Thursday is #PortraitChallenge day at the Virtual Studio! Here's London National Portrait Gallery's self-portrait of Mary Beale, from around 1665. She's considered England's first female professional painter (how cool is that?) and you can read more about here.



Here's the original:


And another interpretation by Dave Windett!


Keep an eye on @StudioTeaBreak and #PortraitChallenge to see if more drawings turn up. :)

Even though two of my three publishers are based in Oxford and I go there often for meetings and such, the town has a special magic to it that never really goes away.



This year for Oxford Literary Festival, I got to stay in Exeter College and have breakfast in their dining hall, which was pretty awesome. (Also slightly embarrassing because I didn't have time to get into costume after breakfast, and the few people in there were too polite to ask questions.)



The very first event I went to, I got to sit in the audience to hear Philip Womack interview Philip Reeve and Frances Hardinge.




Here they are, getting papped by festival photographer KT Bruce. (You can see her photos here on Facebook.)



Philip talked about his new Railhead book and Frances, about The Lie Tree, which deservedly has got lots of press lately when it won the overall Costa Award. They're both brilliant books, I recommend them to adults and teenagers alike.



Respect to Philip Womack: moderating an event is much harder to do and takes more time with research than talking about one's own books. I wish I could have heard him talk a bit more about his book The Broken King but at least I managed to nab the bookseller's last copy.



On the way out, I finally met Katherine Rundell, author of Rooftoppers, which beat out Oliver and the Seawigs for the Blue Peter Prize.. and I didn't mind, because it turned out to be very good! (If it had been bad, I would have been FURIOUS!) ;D



I was too caught up in my Pugs of the Frozen North event with Philip to get any good photos of the Story Museum setting, but we had a good crowd and a great time, and I recognised a certain pug hat from World Book Day dressing-up photos I'd seen on Twitter:



The pugs in the back of our book all have names, but Philip and I loved how these girls found the unnamed pugs at the beginning of the books and gave them all their own names!



Here's a little close-up. Pimples, Macaroon and Sticky Tack are all very fine names.



Another girl had started writing a sequel to Pugs of the Frozen North, called Pugs of the Special Spring. We hope she keeps going with it!



Ah, and evidence of another World Book Day Pug costume. Love the pug costumes.



After our event, I changed out of Pugs gear into something a bit more comfortable and ran into James Mayhew back in the Green Room. James does live drawings at concerts with full orchestras backing him, which sounds incredibly daunting, but he pulls it off with panache.



Oo, and it's Cathy Brett, who was waiting for Jo Cotterill to arrive to do their event about Electrigirl, their book that's not quite a comic, not quite a novel, sort of a mix of several things.



My second event was right next to the awe-inspiring Sheldonian Theatre with its mad-looking heads.



And right there at the base of the theatre, it was so great to see people reading my Dinosaur Police book.



Inside the Blackwell's Marquee, I read from Dinosaur Police and then taught everyone how to draw silly T-Rex characters. We got some good ones from people of all ages!



Here's Andrea Reece who organised the children's part of the festival and invited Philip and me. Thank you so much, Andrea!!



We had dinner with Andrea, our fabulous OUP publicist Harriet Bayly, Philip Womack and Seonaid MacLeod (pronounced 'Shona'), who was at the festival bigging up a Reading Ambassadors scheme, promoting reading for pleasure. Besides the great company at Brasserie Blanc, we got to order a Baked Alaska, which we hadn't had since Philip and I first signed our contract for Oliver and the Seawigs. And it was JUST AS TASTY.



Right before I headed back to the station, I stopped by the Eagle & Child pub (where the Inklings used to meet) to see friends Sally Nicholls and her new baby, comics friends Jenni Scott & Richard Buck and their kids, and my amazing OUP designer Jo Cameron. The kids were very excited and sitting is hard in a pub, so we ended up doing lots of drawing, which always suits me just fine!



(You can find out about more of my events over on the events page of my website.)

Here's my latest #ShapeChallenge drawing. (See more here; a lot of Daleks today!)

