Friday, 3 November 2017

Comic Festival Round-Up: Thought Bubble & LICAF '17

Comic festival season 2017 is finally winding up for me now, and I have to say it's been my busiest year ever! It's been brilliant to spend time getting to know so many new comic-industry faces, and an honour to have been invited as a guest to so many of the festivals this year. Everyone's been so incredibly welcoming!



In September I popped over to Leeds for Thought Bubble Comic Festival. Thought Bubble is always a special one, it was my very first comics convention a few years back, I created the festival artwork last year, and it's always brimming with such friendly creators and enthusiastic attendees! 

This year the convention moved from The Royal Armouries into the city centre, with the convention spread over four venues centred around the town hall and millenium square.  The new location definitely gave the festival a different feel: it was by far the busiest convention I've ever had, but there were a few sleepy-looking people complaining about the security queues and distances between tents (a little extra walking never hurt, right?).




I managed to pick up a few choice prints and comics from the festival (all weirdly colour-themed, see above!), plus a gorgeous mermaid pin given to me by the insanely-talented Jen Bartell (this year's festival image creator!). I always end up wishing Thought Bubble was a three-day festival so I could grab a little bit of extra time away from my table to pop around and speak to everyone!

With the help of Andrew, we grabbed some footage and for the very first time you can see a little video summary of my weekend above, or on Youtube right here!




In October I travelled up to the Lake District for The Lakes Comic Art Festival in Kendal. It was good to see so many people acknowledge the earlier Twitter dispute, and build on conversations on how to create a more supportive and diverse comics industry - we definitely have a long way to go, but it's good to see something positive sprouting out of such a horrible situation.




At the end of September, I was invited to take part in the festival's window art trail - where businesses in Kendal are matched up with artists and community groups to create unique window displays as part of a trail around the town. The theme this year was 'superheroes', and as I was matched with the wonderful Staff of Life bakery, I created a life goddess! Drawn in Posca pens, the goddess grows and nurtures the ingredients used by the bakery: wheat, damsons, elderflower - a force for good, nature, and...food!


A post shared by Emmeline Pidgen (@emmelinedraws) on


I love illustrating on windows, it's such a different experience than being constrained to my usual small pages of paper - it's expansive and freeing! It was great to integrate with the products in the bakery, and to create something beautiful to draw customers in!

This was the first time I'd been to LICAF, and it was a pleasure to be so warmly welcomed to appear in the Page 45 room with the Page 45 comic shop team, and other incredible creators like Felt Mistress, Johnathan Edwards and Emma Viecelli. What a bunch of heroes!




One of my very favourite parts of the festival was running children's workshops in the cartoon-a-room. I ran two (iiiiiiincredibly busy) kids' workshops giving an introduction to comic creation to through shape! It was great to be able to represent female comic-creators to a new generation, and it was really fantastic to see so many young people coming away from the workshops with comics they'd made in the session, saying they were going to go home to create more!

This year LICAF was partnered with the Toronto Comic Art Festival, and I managed to slip away from my table to pop into a talk by Jillian Tamaki - an incredible Canadian illustrator and comic creator, who's inspired me for years! Another huge highlight was the 'Finnish Village', which was home to, honestly, one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to: Felt Mistress (Louise Evans) &; Jonathan Edwards' 'Archipelagogo'. It's a gorgeous combination of felt character sculptures, paired with Johnathan's beautiful paintings incorporating the characters! The colours were bold, the characters were stunning, and it was such a treat reading through the backstories of each set of characters and how they lived on the islands. If you ever get a chance, definitely try to catch one of their exhibitions, it's well worth seeing in person!



So I'm finally winding down, my stock is packed up and ready for my etsy store, and I've made a ton of new friends. Thanks so much to everyone who's been so hugely supportive these past few months! I'm working on an exciting comics commission right now, as well as some of my own author/illustrated narratives - so by the time convention season is around again I'll have even more to show you!

If you missed out on the opportunity to grab a signed print, comic or book at any of the festivals this year, you can find (almost) everything over in my Etsy shop right now!

Until next year!

Wednesday, 20 September 2017

Game Of Thrones & Secret Illustration Process



It's been a fair few weeks since we waved goodbye to season seven of Game of Thrones on tv; but I wanted to finally share my Thrones-inspired illustrations with you, and give you a peek at my process!



