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I’ve been following the Birmingham Zine Festival on Facebook for some time after a friend put me on to it and last month they put out a call for people to submit artwork on postcards for an exhibition they are are holding during the festival. It seemed like a great opportunity to produce a little piece of new work and a way to be involved in the festival as more than just an observer. Within minutes my request to take part on it’s way.

The original call for submissions looked like this –

You are invited to take part in our exhibition of postcards, where each postcard will be a unique work of art. At the end of the exhibition, all of the postcards will be randomly ‘swapped’ and you’ll receive someone else’s original artwork in the mail – yours to keep!

To take part in the exhibition, send us a message with your name and address. When you receive your postcard, just follow these simple instructions:

Create your own unique artwork on the blank side of the postcard. There’s no theme so feel free to submit whatever you like.
Write a message on the reverse, leaving the address space blank (we’ll fill that in later!)
Mail the postcard back to us in the envelope provided, along with your name, address and website details.

That’s it – we’ll do the rest! All of the postcards will be exhibited at The Framers Gallery in Birmingham as part of the Birmingham Zine Festival.

It took a while to decide on what I was going to do but in the end I settled on the idea of a short three panel comic strip. The strip was to be drawn in pen and ink with no use of computers and photoshop, to keep that zine illustration feel I was looking for.

This gallery shows the progression of the strip from original thumbnail sketches through to the completed postcard.

I’m looking forward to seeing all the other postcards in the exhibition along with everything else that is going on over the course of the festival. If your in Birmingham between the 10th and 12th of September then  try and get along to one of the Birmingham Zine Festival Events.