You know the library closure situation is bad when people are actually locking themselves into doomed libraries and refusing to leave. That's exactly what's happening with the #CarnegieOccupation and these people have been in the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill, southeast London for five days and not planning to leave until it's saved from Lambeth Council-led ideas of turning it into a gym.



When I visited today, the protesters at the front gate explained to me that there are lots of gyms in the area, and this library was given to the people by Carnegie, not the council; they claim the council have no right to take it away from them. They said that the council thought they could leave some shelves with books, and still call that a library - 'a healthy living centre with a self-service neighbourhood library' are the words on the council library website - but the book area would be unstaffed. They were frustrated that the council was trying to call this book area a library, arguing that a space with books isn't a library unless there are librarians present. (Too right!)



I wasn't sure if the occupiers would have enough to eat after five days, but when I got there, I saw that the community have been great about keeping them stocked up with food and toiletries. What they need most is publicity for the cause, so the Carnegie Library and others don't quietly disappear. The council and the government need to realise libraries are a BIG DEAL in their communities, and they need MORE funds to stay up to date with modern times, not budget slashing and closures.



Here's a poster I drew for the protest, based on a poster I'd designed earlier (which you can download free here). Some people argue that the Internet makes libraries irrelevant; you can find information and buy books cheaply online. But if you plonk a kid in front of a computer to do their homework, they're not going to know how to find good information other than what Wikipedia and Google turn up. How can they know which sources are helpful and reliable, or do more than copy and paste? How will they even know what 'a reliable source' means?


This argument also assumes everyone has access to the Internet, computing equipment of some sort, and at least a little bit of money and a credit card to buy cheap books. But this isn't the case, library closures deeply affect the poorest and most vulnerable. Many of them need the library for a safe and warm place to study, free access to books and computers, the guidance of librarians, and a wide range of other services, depending on the local area and their needs.



The area closest to my heart is children's books: kids go through SO MANY books when they're young, more than even most well-off parents can be expected to buy. One quality picture book will cost well over a fiver, and a young child will easily read 20 in a week; a 10-year-old in a week might read five or more novels. Kids need a wide range of books coming at them constantly, not one book every year for their birthdays.

(When the kids in Carnegie Library found out I made books, they rushed back inside to see if the library had any and brandished them victoriously. We had a nice little chat about how I create the pictures in When Titus Took the Train.)



The #CarnegieOccupation are looking for support and it's great to see them getting it from other groups, such as this tweeted photo from the Lambeth Library staff. One of the protesters told me that none of the occupiers in the Carnegie are library staff; they said they wanted to protect its staff from losing their jobs, and it's non-employees who really need to speak up.



You can read more about library cuts in the recent BBC report on library closures, with exact figures, a grim read. (Go there first if you're going to follow any of the links here.)



I don't only want to focus on London libraries - so many more isolated communities need their libraries just as much if not more - but the #CarnegieOccupation seems to have hit a real nerve with people and the media coverage can lead a lot more people to consider their own libraries and decide how much they value them.



You can get updates on #CarnegieOccupation by following the Twitter hashtag, you can read a BBC article on it here, an Evening Standard article here, a BuzzFeed article here and an article in The Bookseller here.

You can sign a CILIP library services petition about library closures overall at the My Library By Right website.

The official demonstration Twitter account seems to be @DefendtheTen (here's the Defend the Ten website, and Carry On Carnegie - a blog run by young occupiers) and @SaveLambthLibs; I've seen tweets of support from the Society of Authors (@Soc_of_Authors) and CILIP library services (@CILIPinfo).



Best wishes, Carnegie Library, I hope you win this one.

Today's #ShapeChallenge drawing, with a shape set by saxophonist Alison Diamond (@ADsaxist on Twitter).



Awful news in the media today about library closures, libraries losing a quarter of staff, 343 libraries shut down since 2010. :( You can read more about it in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35707956 and this article in The Bookseller. It's truly awful what this government's doing; our libraries need money to upgrade themselves, not cuts.

