Show N Tell

Good Times, Hard Times.

One of the most fun things I’ve done recently¹ was an intimate evening amongst friends at the Lakes Festival in Bowness, overlooking Lake Windermere.

A few months ago, my long time collaborator, David Gaffney and I were chatting about cool things to do, and we came up with the idea of running a live comics reading at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. We applied for some Arts Council funding (Thanks, Arts Council!) and started putting together a lineup of interesting people we’d like to see read out some of their comics. We called it Show N Tell and it ran on the evening of the 30th September at The Arts Bar in Bowness.

The lineup was; David Gaffney reading his story The Garages, (which I illustrated, more on that shortly) Rachael Smith reading her Nap Comics, Joe Latham reading his story A Step By Step Guide To Living With Lightness, Roger Langridge and his son Thomas reading a bunch of Roger’s Hotel Fred Daily Comics, Zara Slattery in a bald wig reading an excerpt from her work in progress Sweeney’s Progress, Lyndon White reading from his book Candles, Lucy Sullivan reading from Early Doors, myself reading my 24h comic Just Keep Paddling and John Allison reading his unauthorised X-Men comic Kit & The Wolf.

It was a fantastic evening with a capacity crowd, and it was so good to see people’s work brought to life by their individual and various narration styles. I’d love to run it all again with a new venue, new lineup and maybe even some live music? Wouldn’t it be fun to do it semi-regularly? That’d be fantastic. Get in touch if you think you can help make this a reality.

As I mentioned, I’d illustrated David Gaffney’s story ‘The Garages’. It’s a story he sometimes reads at author events, and it was fun to put my own spin on it.

Having limited brain space at the time², I opted for a really straightforward workflow to make the images.

The process was;

• Read the story and break it into discrete nuggets of narrative

• Draw a picture in pencil on my dotted notepad

• Take a photo of that drawing into Procreate

• Colour it in

• Repeat.

Pretty simple, but so much fun. I love working without a safety net, and this kind of drawing is thrilling; so much can go wrong³, and I find myself having to accept errors and work around them. I think there’s a Brian Eno Oblique Strategy I read once that (I think) went ‘Honour your error as a hidden intention’, which I’ve read as ‘pretend you got it right even when you didn’t’. I don’t think I can remember any other Oblique Strategies, but this one seems to fit me.

The colouring in process in procreate was a lot of fun too - I always think my drawings look a bit flat until they’ve been coloured in. I use colour to try to create the illusion of depth. Because I know someone will ask - I do shadows on a layer set to multiply in either a blue or purple, and light sources in a screen or add layer mode. Here’s a video I exported from procreate showing the whole thing in Timelapse;

The Lakes show was a lot of fun, good to meet some new people and catch up with old friends. Good times in hard times⁴.

1. There’s been a lot of not-at-all-fun stuff happening over here. My wife was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

2. See footnote number one. I haven’t really spoken about it on social media as that’s a dark pit that I’m not interested in trying to fill with personal ‘stuff’.

3. Ahh JEEZ tell me about it (see footnotes 1 and 2)

4. See above.