Working pretty neatly within the 'Ice and Fire' framework, I decided to illustrate Jon Snow, and the 'Mother of Dragons' herself, Daenerys Targaryen - what a, um, pair! So, as a little heads-up, these are inspired by the Game of Thrones characters, not direct portraits, so yes, there's a bit of artistic license here!



These were both illustrated using a combination of watercolour and digital illustration, which is my favourite way to work at the moment! For the first time ever, I created a video showing my entire process (from digital sketches, to traditional painting, then back to digital!) for my Daenerys illustration, and you can watch it here! Sneak a peek :)



Both the Daenerys illustration and Jon Snow print are available in my etsy shop at the moment, and you can pick them up at Thought Bubble comic festival this weekend! Woop!


Thursday, 14 September 2017

London Film & Comic Con 2017


With only a few weeks to go until Thought Bubble Comic Festival, I thought it was high time I give you a round-up of London Film and Comic Con!

So despite a growing list of comic festivals under my belt, LFCC was my very first London / three-day convention. So I arrived at the con with some seriously late nights of preparation, some analytics studying, a tum full of butterflies, and a whole batch of freshly printed comics!


It was SO much fun getting to know the other comics guests, they are seriously some of the most lovely and talented people I could have hoped to meet - Aneke, Guillermo Ortego, Emma Vieceli, Will Simpson, Lew Stringer, Ben Templesmith and my #1 table neighbour Dani Strips just to name a few! ❤



The convention was heeeeaving with celebrities and fans stampeding to meet them - which made everything quite surreal! I'll admit I had one or two squeako moments being in a lift with Benedict Cumberbatch; having my portrait of Mads Mikkelsen handed to him; and getting helped off the coach by John Rhys-Davies (Gimli!), who happens to be, almost officially, the nicest person in the entire universe.

As well as selling all kinds of prints, comics, books and original art on my table; I also spoke on a panel discussing 'Creating worlds for children'. The speaker line-up was stuffed with talent from the children's comic and publishing worlds! We chatted in front of an audience on everything from digital media vs print, what we enjoy most about working for a younger audience, to how we develop our ideas! It was great to discuss so many of the key issues in the children's illustration industry right now, especially given the breadth of perspectives the panel formed, and the insightful questions from the audience!


The festival comic zone was put together by the brilliant Tony Lee, and it was great fun to sneakily illustrate this family portrait (above, centre) he'd asked me to draw as a present for his wife! Live portraits and commissions have always been one of my favourite things about festivals, it's always so great to see the reactions people have when they see the finished pieces!



The festival was an exhausting but fantastic three days - I felt so welcomed by the other guests, and so looked after by the festival team! They were all absolutely incredible, and I came away completely brimming with inspiration and ideas. Roll on Thought Bubble, the convention bug has seriously grabbed me again!

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Playing with colour & Uniball Posca pens!



I've wanted to try out Posca pens for absolutely ages - I've heard such great things about them, and I've seen countless comic shop windows adorned with Posca-drawn illustrations, so they've always piqued my interest! So I was thrilled when the lovely team at Uniball were kind enough to send me a whole rainbow's worth of colours and nib types for me to play with and explore creatively (hurray!).






Right, so before this little exploration (or shall we say, scientific creative experiment?), the only thing I really knew about Posca pens were that they're the go-to pen for drawing on glass as they have such a broad range of sizes, opaque finish, and most importantly they're perfect for easily wiping off afterwards. I recently found out about a bit of a disaster a few years ago at a local library, where someone had decided to decorate the library windows a) without permission, and b).....with permanent ink pens....ARGH! So it's safe to say, if you feel the need to get creative on glass make sure you're using the right pens! You'll be glad to know that after a little sketch or two with the Posca pens on my own home windows, they look amazing and clean off perfectly with water and a tiny dash of washing up liquid, phew!




Beyond glass, I was really excited to learn just how many surfaces you can work on with the pens - everything from ceramics, to paper (obviously?), to fabric. I kind of had to restrain myself from bounding about the house doodling on everything like a three year old on a sugar high.  I particularly enjoyed adding a little pizzazz to this flower pot (home to my beloved chilli plant), and I have some big plans for the potential to illustrate my designs onto ceramic jewellery over the next few weeks - I'll keep you updated!


One thing I didn't know before using the pens, was their versatility in terms of working with their opaque quality. Obviously, I'm constantly drawing, but with traditional media I'll admit it would mostly be pen-on-white-paper; but with the Posca pens I'm able to draw on a huge variety of paper colours with a bold, strong line even with the lighter pen colours (and gawd the metallics look good!). It's been incredibly useful for signing my prints as well, especially with all these comic conventions coming up! A gold Posca pen has definitely become a staple for my comic-con artillery for quick signatures on books, prints and live drawings, whatever the background colour.


