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.

The six month training programme, allowed the organizations to explore, experiment, design and implement a bespoke social media strategy which suits the resource and ethos of your business. At the end of the six months all of the organisation that took part were asked to contribute content to a publication about the course. Others wrote about how using social media had changed the way their organisations interacted with audiences, others gave examples of changes in their practice. Me, I illustrated  a comic strip, written in the style of Dr. Seuss.

Metapod Connect was supported by Arts Council England, West Midlands. My thanks also go to Helga Henry who co-hosted the course with Pete. I had a great time on the Metapod Connect course, I learnt a lot about social media and met some great people who I now consider friends.

Strip Generator allows you to create short comic strips online using it’s libraries of objects, people, shapes and beings. The fairly easy to us tools allow you to create really nice looking strips, by dragging and dropping items, in just a few minutes.

There is also thriving community of users who comment on your strips and generally help out  with the more advanced aspects of the site.

These are the remixed versions of my original Strip Generator strips, I’ve just enhanced the overall design and added speech balloons via Comic Life.

Click on the strips to see an enlarged version.

You can see my original strips on my Hardluck Hotel Strip Generator page.

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The look of the character was inspired by anime cartoons and began as an initial pencil and pen sketch, which was when redone in Berol. It was then scanned and imported in Illustrator, given the Live Trace once over, coloured, shadows created and then placed on a photographic background shot of a location in West Bromwich.

Of course I’d forgotten to include my glasses which were added later. The whole project took an afternoon and will finally appear elsewhere as a 100×100 pixel avatar. So here is a chance to see the full sized piece.

The gallery below shows the basic elements that were used to create the final illustration.

West Bromwich background photograph courtesy of Richard Franks.

Stardust was created to accompany a six word story I wrote for the ‘Six Word Stories from Local People’ project run by Multistory, in collaboration with SMITH magazine and The Public. The project invited residents of the six towns in Sandwell to tell their own story in six words.

The illustration started as a hand drawn image with all the colour and star effects added in Photoshop.

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The final illustration appeared in a publication to celebrate the year of communities which contained over 100 stories and illustrations, and was featured in an exhibition at the Public Building, West Bromwich.

‘Six’ was inspired by the six word memoirs project run by SMITH Magazine in America. SMITH Magazine have also produced a hardback book of six word stories titled “One Life, Six Words, What’s Yours? “. The book is available online from Amazon.

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The main illustration was hand drawn, and then enhanced using Photoshop and Illustrator to add colour and text.

The ‘Home Sweet Home’ exhibition at the Public Building, West Bromwich included visual and written messages, narratives and illustrations presented on items of clothing, which were pegged on a washing line against a fictitious garden backdrop. The artwork was accompanied by audio of males that live and work in the borough taking a stand against domestic abuse.

‘Home Sweet Home’ was an exhibition that aimed to give a public voice to local people who have lived through domestic abuse.