Buzzy, buzzy...

Watercolour and charcoal artwork from ‘Goodnight World’, published by Bloomsbury. What the busy bees get up to when nobody’s looking.Flower porn - phwoarrrrrrrr. Check out those stamens. All that pollen. Oh Em Gee…

I’ve been buzzy too. Today I was reading ‘What’s the Time Mr Wolf?’ to a group of delightful Smalls in a bookshop in Edinburgh. Tomorrow, I’ll do the same in a library in Dundee, but with considerably more tech at my disposal so that I will be able to show slides and talk about where the book came from and how it got there.

pencil rough for penultimate spread of ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’ I draw the layout in great detail before committing to artwork. Or at least, I did, back in the days of Mr Wolf v1.0.0 Nowadays, I draw the layout several times over, tweaking and refining and completely reworking as per discussions/instructions from the designers at Bloomsbury. Some spreads of recent books have been reworked as many as seven times. Seven? Aaaargh.

I’m trusting that the tech will work. Perhaps I should go out and make a sacrifice to the little cold-hearted imps of perversity that stalk Powerpoints, roam data projectors, haunt Promethean smart boards and delight in throwing curved balls, spanners and hissy fits into the workings of book presentations in general.

Or perhaps that’s just me.

Oh my lord, the snafus I’ve seen. The weaponised incompetences, the system meltdowns, the times without number where I’m standing uselessly to one side while several librarians, a janitor and a gifted five year old attempt to sort out a knotty problem with the thingummy not speaking to the wotsit because…

because….anyone?

Nope, me either. Which was why doing it tech-free today in a bookshop - just me, my voice, a sketchbook and a picturebook to entertain a roomful of small people for an hour was, if not exactly easy, predictable in that at least there wasn’t anything to go wrong in the showing of pictures and telling stories department.

I explained to the round-eyed tots that Mr Wolf, while being grumpy enough to threaten the noisy neighbourhood blackbirds with incarceration in a pie, and the ghastly door-slamming pigs-next-door with being rendered into bacon sandwiches, in reality, he’s a harmless wolf. A toothless wolf. He keeps his fangs in a glass by his bedside.

Bless! ( and also, ewwwwwwww)

watercolour artwork from ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’ published by Bloomsbury. The most aggressive thing that wolf could do would be to gum you into submission.

To my delight, Mr Wolf will return in a new book! I am beyond thrilled to revisit not only my favourite Wolfy chap, but also to head back into the land of Hushnow where Dr Purr made her debut. Will make her debut. Dear heavens, will definitely make her debut just as soon as all of us in Team Purr get their acts together and decide on a cover.

Which as any fule kno, is no easy decision. Latest attempts by Yrs Trly have not set the publishing world ablaze, alas.

Ruff, ruff roughs. I like the bottom left version, but it may be too hard to ‘read’. Covers have to be utterly and totally legible. No ambiguities here. They have approximately 0.05 parsecs to attract and hold the attention of a buyer. If they’re tricksy to decode, they don’t work.

I’ve also been hand-colouring ( AAAARGH, shoot me now) a batch of zines for distribution around the afternoon cohort of Jane Porter’s summer comics class.

And don’t get me started on the duff photocopies I had printed in Edinburgh last week. A3? I don’t think so. Edge to edge printing? Nope. Cue endless screaming…

Hand-colouring because I still haven’t mastered the intricacies of Canva ( and possibly never will, give yesterday’s horror show/entanglement with their onboard AI) and I need a flatbed scanner to make a decent file that I can faff around with - just as soon as I teach myself how.

Canva et al are such rabbit holes. Finding my way, blundering around in online instruction manuals, clicking on things that don’t do what I need them to do and lacking the right words to ask ( again online) how to do the various small and simple tasks I need from a digital image manipulator…all of it eats time. Time I’d far rather spend actually making the comics. I’ll always hand-draw everything but if I make a mistake, it would be so helpful to be able to remove it without having to tear bits of paper up and stick them over the mistake and end up with torn edges of paper that need digitally removed. I fell into the clutches of Canva’s AI which I have to assume is in its infancy/beta stage because it was…incompetent? Or perhaps that was my inability to give it the exact prompt it needed. The correspondence between me and It was painful. It would say, right, I’ll do that ( whatever I’d asked it to do) now, and there would be a long, long pause while the Canva logo pulsed in an alarming fashion and then…nothing. I’d re-enter the prompt and It would ask was I sure, and just to clarify, we were talking about the torn line separating the title from the actual comic, and yes, right, I’ll go do that now, and back to the pulsing logo and…nothing.

I gave it five attempts and then exited the programme. Swearing like a fishwife.

Pause while I grind my non-Mr Wolf teeth to stumps. All of the above is why I occasionally frequently need to go do this:

Vaila: Thank the lord there’s nobody coming. Mum is being so cringe.

I have so many ideas for comics now. The world we’re all navigating is full to the brim with opportunities for snark and take-downs and poking fun and mordant social comment and just generally letting off steam armed with nothing more threatening than a pen and a lust for REVENGE. Oh my darlings, that I have in spades.

Mwoah, mwoah, mwoah….

But for now, here’s the torn paper edge still in situ, thanks to Canva’s It. Cheers.

I’d just like to say that there were absolutely no Hugos whatsoever in today’s bookshop gig. The Smalls, their Bigs and all the booksellers were a joy to work with. Thankyou to Toppings Edinburgh for organising such a great event.