutorials I’m going to be teaching you the basics of using the next level up from that: quick mask, layer masks and clipping masks. These features are especially useful in photo-editing, but we can use them in illustration for some really handy shortcuts and effects. Rather than running a step by step on a specific final image, I’m going to be showing you around the basic techniques, so that you can use them in your own art however you like.

This lesson is going to introduce you to a tool called the quick mask. It’s kind of the middle ground selections and layer masks, and we can also use it to very quickly create a black-to-transparent lineart, something that can be incredibly useful to have.

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New site is GO! As you might have noticed, it’s had a complete overhaul, including moving it onto wordpress. I decided to consolidate my bloggery, so The ‘Tea and White Noise’ and blogger blogs have had their content moved over and I’ll just be posting here from now on. Admittedly I’m a little sad to put away the ‘Chaoslace’ and ‘Tea and White Noise’ names, but times are a-changing. (The latter might get used for something else though…)

A second entry in this journal comic nonsense thing between Sel and I. She still owes me comics.

So, the lovely Selena Thomas and I were supposed to be doing a back-and-fourth journal sketch comic thing. And it was taking too long to get started, so this happened:

Oh boy.

A series of workshops across all 3 days of Pickering’s Culture Shock festival, on the basics of drawing manga. All workshops last 50 minutes and take place at Pickering Showground.
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Three introductions to making manga characters, at libraries across the Rotherham area. The daytime sessions are for invited school groups, but the evening session is open to the public.
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The new site is almost ready to go live. Just a few bits and bobs left to do, and then I can put it up.