In my illustration work, I most often use ink brush pens to create my linework; so it was great to try out Uniball's Posca Free Size brush pens. Again, they have that great opaque colour, so it really opened up a lot of opportunities for me to play creatively in ways that ink might not necessarily allow. I did find that on some paper stock, overworking an area sometimes led to a little eating away at the paper texture, so I'd recommend using a good quality paper if you're doing anything more than light sketching. I absolutely loved the broader 1.8-2.5mm bullet nibs for drawing on larger surfaces and block colouring, whilst the 0.7mm bullet nibs were my favourites for sketching and for illustrating faces. The 0.7mm pin type nibs were a little bit fine for my style of illustration, but perfect for writing, or if your usual style is fine linework, more controlled comics art or you want to transition from biro pens.



The range of colours is really impressive; they're all so bold and have a gorgeous chalky quality to them. One look at my portfolio and you'll notice I use a lot of coral and teal in my work (not sorry), so some of the pens wouldn't have been my very first choice of colour for a final illustration, but my oh my do they make me happy to use for sketching and ideas! I'm also really excited to try them out with some of the window illustration projects I have coming up later in the year - those are the kind of times that call for bold colour!

The metallics were really fun to use, although they might not factor into my everyday professional illustration much (as so much of my work needs to be shown digitally), they're a joy to use for adding an extra flourish onto original watercolour illustrations or ink drawings. I found that the thicker nib pens had a slightly more opaque ink flow than the smaller pin nibs, but obviously with a thick nib you can't get as much detail in - so I'm definitely going to look into buying a 0.7mm bullet tip gold pen which will be perfect for details and the print signing.


The pinks, oranges, red, white and gold were definitely my favourites - I found myself reaching for them again and again to draw with. Maybe the Summer has put me in a warm colour palette kind of mood!



All in all, Posca pens are definitely going to become a staple in my preparatory work, sketches, and print signings - and I think they'll really come into their own when I use them as part of the window illustration trail at LICAF this year!

Head over to the Uniball website to have a browse of their Posca pen line, and if you've tried Posca yourself, show me your creations! 

Note - This is not a paid-for post, although the pen set was provided - I'll always give you my honest opinion :)

Monday, 24 July 2017

Macc-Pow Comic Festival

A post shared by Emmeline Pidgen (@emmelinedraws) on

This month kicked off my string of 2017 comic festival appearances with Macc-Pow, the first of four I have lined up so far!

I was invited as a guest to table at the one-day festival in Macclesfield, with a big ol' table selling my prints, comics and books, and plenty of space for my live portrait sessions.

A post shared by Emmeline Pidgen (@emmelinedraws) on


The festival took place in Macclesfield town hall, and was brimming with talented comics creators from near and far! Organised by the incredibly lovely Marc Jackson (who I'll be doing some comic workshops with at LICAF later in the year!), the festival catered really well for families and young comic fans - it was so inspiring to see how many children there were ridiculously enthusiastic about comics!



It's always a pleasure to spend time drawing live portraits at these sort of events - it's great to get a chance to chat to new people and to spend some quality time drawing. I had quite a few live portrait commissions, and although it's always a little nerve-wracking, it's the best feeling when they absolutely love the drawing!

I'll hopefully be back at Macc-Pow again next year, with even more comics and illustrated goodies! Here's to a thriving northern comics scene!

Tuesday, 11 July 2017

Emmeline's Illustrated Home: Big Steps, Interior Design Trends & A Collaboration With DFS


So this year has been quite a year so far, but after more than half a decade of living in a teeny, tiny studio flat, I'm pleased to say I finally have my first house! What?!

Freelancing and home ownership aren't usually ingredients you'd think of in the same cake; the prospect of trying to get a mortgage as a freelancer absolutely terrified me for a long, long time. But after a lot of work, a little luck, (and a life based far, far, outside of London); I finally have a place to call my own.



Our first week in the house was serious go-time, Andrew and his Grandad completely redecorated the living room, whilst I hulked-out a little and dragged up the long-pile bathroom carpet (whyyy) and painted, re-floored, grouted and even re-plumbed the bathroom πŸ’ͺ We have a little veg patch in the garden now too!