On a lighter note, author Michele Robinson has posted 50 things that worry her when she does Author Visits. (I think the list is going up past 60 now as people keep giving her extra things to worry about. It's very funny... and TRUE.) Read The Picture Book Event Anxiety Checklist.

If you know me at all, you know I LOVE to dress up and do it all the time. So World Book Day is always exciting because it means I'm not the only one! I LOVE seeing everyone's costumes. Here's a killer cake, from Cakes in Space!



Philip Reeve and I were really, really hoping someone would dress up as a pug, and... HURRAH! :D





And not only pugs, here are Sika and Shen, the human stars of Pugs of the Frozen North.



Check out the awesome Seawig on this Rambling Isle: Cliff from Oliver and the Seawigs!



I'm glad someone was able to use the Seawig template from my website, that's ace.



And the Rambling Isles are joined by Oliver and Iris the mermaid!



The other costume I really wanted to see was someone from Dinosaur Police, and here's the very first costume I've seen. So awesome.



Check out this shark from There's a Shark in the Bath!



And YESSSS, it's Superkid to the rescue.



Thanks so much to everyone who shared photos, that's amazing! :D

I have so much blogging to catch up with, but I've been working like mad on Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair and haven't had a second! But I did manage a #ShapeChallenge drawing today:

Here's a little drawing for my fab friend Mags. I'm posting it because I only sent her card a couple days ago and she lives far away so it might not get there in time... (Happy birthday, Mags!) :)



Also, I've done an 'Five-minute interview' for London Book and Screen Week which you can read here, and find out more about the Sketchbook Social on Thurs, 14 April in London here.

World Book Day/Week round-up coming soon, but here's today's #ShapeChallenge drawing:



It's based on this painting by an unknown artist of a Florentine woman in 1467:



Stuart and I have been so busy that we've been eating all week out of one pot of soup he made. Here's Stuart's favourite borsh recipe, if you want something warming. It's not really traditional Ukrainian borsh as it has tortellini in it, but it's yummy.

Hurrah! I was SO hoping someone would dress up as a pug for World Book Day on Thursday and children's book illustrator Jo Byatt just sent through this photo of her daughter Sienna, age 10, in a most fabulous PUG COSTUME! :D Thanks so much, Sienna and Jo!

My parents remarked on Skype that I hadn't blogged for a whole week, whoa! What is happening! ...Actually, I'm just working crazy-hard on the next Reeve & McIntyre book, and I'll post some artwork updates soon. In the meantime, I've updated my EVENTS PAGE, so go have a look to see if I'm in your area! The big one coming up soon is in London, at the Daunt Books festival, and we found out people are allowed to BRING THEIR PUGS. :D (Here's a link to book your free place.)



Also, the editor of Varoom illustration magazine, Derek Brazell, has interviewed me about illustration and social media, so if you want to get a copy, here's a link.

My latest #ShapeChallenge drawing :)

I was so, SO sick with 'flu this weekend. You'd think it would be a good excuse to curl up with a book, but everything just annoyed me and all I wanted to do was lie there and make it all go away. Films were better.

There are some films I can put on and they do the trick of making hours pass and maybe I even feel a little better at the end of them. Not new films, films I can rewatch, because there are just so few brain cells working. Here are my top five:



1. Rush
I don't even like car racing. But there's something about the simple storyline pitting a playboy and a nerd against each other that's wonderfully soothing. There's a great quote in it by Niki Lauda (the nerd): 'A wise man can learn more from his enemies than a fool from his friends'. When I'm feeling feverish, the flu can feel like the enemy and this theme, uh... makes everything feel very profound... in a way that won't quite so much when I'm well again. ...I really love this film.






2. Cyrano de Bergerac
I think this is my all-time favourite film, I watched it three times in cinema (Seattle's Seven Gables) when it came out. I love how it's funny, and sometimes solemn, even tear-jerking, but never takes itself too seriously. So I can weep about how I'm going to die a poetic, flamboyant death from this flu and then afterward feel like I'm doing something heroic to crawl my way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Also, if my schnozz is all swollen up, Cyrano's nose will always bigger and he will always be more self-conscious about it.




