I Love New Brighton. It Has Many Reasons to Be Cheerful

If I didn't live in Lyttelton, I’d probably choose New Brighton (though I would be worried long-term about the threat of sea level rise and tsunamis). New Brighton has a fabulous long sandy beach and a cool modern pier that stretches out into the Pacific. The council had to do a lot of work to repair it after the earthquake and it is due to open to the public again tomorrow.

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New Brighton also has one of the new electric car charging points that are springing up around Christchurch.

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But the thing I like best about new Brighton is the library. You can sit and work in a chair that looks out over the ocean and there is a cafe below whenever you need a break from that.

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Illustrated Epistle: Learning to Cartoon

Another month has whizzed by, we're well into Autumn and we have been busy working on the house and garden while the good weather continued. Fortunately, the veranda was replaced before the weather turned wet this week. I'm also happy to report that I no longer get seasick going off to bed as the house has been re-levelled and new piles put in to keep it level-ish. 

This week, I have been working on the illustrations for Chapter 13 of the second FAB Club book. By the next Epistle the drawing should be finished, which will ease the deadline pressure somewhat.

I've also been busy running cartoon workshops in Lyttelton. The first was in the library with kids aged 7-12. They were enthusiastic and engaged and it was very rewarding to see how much their drawing developed in a couple of hours. The second was at a youth club that catered to 11-14 year olds. We started with about a dozen kids and ended up with four! All of them were the younger ones who weren't distracted by their peers. It was a good learning experience for me.
I think that peer pressure in the early teens is a big factor in which interests we take up. Most kids give up drawing at this point, believing that their drawing isn't good enough to impress their friends. I was lucky at that age to have friends who loved to write and draw and we created comics to entertain each other. Without that encouragement, I might have given up too, as I don't find that drawing comes naturally to me and I have to work at it. It is the reason I give myself deadlines in order to develop my work. Doodle Diary on gocomics.com forces me to to draw at least three sketches of my life every week, many of which debut in the Epistle.

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This is an excerpt from my Illustrated Epistle, which goes out in the middle of the month. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a cartoonist (specifically, mine). I'd love it if you signed up at the bottom of this page, or here:

http://eepurl.com/cCOOeD

Cartooning Workshop for Older Kids

I ran a second cartooning workshop in Lyttelton this week. This time it was at the recreation centre, where there is a youth club. The age range of the kids skewed older and it was interesting how that (and having other kids and activities around) changed the group dynamic.

We started with about a dozen kids, but as they became more and more distracted the numbers dropped off. After an hour, there were four kids and they were all the younger ones. They were the only ones able to focus and produce a comic strip at the end of the workshop. I wonder if I would have stuck out a cartooning class at the age of 14. I think so.

Reasons to Be Cheerful: I'm on Cartoonstock

I'm not very good at selling my own work and tend to leave it to others (e.g. King Features and Amazon). But I've been asked about availability of some of the personal work I've been putting up on Gocomics.com as my Doodle Diary. Eventually, I hope to turn Reasons to Be Cheerful and New Zealand Diary into books, but that is waaaaay down the track at the moment.

In the meantime, Cartoonstock have offered me a way to sell my cartoons, so I'll give it a try. Clicking some of my images should take you to Cartoonstock and they'll take care of the sale of the work. We'll see how it goes. Click on the following images if you want to find out how it works (I do!).

Cheers!

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