It's definitely been a work in progress. Honestly, the number of times I've wished I could instantly decorate, fix everything and create the perfect furniture with my mind Sims-style has been ridiculous! It takes time, and sometimes it's frustrating having all these incredible design ideas, but lacking in the free time and budget to make it happen.



One room we're finally in love with is our living room! It's our space for relaxing, playing Witcher 3 on xbox, eating snacks, watching Twin Peaks, film nights with friends, playing music and reading books; our window to the outside world, and the first impression we have for visitors. 

We've completely shaken up the design from the previous owners, with a new warm-grey wooden floor, ghost white paint on the walls, a burst of orange with the curtains and some choice art prints (naturally!). But the thing that's really brought the room together has definitely been our gorgeous charcoal Zinc sofa and footstool from DFS. Seriously, after years and years of hand-me-down sofas disguised with throws, it feels so great to be able to curl up on one that actually looks amazing.



Working with DFS, we looked at the key trends from the Salone del Mobile design festival in Italy, and focused on the yum combination of burnt orange and the revival of the footstool! Okay, so you might not have instantly thought that's a footstool in my photos, because yaasss we've multi-purposed it into a little reading nook seat! 

We have a lovely big window in our living room, so Andrew and I thought about our space at different times of the day: during bright daytime, the far end of the room is the perfect spot for reading, thinking of creative ideas, and gazing out of the window; whereas at night we love cosying up in front of a film - so we needed our space to work for all purposes. We realised the footstool is perfect for that! With a few cushions on the back it works as a great little reading seat between the bookshelves - but can be easily moved over to the sofa for when we want to stretch out like big ol' starfish to watch a few episodes of Orange Is The New Black!



Speaking of orange; with the living room as it was, it was practically a Pleasantville-style monochromatic world; seriously, almost everything was greyscale! Once we'd moved in our book collection, and a curated a few of our favourite boardgames, we brought a bit of extra warmth to the room with a shock of burnt orange textile - and it makes the world of difference. The orange really brings out the warm tones in the floor, gives it that bolt of the unusual, and makes everything just seem that bit cosier. As an illustrator, colour is obviously incredibly important to me, and it's taken time to make sure everything is accented just right, and works wonderfully with the base greys and whites.



As I write this, I'm sat on the sofa in the living room, curled up with a cup of tea (and a cheeky biscuit), and gawd, I feel happy. Okay, so the house isn't exactly like the rose-covered thatched-roof dream home I sculpted out of clay in primary school, but right now it's everything I've needed, and I'm so grateful I've managed to get to this place. Things are finally coming together, one step at a time, and it's really starting to feel like home. 

A huge thank you to DFS for working with me on this blog post and letting me explore some interior design trends! The gorgeous sofa I chose is their Zinc Three Seat Sofa and matching footstool from the French Connection range, all in charcoal (very yum, and just a heads up that it's on sale right now if you're in the market for one) and you can see all the other colours and stylings through #MyDFS. It's not often I get to collaborate on a blog project which has such an impact on my life; there'll be an awful lot of films watched, books read, conversations had, and ideas dreamed on that sofa, and in this new house! Here's to taking adult steps!

Note! This is not a paid-for post. The sofa and footstool were kindly provided by DFS for me to explore the creative design trends of Salone Del Mobile, which is well worth checking out (hurray burnt orange!).

Thursday, 6 July 2017

Illustrated Birthday Present Extravaganza!

A post shared by Emmeline Pidgen (@emmelinedraws)

Ahhh what a pile of loveliness! So, back in May I was incredibly lucky to receive these awesome gifts from my nearest and dearest for my birthday. I like to think this builds a bloomin' strong case that my friends and family know me well - has there ever been a photo that sums up my interests quite so well?

Okay, so maybe I've been a bit slow in posting this - but can you blame me? Look how distracting all these things are! 

First up, wow, I finally got my paws on the first two volumes of Sam Bosma's incredible 'Fantasy Sports' series. It's funny, unusual, brilliantly paced and has great characters - and uarghh it looks amazing! So completely up my street. I haven't read the second one yet, but I'm excited to set aside some time to drink it in. After the first one, I'll admit I had a bit of a rummage in my garage for a basketball (before realising it went flat years ago, noo!) hurray for books that make you wanna move!

Following the Nobrow thread, I also snagged myself a copy of Robert Hunter's Map of Days, an absolutely stunning graphic novel - seriously, every panel could be a poster in its own right. Nobrow and Flying Eye Books stories are rapidly filling up my bookshelves, and I couldn't be happier - they always have such incredible curation and pay such good attention to detail and quality in their printing and binding.