3. Maleficent
I wouldn't have thought of this except that last time I got sick I was in such a state that I just watched it four times back to back and it got me through an awful day. I think Maleficent has an awesome costume and is bad-ass enough to take care of everyone's flu.





4. Babette's Feast
This film potters along slowly, but never painfully slowly, and has a very small-world cosiness to it. It's sweet and romantic and sad,



...and everyone eats all the food I can't quite manage to get down. But I feel gently pleased for them.



5. When Harry Met Sally
I think this is the rom-com that most rom-coms after it tried to be. I can lie back and be gently reassured that Harry and Sally are going to keep meeting up and exchanging well-written lines and feel gratified that Sally is more OCD than I am.





Worst films to watch when I'm sick: I actually love these films, just NOT when I'm ill.



1. Lawrence of Arabia
My other favourite film, since I was twelve, but if I watch it with a dry scratchy throat, the long desert scenes will drive me insane.






2. Moon
You know, when you're so feverish that you seem to have left your soul somewhere down the road? When I'm like that, this film makes me feel even worse. The gorgeous pulsating soundtrack somehow changes to sound like throbbing sinuses. I don't want to be trapped in a helmet in some airless environment.



3. Empire of the Sun
Too much slow fever and dying along roadsides for the likes of me. I watched this one yesterday and really wish I'd watched it while in better health. The book was so good, too. The little boy singing felt like my own funeral music. And then I thought it was over, and there was still half an hour left.



4. Bridget Jones's Diary
I love you, Bridget, but please just go away right now. You'll save for a better day when I can get upset about things like bad cooking and stage fright but right now I'm too ill to care. I feel bad, I should care, because look, we're both here in our pyjamas. But you're drinking wine and I'm drinking Lemsip.



5. Fantasia (1940)
Beautiful film, but feels SO slow when I'm in a daze, and all the things that are cute about this film will suddenly become loathsome and make me want to hurl things at the screen. Just LEAVE THE BROOM ALONE, MICKEY.

We need our libraries! Here's what a bunch of us writers and illustrators have been up to today in Westminster, with lots of people who work for and care deeply about keeping these national treasures alive and vibrant parts of our communities!



Lots of people have asked if I'd make downloadable and printable versions of this year's library poster, so here they are! Feel free to use them in any non-commercial way that promotes libraries. (And I'd appreciate a credit, just because I'm an illustrator and you should always credit illustrators.) :)



If you get a chance, I'd love it if you'd leave a note in the comments, saying where you are, and if you're using it in any particular library. Here's a link to my previous poster, A Trained Librarian is a Powerful Search Engine with a Heart.

Download the A3 version here

Download the A4 version here

Download the 8.5 x 11 version here (USA)



Download square version (A4 or resize)

This morning, it was so great to bump into George, one of our champion #ShapeChallenge drawing people, who set one of our shapes the weekend before last! He managed to get special permission from school to come along as a reporter, and give a talk on it when he goes back to school.



And George gave a speech, along with author Eve Ainsworth! Great job, guys!

They come in peace. (Click here to see other #ShapeChallenge drawings.)



I was really taken with these #ShapeChallenge drawings by kids; in some ways, they're more proficient than mine, in their bold use of colour and pattern. @MrsJTeaches, who tweeted them, explained that she had the kids look at the shapes for two minutes and think about them, then spend ten minutes drawing inside the shape and ten minutes drawing outside it. What a great way to pace them! (She said that, if she doesn't do that, they just tend to colour inside the shape.) I'm packing away that tip for future use!



These would make amazing abstract tapestries.

Last night was amazing. The House of Illustration in London launched the UK's largest-ever exhibition of the work of pioneering female comics artists, in Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics.



Here's the striking poster by Laura Callaghan:



Do pop over to see the show, running until 15 May, just across from St Pancras stations (the one where you catch the Eurostar to France) and next to the glowing fountains of Central Saint Martins art college.



