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Jet-lag and catching up means it's taken me a week and a half to blog this, but here it is, my Stumptown blog post!



My family used to go every year to the Oregon on holiday (Cannon Beach, to be specific - here's a photo. Cannon Beach was where a lot of the outdoor scenes of The Goonies was filmed.) Since it's our old vacation place, I've always thought of Oregon as my favourite state.



As I flew over from MoCCA festival in New York City, I drew this mini comic on the plane to Seattle and roped my parents into helping me put it together. Which I'm glad I did, as it turned out to be my best-selling item! (Apologies if you already read it in an earlier post.



There's been A LOT going on in Portland since I emigrated to Britain. It has a thriving arts and comics scene; in fact, such a scene that there's now a whole TV show called Portlandia that parodies the city 'where young people go to retire', 'all the hot girls wear glasses' and 'you can put a bird on something and call it art'. Portland residents have very mixed reactions about the series, it does hit a bit close to the bone (and particularly annoying if your art career involves a lot of birds.) But I love this clip. The '90s are how I remember America, so it's ALL STILL THERE... in Portland! Ha ha...


YouTube link



YouTube link

I was trying to think of things to draw in Seattle when I was trying out encaustic wax painting with my sister, so... yeah. The bird. I think in Britain right now it's unicorns, possibly shifting toward tentacled creatures. There was even a brief period where everyone seemed to put Abraham Lincoln on things.



And here's how it looks if you put three birds at a table. Here I am with my fab table mates, my studio mate Ellen Lindner (ellenlindner) and Cliodhna Lyons (lj user="ztoical">), pronounced 'Kleena'. I sold lots of copies of my new all-ages comic book Vern and Lettuce and generally felt pleased about its US launch.


(Photo by my sister's partner, reporter Mike Lewis)

A big thanks to visitor Linda Wada (who knew of me through British comics creator Garen Ewing), who shot several videos duri

And the inhabitants were friendly! Stuart and I headed up to Scotland for our first-ever visit to the Highlands International Comics Expo or Hi-Ex. It was also Stuart's first experience of running a festival table, and I think he's still decompressing from the strange voyage.

Photo thanks to Joe Gordon (whom I met in person for the first time, yay!) at Forbidden Planet International

Here's a comics jam I did with DFC crewmates Jim Medway, Dave Shelton and Gary Northfield.
(Click on pic to embiggen)



Hi-Ex had some great photo ops, here's Dave, Jim and Gary:



And after months of only managing to grab a few rushed words in passing with Asia Alfasi, I finally got to have a long chat with her in Jimmy Chung's Chinese restaurant, hurrah! She'd been drawing portraits all day, but I talked her into doing one more with me and we swapped.


Gary and I led a workshop called Stupidmonsters & Aliens: comics from outer space. (Stupidmonsters is a mini comic Gary did awhile back.)

(Click to enlarge)

Here's a picture from the workshop and another book of comic strips a guy brought in that he'd made:



Here are Ishara and Freya with their alien pictures; these gals spent 18 hours on a coach to get from Bath to Hi-Ex. that's dedication!


Gary, Jim, Dave and I did several comics jams right at our table with some of the visitors. This one's by Jim, me and a girl named Amy.

Here's a fab example of four people making three panels: Amy did the first, Jim did the second, I inked the third and Fiona coloured it in. The other one has panel borders by Jim and comics by the beautifully face-painted visitor.



Jim Medway's table and his alien:

Here's an amazing cat picture I got from Jim, which reminds me of some very old Russian woodcut pictures. I'm totally going to treasure this one.

Hi Folks! I'm back from the CHEA convention. I thought I'd be able to post something before I left, but I just ran out of time.

Saturday, February 23
+/- 700 teachers and librarians
8 great authors: Pam Munoz Ryan, Jenni Holm, Jennifer Roy, Melanie Watt, Sharon Taberski, Jen Allen, Aimee Buckner, and Terry Thompson

Lots of fun moments, but this was my favorite: I was doing my presentation on blogging. Approximately 1% of the conference attendees were in my session, most notably, Megan, from Read, Read, Read. Karen came in towards the end. Katie was at the conference, too, and of course, so was Franki. Small world, eh? It gets better.

My formal (if you can call it that) presentation was over and conversation had turned to tracking blog statistics. I went to SiteMeter. Just for fun, I showed them the world map view of the last hundred visitors to A Year of Reading. When our blog was new, I used to spend a lot of time poring over that map, wondering how someone in India or Australia had found our blog. It's been a long time since I looked at the map. As the cursor passed over the UK and the ID box for Glasgow popped up, I realized that I knew who that was! TadMack, you, too were at my presentation on Saturday. Now that's a small world!