It’s my first actual newsletter on this platform! I’m going to be closing down my substack soon, and only posting from here from now on, so maybe subscribe to this?

A couple of weeks ago I was very proud to put on my first solo exhibition at Swan Hill Studios in my hometown of Shrewsbury. I’ve had work in shows before, and have installed loads of exhibitions when I worked at the art school, but this was the first one that was all about me. We titled the exhibition ‘Between the lines’ because that was the best (only) title that I could think of.¹

The aim was to show a bunch of the process stuff that goes into making a comic, not just hang some nice looking pages. That made installing the show both easy and difficult simultaneously. I think the problem with showing comics work in a gallery setting is that you must compromise; you can’t really show everything because the space will end up looking like a car boot sale², and not enough stuff on the wall and you lose the sense of narrative in the work. I printed out some of my shorter stories on big banner rolls and then filled in the corners with pages and pages of original artwork and sketchbooks for people to dig into.³

The process of going through all my old pages and sketchbooks was fun. I’d forgotten so much of what I’d done, and when you are stood next to a stack of work that reaches your bellybutton it’s a pretty good feeling. Going through and deciding what was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ was tricky. There are a bunch of half-finished and never-were projects in various states of completion in my back-catalogue. My sketchbooks are filled with either very rough diary comics;

or stuff that can be filed under ‘why did you do this?’;

or life drawing. Lots of life drawing. Here’s the fabulous Danielle Corsetto drawn in Denmark a few years ago;

I set up a space for me to work in the gallery and set about getting some work done. This turned out to be a little challenging, I barely got anything done, as I had a fairly constant stream of visitors dropping in for a chat and a nose about. It turns out that this is actually quite nice. I had kind of forgotten that I enjoy being around other people⁴. Commuting in on my bike to a place of work and getting to hang out with other creative people all day is a genuine treat, and it really made me lament the fractured state of the comics community post-twitter⁵.

I set up my workspace in a similar way to how I try to set up any workspace; natural light coming in from the left hand side (I’m right handed), somewhere to position previous pages for reference, lightbox at an angle so I don’t accidentally foreshorten a drawing, watercolour water in a big jar that I can’t mistake for my coffee.

One of the fun things that happened during the week was a visit from the local high school illustration group. That’s right, a high school that runs an art route specialising in illustration. We did a fun Q&A:
Q- ‘what is difficult to draw?’
A- ‘Everything, some days, nothing other days.’
Q- ‘Do you see the pictures in your head?’
A- ‘Yes, in extreme unattainable detail.’
etc.

Swan Hill Studios also contains Aaaaaah Riso a Riso printing company, so we did a riso print of the tiger I drew earlier that week. I didn’t have the original any more⁶, so I recreated it in Procreate, and got to use some screen tone brushes to work out the separations, which I think came out really well. I think they’ll be available on the Swan Hill store some time soon?

I was quite sad when it was time to take it all down and bring it home. It feels like comics kind of die when they are left on a bookshelf or in a cupboard, but spring to life when there are people around reading them.

This was a fun way to spend a week and made me want to do more things with other cartoonists again. Watch this space, I’m scheming.