Speaking of France, this show couldn't be more perfectly timed. Curators Olivia Ahmad and Paul Gravett had been working with the House of Illustration to prepare the show for a long time, but it came right on the heels of a shocking announcement by France's top comics prize committee of an all-male shortlist of 30 international comics creators. What made it even worse was the board's surprise at public indignation and their follow-up explanations that there wasn't any strong female talent in comics, and general lack of supportiveness for women in the field. (You can read my article about that here.)



I only make comics occasionally and focus more on other kinds of children's book illustration, and go along to lots of social events dominated by women. But when I first started going along to comics events, very often I was the only woman in the room. Over the past ten years, this has changed so much, partly I think because of the coming-together of an arts & crafts movement with comics (look at comics by Philippa Rice and Isabel Greenberg to see what I mean), and comics moving away from being so entirely dominated by superheroes.


But there have always been women making comics, and the women who've made them have had to fight against all the odds that male comics makers struggle with (mostly do to with not getting paid enough), and also being marginalised by comics lovers who didn't care to look outside of their own very focused spheres of interest (Marvel, DC, 2000 AD, etc). But to pretend talented female comics creators don't exist makes some people VERY angry, such as comics expert Stephen Holland at Nottingham's Page 45 bookshop, retweeted here by comics legend Kate Charlesworth (who for a long time drew the comics for New Scientist magazine):


(Here's the Comics Beat article Stephen's referring to.)

So the best way to counter the Angoulême assertions would have been to set up a comics exhibition, just on the other side of the channel tunnel, rebutting that notion entirely. I can't even say how thrilled I am that this was already in the works, and here it is! I hope lots of men and women will go along to it; anyone interested in comics, drawing, illustration, storytelling, graphic design, history, typography, etc will find it fascinating.



Patrice Aggs was making comics long before I even moved to England, she makes comics with her son (John Aggs), and she's attended the Angoulême comics festival more times than I can keep track of. If they don't know who she is by now, they haven't been trying. It was great to meet her husband, Chris Aggs, who's a painter; I always see her zooming around on her own! She was always the last one to bed at Angoulême; the rest of us were dropping with tiredness and she'd still be up having intense conversations with comics people at 4am.



Here's Patrice's comics on display:



A lot of people know more about women in comics through Nicola Streeten, co-founded with Sarah Lightman of Laydeez Do Comics, an excellent series of talks (by anyone creative, not just women, but with a focus on women). Here's Nicola looking very fine with legend Suzy Varty in their matching lime greens.



Kripa Joshi goes back and forth between England and Nepal, and was in Nepal during the earthquake. The evening was great to get the chance to have a look at the anthology she and Elena Vitagliano have compiled to raise money for the earthquake victims.



(You can find out more about their anthology project together here.)



One of the cool things about the launch party was seeing people who'd been lauded in their field for ages, but never actually been featured in an establishment exhibition. There was some big-time excitement. I'm not even sure who this creator is (Claudia Davila, perhaps?), but she was totally lit up, I got all giggly seeing how excited she was.





Kate Evans was pretty excited, too, and I got a copy of her new book, Red Rosa, about Rosa Luxemburg.




Somehow I was so busy looking around in the exhibition space that I missed the speeches. (Oops!) So I never got to meet co-curator Olivia Ahmad. But here I am with Paul Gravett, who is one of the top people I can credit with jump-starting my career. He found me, probably at the first comics event I ever went to (a Yahoo group pub meet-up), and pointed me in the direction of David Fickling, who published me both in his DFC comic and with my first UK picture book. There's this notion that women in comics is a Women's Issue that only women will be interested in, but it's not at all; it's just as much about the thoughtful and clued-in men (Paul, Stephen Holland, David Fickling, etc) who encourage women and help us get pointed in the right direction so we can make comics that everyone might enjoy.



