I had the best day yesterday.
The weather wasn't as bad as predicted, allowing my journey to go ahead, and all the trains were on time too! Getting to Leeds and back was as stress-free as it could have been.

So, Thoughtbubble, Leeds. Last year it was a rather quiet event in a freezing cold hall. This year it was still coldish, but with a lot more people. But there was still, thankfully, room to get the chance to chat to people around and about. I was carrying my new business cards from MOO.com, a copy of Legends and as much confidence as I could muster!

So almost the first person I bumped into wandering into the hall was Ilya! (a manga publisher and artist) I'd never met him before. I'd always been a little cautious of him, having heard he was quite a harsh critic and has very high standards (which having seen his excellent Anthologies, the Mammoth Book of the Best New Manga 1,2 and , I had no trouble believing). In person he was really nice. When I told him I'd entered the Jiman, he asked what the entry was, and he remembered it! He said that he liked my work and confident hybrid style, and thought I was coming up to pro standard now, and he'd be interested if I had any projects in mind! I was just... *_* He gave me a business card. I was over the moon!

So continuing on, I met an artist who used to draw SONIC THE COMIC!!! Um, yeah, so that was something of a Nostalgia trip! He said he kept getting people around my age coming up and going "OMG! I used to read this!" StC was before digital colouring was widespread, and he told me all about the techniques involved, airbrushing, painting and ink washing. It was great to look at the real life pages and fine out how they were made. I learned a lot!

Then I found Sonia Leong, who as usual was swamped in people and largely obscured. I forgot to buy 'Talking to Strangers'! Dammit! -_-;
Emma Vieceli and Yishan Li were there. I got to look at some beautiful Bandes Dessinees. I wish they'd do English translations of those! Pud was painting Ultramarines on Emma's table. We chatted about Warhammer a bit hahaha!
I bought a bunch of small press comics round and about, and swapped cards with people. There were some good ones about, both new and familiar faces.

I headed over to Self Made Hero to see Nana Li and Faye Yong, and got both their new Manga Shakespeare books. Faye's Merchant of Venice is a delicately rendered Fantasy adaptation with stunning backgrounds and heaps of atmosphere. Nana's Twelfth Night is a fluid and effortless feeling steampunk packed with fun. I have signed copies of both ^_^ I went out for lunch with Faye and Nanna and helped out on the SMH table for a couple of hours to give them a bit of a rest. It was great to be able to chat about art techniques and philosophies and stuff, and just have a laugh.
The Manga Shakespeare guy remembered who I was! 0_0 He remembered my name and asked what I was up to lately! 0_0!!! Can't really express my feelings about that in coherent words just yet.

Umm, what else... Ohh! I met the guy who makes Gunnerkgrigg Court! He's really nice. He was impressed by how long I'd been reading the comic (since back when it was on Drunkduck, and when he had the old version of the first printed book) haha!
Erm, erm....I think I've run out of steam now. I'm knackered.

So all in all, it was a successful AND fun day. Definitely want to go next year.

You may have seen on the news that there is pretty bad flooding here in Cumbria. Just writing to say that I'm just fine here. There has been a little flooding here in Ulverston, but it's down at the end of town near the beck, an area that's pretty prone to flooding. I live a few hundred yards outside even the 'worst case scenario' danger zone. I've backed up my important files just in case (my tower is on the floor, so if a flood came really fast, maybe it'd get caught?), but honestly you know I'm generally really over cautious.

The flooding seems to be river-based. Cockermouth got it bad because it's situated in a valley at the meeting point of two large rivers. Kendal and Keswick are a bit flooded too. There's no coastal flooding though, so Barrow is just fine, and Ulverston is only effected at the low end of town. What's happened is that the fells were already saturated from wet weather, then a load of rain fell in a short period and all of it went into the rivers 'cause the ground can't soak it up.

It's actually lovely and sunny right now, and I can't see any flooding at all from my house. It's a little surreal.

I don't know if I'll make it to Thoughtbubble or not yet. I might be all right, the trains in North Cumbria are all cancelled, but South Cumbria's trains all skirt around Morcambe Bay down into Lancashire, avoiding the effected areas and Yorkshire seems largely unaffected. Fingers crossed, I'll be there.

