Meet Al Davison.

(Please click to enlarge.)

Meeting the admirable, Al Davison in londonprintstudio was an eye opening experience! Not only a knowledgable and a passionate comics artist, he also is crammed packed with touching personal stories. His client list includes, DC/Vertigo comics, Dark Horse Entertainment and Penguin Books.

To read more about his life experiences and see his drawings of the unconscious, please support his project, "The Alchemist's Easel".

To summarise here are a few tips he taught us:

6 Elements to a plot: (This comic follows the plot format)

1] Introduce the character

2] Introduce the location

3] Reveal the character in the location

4] Conflict or Question

5] Explore the conflict/question

6] Resolve! 

► People read BLACK faster than white. 

► Larger images/open frames are slower to read, they can act as a full stop. 

► Remember GUTTERS! The larger the gutter, the more time has passed. The thinner the gutter, the less time has passed.

► Due to the book format of reading right to left, splash pages should be on the left for impact.

(As it increases the suspense as the reader turns the page).

► Use speech bubbles to guide the reader through the flow of the page. If there are two characters speaking in a frame, the character positioned on the left should speak first.

- Susan. 

(Happy holidays! ♥) 

Brussels: PART 1

Okay, here's how we see it: we're going to break down our visit to Brussels into four parts, so that we can tell you all how much fun we had and how much we learnt in digestible chunks; Part 1 will cover Saturday, Part 2 will cover Sunday, Part 3 will cover Monday (these will all be photo posts) and Part 4 will present some entertaining blog comics from each of us. Y'got all that? Good! Let's get started with
Part 1: SATURDAY.

So after a very early start for most of us, we arrived in Brussels via the Eurostar. It was a fun journey, a lot of us had never been through the tunnel before. It was so cold when we got there! SHIVER SHIVER.

We quickly nipped to the hostel to drop off our bags and then our first day in Brussels actually began.

Simply walking through the capital we were amazed at the Grand Place and all of the wonderful architecture. It is a beautiful city, don't let Abe's strip fool you, it's not all dodgy red light districts!

 

The city was so well decorated for the festive period, especially at night (which you will see in Part 2).
Around midday we sampled Belgian waffles! THEY WERE SO TASTYYY. But the trip was not, of course, just about the delicious food (we'll come to the chocolates eventually) - in the background of us chewing away, you can see...

                                                                     Yup, it's Tintin!
This was one of many comics walls (yes, you read that correctly!) around the city, and we'll show you them all in Part 3.

 

So we now come to the main event of Saturday: Heading for Strip Turnhout. Antwerp Station stunned us with its multiple levels of trains and lovely architecture. This was also the first of many trains over the course of the weekend that we ran for; we seemed to do a lot of running!



















We got to Strip Turnhout for the afternoon, and got to hear some really interesting talks about the international creation of comics and how the comics scenes differ around the world, featuring speakers such as Paul Gravett and Rashid Alik. While we promoted our collective at one of the sales tables, we also got to see the comics exhibition about the Keikeboes comic strips; and a British exhibition featuring our very own Karrie Fransman, last years intern Rachel Emily Taylor, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and others. All of their comics were really interesting in terms of breaking and reconstructing the rules of comics.
After the event was a live music and interview event on stage, which featured Posy Simmonds. It was lovely to hear a little bit about how she feels about her work.

The event was over quickly as we had arrived quite late in the day, but we all really enjoyed it. We got to meet so many other great people from the comics community including Kevin O'Neill, Woodrow Pheonix, Peter Stanbury, and many many more, during the after event dinner.

Alas, that was Saturday over! After drinking some crazy strong hot chocolates and waving goodbye to Turnhout, We ran for yet another train, almost missed it, and then made our way back to Brussels to get some needed rest for our next jam-packed day in the city. In Part 2 we'll cover what happened on Sunday, including the Belgian Comics Museum and the Herge Museum! LE GASP!
In the meantime, here's us looking longingly at some comics in one of the many bookshops we passed over the weekend:

Look forward to Part 2 of our Brussels report!
-Jade

BRUSSELS WINDOW SHOPPERS

Howdy folks!

Heres a doodle Abe made of our time in Belgium... All the way from the red light district o' Brussels... We comicy 'terns were mearly window shopping (honest!)

screen print & etching workshop

A catch-up comic on the Screen Print and Etching workshops the interns received from londonprintstudio's print maestro Paul, with help from Marco! Merlin is now working on etching her comic pages for her anthology submission! Thanks very much to Paul and Marco...we are looking forward to making more screen print & etching work in the studio with them soon in the new year.

Here's how my screenprints and etchings came out...the other interns may add their prints later...:

The interns are back from Brussels, and working hard once again today on getting ready for exciting workshops and, of course, preparing our Parallel Lives anthology. A blog entry on our trip will be coming soon!

In the meantime, check it out, Jade's guest blog on the Laydeez Do Comics site is now online for your viewing pleasure. This here is the short version, you can read the extended version on the LDC blog.

Strip Turnhout

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the interns are nipping out of the country this weekend to attend Strip Turnhout! Karrie Fransman is a guest of the event, and the interns will be at a table with an activity you can take part in if you come along: The never ending comic!
Want to know more? You better come to Strip Turnhout then! (Or if you can't make it, don't worry, we'll be doing a writeup after the weekend.)
We'll be in Brussels for the weekend to visit various places (TINTIN MUSEUM GAH I'M RATHER EXCITED) thanks to the project funders, so we hope to get a lot of great inspiration there and come back to make some awesome comics for the anthology!

Look forward to our report next week!

Also I recently attended December's Laydeez Do Comics meeting and, like Shamisa last month, was asked to do the blog report on that, so I'll upload that here once the lovely ladies over at the LDC blog have posted it there. Look forward to that too!

-Jade

Laydees Do Comics

Another post about the awesome Shamisa!!! 

This time round she did a sweet comic about her visit to Laydees Do Comics meeting...! Here's her sincere comment from her blog entry:

"Laydees Do Comics, has helped me a lot since I have been here in London. Yes, it has to be said, the Brits are kind and lovely people. Many thanks to Nicola and Sarah, Karrie Fransman, Paul Gravett and Ellen Lindner, for welcoming me to the UK comic world in this way."

To read more about Shamisa's Adventures in London, be sure to visit her tumblr!

Casual Conversation

"Casual Conversation" is a heart warming comic that will definitely beat the winter cold.  The talented, Shamisa (MA in Comics!!) is currently working really hard to tug on our heart strings~ A short, self contained excerpt will be featured in our lovely anthology.

These are her striking preview images for her comic...!! Check out her tumblr for more of her amazing illustrations...!      

- londonprintstudio comics interns.