And talking about clued-in people, here's Audrey Niffenegger, who doesn't let the confines of medium or genre limit what she does; she's succeeded in everything from comics to bestselling novels to printmaking to her work being staged as a ballet in the Royal Opera House.



Despite being fairly young, Isabel Greenberg has already created an impresssive collection of work and I'm a HUGE fan. She has this amazing way of bringing together a craft element with modern storytelling twists on old legends that's spectacular.



I loved being able to see old favourites at the exhibition, such as these Moomin pencil roughs by Tove Jansson:



And Posy Simmonds, who first inspired me to make comics with her Gemma Bovery book:



And another person who got me making comics was Simone Lia, with her Fluffy books about a rabbit that I found in a clothing shop in Brighton, when Simone was still self-publishing them through Cabanon Press. (The Fluffy books were later taken up by Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape.)



Philippa Rice continues to inspire me with her innovative approaches to making comics, using non-traditional formats and materials and lovely storytelling (I think I've bought at least ten copies of my favourite of her books, We're Out, as gifts for friends.) Here's an interview I did with her about the book. And here's Karen Rubins having a look:



But it wasn't all familiar faces and work at the show. One of the great thing about the Angoulême debacle was the hashtag #WomenDoBD, which highlighted LOADS of female creators I'd never heard of. And this exhibition was like that. Lizz Lunney felt the same:




Check out this lovely piece by Aurelié William Levaux:



And I definitely want to get a copy of His Dream of the Skyland by Aya Morton. My top new find, I think.



A case of work by female comics creators from back as far as 200 years:



Hey, it's work by my former studio mate Ellen Lindner! Ellen was the one who introduced me to LiveJournal and its comics community, which shaped so much of what I know now. She edits a magazine of comics by women called The Strumpet, and lots of us at the show have had work featured in that.



It's one of my buddies from back in DFC comic days! Emma Vieceli and I have had lots of adventures, including a trip to Paris to exhibit with her French publishers. Emma used to organise the Cartoon Village at MCM Expo and she's one of the people everyone goes to when they want to know something about comics.



I really must go back to the exhibition for a longer, quieter browse. Besides all the displays, they have loads of interesting-looking books in the reading room.



The exhibition is aimed at adults, so while I think parents could bring older children, they should be aware that some of the content is graphic (but not horrific, I'd say) and that the frames might be hung a bit high for short people to read closely without assistance.



Three cheers for the House of Illustration and everyone who worked hard to make this show happen! You can follow the House of Illustration on Twitter: @illustrationHQ.

My co-author Philip Reeve and I are excited to share the title of our next book with you!



Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair will come out this autumn, and I'm working like mad on it right now! You may remember my very first published collaboration with Philip Reeve, a comic strip that I wrote, he drew, and I coloured for The Phoenix Comic (Issue 44). It featured these two friendly alien repairmen:



And it was set on an amazing planet that was ALL funfair! A dream come true.



When I was little, I LOVED playing with LEGO and trying to build the most exciting funfairs I could think of. But I was always a bit disappointed with the results, I could never capture the funfair in my mind, it was supposed to be WAY better than that. I thought that growing up was how I'd acquire all the skills that would equip me to making a proper awesome funfair. But even though my dad was a top engineer, I never quite managed to master the maths and physics I'd need to build funfairs. ...But now I can DRAW them. I can build funfairs in people's MINDS, ha ha. Here's Emily. She's a bit like LEGO-kid me, but she looks very much like my studio mate, Elissa Elwick.



Inspired by our original comic, Jinks and O'Hare are very much supposed to be the main characters in this book, fixing the rides that go wrong on Funfair Moon. But Emily lives in the Lost Property office and she's rather ambitious. So we'll see what happens with her.... Here are a couple work-in-progress drawings:



The way I've been working is to draw thumbnails with pencil, working to Philip's text. (Philip came to London and helped me draw these). Then our designer, Jo Cameron, figures out how they can fit with the text, and we fiddle them around a bit. Then I draw them with pencil in more detail, and use my light box to trace over them with an old-fashioned dip pen and ink. I'll scan them into the computer, colour them in Photoshop, and they'll be ready to send back for Jo to put into the book! Now I'd better get back to the drawing...