Okay, I won't get far without mentioning Stardew Valley. My. Oh. My. What an addictive game! I'm not going to lie, I've sunk a loooong time into this game already. It's just...lovely! There's farming, fighting, foraging and friends - all with a nice little 'let's support the little guy!' and a 'follow your passion!' subtext to it. Speaking of games, you'll notice the Andrez Sapkowski novel in the picture, well that's the first (chronologically) in the series of books which my other current favourite game, The Witcher 3, is based on! It's on an entirely different spectrum to Stardew, but it's honestly incredible. I'm finding it hard not to read the book and completely imagine everything from the game; the short stories read exactly like the missions, although in a way it's quite a relief to know you're not going to have to make some harrowing grey-area moral choice at the end (who am I kidding? I love those!). 

Alongside that I got so many gorgeously patterned and illustrated goodies - I felt so spoilt this year. Two of my lovely friends got me this Cath Kidston bag with an incredible horse print on it (I'd seen it a few days before and fallen in love with it, but didn't quite have the pennies!); I got some beautiful quirky stationery and homeware; and my mum and dad bought me a Janome sewing machine! I've been wanting a sewing machine for years, but never had the space for it until now. Okay, I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to sewing, but I've got the drive at least! On one of my first days having it, I completely winged it with a vague idea of a pattern and sewed a top! Yeah, it was a bit short, and maybe a bit messy - but it felt so good to do. One of my serious goals at the moment is to start thinking of designing and screen-printing my own fabric to sew into products for my shop - so watch this space!

It feels like so long since my birthday now, but I still completely brim up with feelings when I think about the lovely time I spent with my friends and family, and how perfectly they know what gifts I'd like! There's no denying I'm a lucky duck (and I have a lot of reading to do). Hurray! πŸ’—

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Exploring 'The Japanese House'


After a very late night at the IPSE Freelancer of the Year awards on National Freelancers Day earlier this month, I made the most of my time in London with a Pidgen-sibling adventure, which ended up with an accidental Japanese architecture theme!

Firstly we walked over to the House of Illustration near my hotel, to check out the 'Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan' exhibition, which featured some incredibly gorgeous original sketches and gouache paintings for the backgrounds of classic animes like Ghost in the Shell. I'd never actually been to the House of Illustration before, I've been meaning to for literally years but I could never quite place where it was or find the time to go until now. It's a cute little building, nestled in King's Cross between a fancy Waitrose and a trendy coffee shop or two (one with an unnecessarily snooty barista!). It's little, but packed full of really interesting shows and a real passion for illustration (obviously right up my street!). You can keep an eye on what's on at the house of illustration on their website!




Next up, we popped on the tube down to the Barbican - well, actually, I say "next up" but first we grabbed a drink (from the rude barista coffee shop!) and literally twenty seconds after we left my brother tripped and the world was suddenly covered in coffee. SO, "next up" was actually getting a new coffee from somewhere a little friendlier, and then on to The Barbican's 'The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945' show.


Okay, yeah "1945 architecture" might not sound great to everyone - but one look at the promo and it was completely sold to me. There's a giant bloomin' Japanese house built into the space, and a charcoal-decorated tea room, and old films projected in front of humongous bean bags where we could rest our mildly hung-over heads! Yes πŸ‘ yes πŸ‘ yes πŸ‘.

The exhibition was full of really interesting history and insight into the reasoning behind the modern wave of minimalist design, framing, and open space the architects loved. There were really great tiny models of buildings, constructed with really graphic shapes. There were piles of books; tiny porcelain cats; orange trees; and a really amazing ladder-only-access tea house covered in charcoal! As I walked round I kept seeing such incredible angles and shapes, honestly there were so many Instagramable shots, and so many new ideas for illustration compositions.



It felt so good to actually be in the space, walking around the building, between each room and out into the main gallery - it's something kind of rare to find in a gallery space, which you'd so often think of as "you stand, you look". It was such a nice place to just hang out in and be in a bit of a different world for a while!

Again, this was my first time at The Barbican! I'm definitely going to go again, even whilst we were there there was a really awesome-looking sci-fi exhibition that I really wish I'd had time to go to (I feel like I'm their demographic right now!). The Japanese House is only on until June 25th, so if you're interested go for it! Here's to family exhibition adventures, a lack of sleep, and Japanese architecture!