Well, some surprising good news today. My gran went in for a scan about two weeks ago, and everybody was pretty sure she had Altzheimer's, and we were waiting prepared for the inevitable result...
Only to get it today and it's not!
The pychologist was as surprised as we were, since all the symptoms (memory loss, mood swings, depression and general loopiness) seemed like text book altzheimer's! It turns out that what she does have is vascular dementia. Most people who eat fatty foods a lot end up having a heart attack or getting cancer, but in a rare case, for Gran it seems it hasn't caused either of these, but the loss of circulation has caused macular degeneration (damage to the retina of the eye causing sight loss) and vascular dementia (lack of bloodflow to the brain causing short term memory loss and confusion). While it is a condition, fortunately unlike Alzheimer's it's not terminal, and can, to some extent, be treated.
I think the symptoms of short term memory loss, on top of the fact that frankly Gran has always been bipolar, forgetful and um...'away with the fairies' to put it mildly made it appear like typical Alzheimers, even though it wasn't. Wow, it's kind of like the conclusion of an episode of 'House', isn't it?
They're getting more people in to help look after her now. That should take a lot of strain off the family. It's certainly a weight off my mind knowing she doesn't have a terminal illness!

A few bits of news from the past week or so.

Firstly, now that Azure's laptop problem is finally fixed, we were able to sort out the IndieManga shop, transferring postal duty to me (for Origins and Legends, I won't be handling Between Worlds' until one of the other members gives me some stock, but you can still buy them, they'll be dispatched by Anna or Azure). You can order them from the shop:
http://www.shop.indiemanga.com/
I'm trying to include little sketches as an extra in the packages.

I set up a website! Finally! I'd been wanting to get a new artsite made for a while. I discovered quite a few new tricks with Dreamweaver that make things faster than typing out all the HTML code. That made it a lot easier than expected.
http://www.kateholdenart.com/
I think I realised in the end that it's better to just use html to the best of your ability and make something that's simple, but works, than to try to use php you know nothing about to attempt to make something shiny that's overcomplicated for the purpose, or you can't fix or edit easily.
There are some tweaks I want to make, but I'm glad to have something that's at least reasonable, easy to navigate and up-to-date up there.

I got some business cards printed too. Really nice recycled Moo cards. Now I have a site and I have cards, I am ready to spam the crap out of companies at Thoughtbubble in a couple of weeks!

By the way, if you're going to be at TB yourself and want a copy of Legends (because otherwise you'll have to pay P&P or wait for May Expo) tell me to bring one for you. I'll probably carry about 5 of them, unless a lot of people tell me to bring a copy for them.

Finally, just a little rambling: Woo! I'm 10 pages into 'Fan Dan Go' now. Feels like I've been drawing it forever. Ten pages isn't a huge amount, but it's half a typical floppy comic, which puts things in perspective. I'm not currently planning on releasing FDG as single chapter floppies. If I print it, I want a book to be at least a full storyarc of around 60 pages. I'm looking forward to reaching 30 pages so I can get some ad revenue! At 10 pages I'm up to about #300 on Drunkduck, which is good going. Let's see if I can push that up into the top 100! ^_^

Okay, this is the last one of these.
( cut for autobiographical crap and old art )

I thought this was going to be the last part of the OLD ART marathon, but actually I think that'll be next post. This time, I'll be showing the comics I made at age 18. Any of you who are about that age reading this who think you suck. No. No you don't. You really don't.
( cut for lots of images )

It's time for more OLD ART!
This is the point where everything goes stupid.
( Cut for horrible art and ramblings. Enter at own peril. )

Guuh, what a crap day. Don't ask. Just don't ask.