Be sure to catch up with our other books before this one comes out! :)



PS Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair isn't a comic, it's the same format as the last three books. But if you love family-friendly comics, do have a look at what The Phoenix Comic is coming out with, it's brilliant stuff! You can either subscribe to the weekly magazine or buy their awesome compiled comic books. (Their Star Cat by James Turner won the top UK comic prize this year, the Young People's Comic Award.) Absolute essential books for any library.

Things are going well so far with the Virtual Studio. I love how people are starting to take on #ShapeChallenge as their own thing, and I'm not so much 'in charge' of it any more. I just man the @StudioTeaBreak Twitter feed so everyone who draws gets followed and a retweet and a 'like'. This weekend two teenagers, Archie and George, are setting the shapes (tweeted through their mum's account); you can see what's going on over on Twitter. Here's my drawing for Archie's shape, a man playing nose flute with his toes, at sunset. :D



On Twitter the other day, I found a link to a lovely article about LiveJournal nostalgia by Lindsey Gates-Markel (@LGatesMarkel on Twitter). She's one of a pool of us who grew up with LiveJournal and who found ourselves and our creativity supported and shaped by its community:



I'm one of the few people I know who stuck around here on LiveJournal, and not because I thought it was perfect for social networking, just because it was where I kept my brain. LiveJournal was where I made sense of my world and decided what kind of person I wanted to be, and tried it out for size. In the early days, I could make mistakes, and post bad drawings, and it didn't matter; the community was forgiving and they were just like me, people who were still trying to figure out what they were doing, and making their own mistakes. Now I can still post stuff I'm not sure about here, because most people I know have left LiveJournal and it's almost like having a private diary. I have a terrible memory, and it really helps me get a sense of what I've been doing if I can go back through it.


I once had dinner with a well-known author who'd been on tour and asked her how she could remember all the many people and places she'd met and seen. And she said she wouldn't, she'd just remember a few key things. That made me sad; I thought, I don't want some day to get to the pinnacle of a career - where a lot of people wish they could be - and not even remember what's happened. If even that famous person can't remember these thing so many people dream about, it's like they never happened, and what's the point?

Another very talented (and I would say, well-known) author friend told me she just wasn't happy yet, she couldn't quite get to that place in her career that she wanted to reach, where everyone knows her name, and she found it depressing. That also made me think. I don't want to stake my happiness on a future goal, I need to find it along the way, or I might never be content. And I want to be content - having the time to draw, have good friends, see the world a bit - way more than I want to be famous or remembered after I die. And I think the way to be content is to notice what's happening around me, and keeping my blog really helps with that.


Experimental lino-cut study of a pine cone

I think, in a way, that's become my religion, simply 'noticing things'. Whether you believe in a creator or not, if you can imagine one, try to picture how he/she/it thinks up things and makes them, a bit like an artist. Artists love to have people look - really look - at our work, and notice the details we've put into things we've made, ask thoughtful questions, and treat our creations with respect by giving us credit for them. I think that's a healthy way for me to see the world, as a place full of someone else's artwork that deserves close attention, questioning, care, and credit where credit's due. And having a blog makes me stop and do that. It helps me notice the amazing people around me, it helps me think about the work I've created (sometimes just having a blog inspires me to create something), it helps me remember the people I've met and the places I've visited. It lets me get involved in drawing challenges with people and have fun seeing what they can do and show off my own more playful stuff, instead of just being focused on my commissioned work.


Another #ShapeChallenge-inspired drawing

I love Twitter, and it's pretty much the only way people find their way to my blog, when I link to a blog post. But Twitter is often reactive. The things that people share are often things that outrage or amuse them, but it doesn't leave much space for developing a train of thought. I like it best for posting images and cartoons, because so much can be communicated with those. But if I try to have a thoughtful argument, I do much better to take it to my blog and write an article about it.


Responding to the Charlie Hebdo attacks with ideas for people who wanted to get into making comics

A Twitter audience also doesn't give much mercy if I'm not certain of what I think from the outset. And I'm very seldom certain about anything; I like talking with people to help me develop my argument; I need the chance to say stupid things, have people thoughtfully counter what I say, and learn from that. But with Twitter, I can say that stupid thing and that could be the thing that gets retweeted, leaving the whole context behind.



The other problem with Twitter (and Facebook) is that things I've worked hard on, or thought a lot about, drift down the feed and get lost. Whereas, say, I want to remember the names of people I met at Kempston Library Festival, I can pop 'jabberworks livejournal kempston' into Google and the article from 2012 will come up instantly.

I miss my old LiveJournal community, but I love the speed that things can travel on Twitter; I love how I tweeted links to the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign articles and lots of people were talking about the issues right away. I love how people can comment on LiveJournal, but they can just as easily comment on Twitter or Facebook or wherever they want to say their bit. It's easier to have a discussion on Twitter about something when there's a blog article I can refer people back to, for context. So a combination of LiveJournal and Twitter, that's what works best for me.

I would feel silly if I tried to champion some big return to LiveJournal (popular now only really in Russia, I think). It's like trying to say MySpace might be cool again. (Ha ha!) But LiveJournal is there for me, and I'm comfortable with it, so I'll keep using it. People don't seem to mind coming to visit me in my eccentric blog home, as long as I write or draw something worth reading or looking at. Then again, maybe just because it is so totally uncool, it will take on a sort of retro glow, like Pac-Man or Atari, who knows.


Using LiveJournal to help me process the last election results

LiveJournal's not perfect. People tell me it can be hard to comment if they're not already a member; they have to jump through a few hoops to say something. (There used to be a horrible problem with spam comments, so the programmers must've dealt with it very strictly.)

Good things about LiveJournal:

* It's suprisingly Google-friendly. I think that's because it's such an old network, and its HTML format is very simple for webspiders to crawl through. (Can you sense I have no idea what I'm talking about? Yes, that's good.)

* It's simple. Our studio used to have a Wordpress blog and we kept having problems with images shifting about and doing strange things. Then we lost it completely and we'd forgotten to back it up, so that was that. LiveJournal's never once lost anything I've done. I even learned some basic HTML.

* It's slightly better than it used to be. There have been a few upgrades: pictures are easier to load; you don't really need to know any HTML. But not so much has changed that it's confusing.

* It's quiet. I can blog and blog and no one but my parents will care a hoot about what I'm doing unless I go tweet a link. That's rather nice sometimes. My parents feel more in touch with me.

So there you go.

I love you, LiveJournal. Thanks for being there for me.

Ha ha, I haven't written such a long a blog post about myself for ages, it feels like the old days. If you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me! :)

A couple more #ShapeChallenge drawings. :) (You can see the original shapes on the Twitter hash tag.)

I've been a bit negligent in posting them here, but I've been trying to do a daily doodle, inspired by the #ShapeChallenge on Twitter. Click here to see the original shapes these pictures are based on, and lots of other people's drawings!









This last one's Paul Dano, playing Pierre in the BBC six-part adaptation of War & Peace, showing on Sunday nights. The story's going so fast it makes my head spin, but Stuart and I are still enjoying it very much.

Here's my little painting for today's #ShapeChallenge:


Here's the original shape. I got rid of the red in the dot, but that's okay, I can do that. (No real rules!) :)

Here's my #ShapeChallenge drawing for today. :)



And the original shape. See loads more here, they're amazing! Feel free to print out any of the shapes and try them yourself.



Love this one by @DazNewall:

Here are a couple shapes from this weekend's #ShapeChallenge: my shape from Friday and the one @MrEFinch set on Sunday. (Thanks, Ed, for taking the weekend! I missed drawing Saturday's.)



You can see lots of awesome drawings here on the #ShapeChallenge hashtag.





And here's Monday's shape! Feel free to turn it any direction (or do anything you like, really!).