So here's some more old work. This stuff is from when I was about 15/16, I think. I assume 15 because of the style and the fact that everybody is 15 *headdesk* except the leader, who is much more experienced and grown up at...17 *double headdesk*



At this point I had just discovered FINAL FANTASY VIII! *_* "This is the best game ever! It is all about pretty teenagers a little bit older than me, with cool weapons who live in art nouveau land saving the world and falling in love! OMG an Squall is the cutest guy evaaa and I wanna be just like Selphie when I grow up!!!!11!!" (transcribed thoughts of Kate aged 15).
The style is a weird mixture of the very sharp and detailed style I used for my Warhammer-influenced artwork I drew from age 11-17, the manga experiments you saw in the previous post, and the artwork of my newly discovered (at the time) idol, Tetsuya Nomura.
Sorry about the squared paper, but I will draw on ANY available paper. This includes filling up the back of any old exercise books from school (this was my old maths book) as well as typically drawing on the back of letters and old worksheets. You simply can't comprehend how much I draw if you've never been in a room inhabited by me.
I did draw comic pages of this. If I ever find them, I will scan and post them. It is melodrama-tastic. It was called 'Star Legion 22' a name that, like 'Anglomanga' I tend to reuse a lot for different ideas I keep changing my mind on. It was about angsty teenagers who catalogued, photographed, studied and killed marauding monsters around their hometown outside of school hours.

I'm actually quite surprised that at this point, I had already developed the angular jaw I draw on male characters. The proportions all get very stretched out here, and stay that way until I'm about 19. Next post, you will see the horrible logical conclusion of this awful shoujo limb stretching, and it may explain why I draw all my characters comparatively short now (an opposite and equal reaction, you could say).

Please note that I did not write 'Thorn rocks!' on my own drawing. This was my friend Mace, who enjoyed going through my notepads writing comments.

I am frustrated waiting for the Jiman, so here's some REALLY OLD ART.

I tend to think of myself as having started drawing manga when I was 17, when I got into Megatokyo and Cardcaptor Sakura. That was when I started drawing comics. But I often forget that this wasn't my first foray into the manga style. See, when I was about 14/15, this weird programme came on the telly called 'Pokemon' (you may have heard of it hahaha) followed a year or so later by 'Digimon', 'Monster Rancher' as well as 'Strange Dawn'. I was really quite amazed by these brightly coloured and pointy-looking dynamic cartoons, and took a break from my usual drawings of constipated looking space marines shooting at Orks to come up with a cartoon idea of my own...

So here are the never seen before online drawings of 14 year old 'Koolesteva Kate' (this was pre-Darth Mongoose). I recently found them in an old sketch pad, as they were drawn before I had a scanner or decent internet access, or any real knowledge that people put art on the web (hey, it was 1998, okay!?)




It was a fantasy story about four teenagers stuck in a magical world (yadda. yadda, you know the drill) where there are elves (wood elves and high elves) and magic, and these stones that allow the kids to turn into monsters. The Elves couldn't use the stones, because they had magic, which made the transformation permanent, but one had, Fell. He was...umm, you know, evil and stuff. The main character was the red haired tomboy, Gill, who had a cool sword. With diamonds along the edge. So it was really hard (yeah, in retrospect, I dunno if that'd really work). If you have ever seen the hand with a spiral in it in my work (particularly FanDanGo, where it occasionally appeared) it was actually the symbol on the transformation pillars (ooh, history!) and naturally, when I named a comic 'Fell' to enter in the rsom, I did remember that I'd once had a character named that.

So, yeah. I think next post, I'll show you some work from when I was about 17-18, because my DA gallery, while it goes back a fairly long way, only starts from when I was about 19 or so.

Hmmmmm.

Maybe that wasn't such a great idea.
It's not totally awful, it's just not 'this is what I want on the front page of my website' material. It doesn't really speak clearly about what my work is about and it's generally not a striking image. I think something more bold and pop-arty with cel shading would be a better idea.

Discovered with this image that the big inking pen only works when the image has real flow to it and makes bold statements. It was pretty rubbish for this. I wish I knew how CLAMP manage in Tsubasa Reservoir to use such a bold and exciting inking style with such delicate lines! I guess they have been making manga since I was about 3 though 0_o;

Bleh.
Now it's Games Design Document time and waiting for my 'you lost the Jiman, better luck next time' email. Yaaaay. ¬_¬