New Book!

Woo! New A6 Doodle Doods books arrived today! :D I will be selling these in my shop and at cons very soon!

May Contain Sharks Pre-Order!

My new comic is now available for pre-order! All pre-orders come with a mystery 20x30cm print and a small selection of random stickers! Check it out here!

Monday Morning Bundle Book Offer!

If you buy all three volumes of The Cute and the Weird from my online store, get a large print free! Just state which print you would like when given the option to add a note through Paypal. Options are: Hammer Time, Kraken, Cute Roots and Space Dogs.

Comics Land Giveaway!

I'm running a little giveaway over on my Facebook page - head over to see how to win a copy of Goat On A Boat and Dinosaurs For Breakfast! :D

The Rather Odd Alphabet!

My new small press book, The Rather Odd Alphabet was delivered today! It's 32 pages of weird and wonderful animals and words and you'll be able to pick it up from me at all the comic cons I'll be attending. However, if you simply cannot wait that long, it's also available in my online store. Be sure to check out my other books which now have new prices and shipping prices! :D

Self Publishing is Addictive!

I didn't realise how many Small Press books I've self published over the last year; I think it's safe to say I've got the bug! Although I started to self publish my own comic when I worked in a comic shop back in 2004-2007, it's only really been in the last year or so that I've gotten back into it and started to realise the potential in printing books myself. One thing I love about self publishing is having complete control over what I write and draw; if I have an idea for an activity book or a comic, I can do whatever I want because I know I'm the one paying for printing costs and I have to push myself to sell it. There's also a huge amount of satisfaction (and mild terror) when you receive a box of books from the printers and see them in the flesh for the first time! Somebody recently commented on how much they liked the overall look of my books and how I have my own creative brand going on. Although I feel a lot of my book covers look a bit samey (I'm not the world's best designer) I do like how they all tie together. This is also what I like about a lot of my friends that self publish too; they all have a very distinct and unique look to all of their books (I'll be doing a blog post about some of my favourite small pressers soon!). I've been a part of the UK Small Press scene for a while now and have made some awesome friends through it, all of them very talented.

With the exception of Brains Etc, all of my books have been printed through Inky Little Fingers. I cannot recommend these guys enough; they're fast, easy to print through and the quality, especially colour stuff, is outstanding. They are also extremely reasonable price-wise. Although I only have an electronic proof to check before my books go to print (you can get hard copies but they cost extra) I've come to trust that unless I mess something up on my end, they always do a good job.

Hopefully in a few weeks time I'd have printed my Rather Odd Alphabet and I've made a start on another book, this one with a little bit more narrative that I'm hoping will be really fun!

Super Cute Colouring Book!

I decided to make another colouring book, but this time a little A6 book on recycled paper. It looks very cute and is full of little characters to colour!

So much paper...

I had a quick tidy up of my desk earlier on and sorted some of the books I've been working on into piles. That's a lot of paper! I often forget how many sheets get used for roughs, doodles and finals until I collate them all and end up with a wad that weighs a ton in front of me. I've got a huge box full of work up in the loft already and no doubt these sheets will join them when they're all done with. I can't quite bring myself to throw them away at the moment, even to recycle...

Books in shops!

I was rather chuffed yesterday to see the books I worked on in WHSmith! Hopefully this time next year, the farm book I'm working on will be alongside them containing artwork that is just all me! :P

Colouring Book Version 2!

I finally got around to getting nicer copies of my colouring book printed. The new version has heavier stock paper and a nice colour cover! Each copy also comes with a pack of mini pencils.

Jurassic Dorks: The Book!

I'm pleased to say that the Jurassic Dorks' first exhibition was a big success! We all had a great time and got a great response from the people who came to have a gander. For those of you who couldn't make the show, we're selling copies of the show book. It's an epic 32 page, A4, full colour tome signed by all the artists. If you'd like one, they're £12 each and that includes postage and packaging in the UK. For overseas peeps, the price is £16 postage and packing included. Please Paypal myself at venkman(dot)project(at)googlemail(dot)com.

Awesome New Toy!

I'm a huge book fan, but have more than my little house can hold. Most of my precious tomes are up in the loft and I will admit to hanging onto stuff I don't really need more often than not! I made the decision to buy a Kindle so I can continue to buy graphic novels, art books and kid's books but get novels electronically. I have to say, it's bloody brilliant; I've already got over 100 books on it and you get can tons of free books for it. There's a lot of stuff that's very cheap, mainly older sci-fi and fantasy but that suits me fine! Here's a look at my new toy:

Brains Etc. looks pretty good on the Kindle, which bodes well for the digital version being published soon! It's quite a flexible little gadget and I can't stop playing with it. Of course, it's easier to spend more money on books because they download straight away. But it's worth it! Here's a look at some of the books I'm reading at the moment:

I love the Conan film with Arnie and even though I'm not huge into fantasy, this is pretty good. I sometimes find fantasy a bit hard going but pulp master Robert E. Howard makes for an enjoyable sword and sorcery romp!

Another classic series by Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane is a quieter hero than Conan but the adventures he get into are dark and creepy and I like the pacing. Good pulpy action and very atmospheric.

I've just discovered this guy and don't know how I didn't know about him, being a big Lovecraft fan. I'm already enjoying his work and I've only read two stories so far; one about a sorcerer who kills and dismembers his brother (who's also a wizard) only to have the limbs come back, re-form and kill him. This is looking good already!



I just read this for the first time and WOW. What an amazing book. Two men on holiday discover a strange pit and the remnants of a house in Ireland and soon find a journal that belonged to a recluse who used to live in the house. His story is disturbing and almost unbelievable - the house seems to sit on a gateway between dimensions and the man is soon driven mad by attacks from strange pig creatures, time and space start to meld together and no-one else seem to experience quite what he does. Brilliant sci-fi/horror that kept me reading because I NEEDED to know what was going to happen! There's an amazing few chapters where the man experiences time speeding up to where minutes become thousands of years and the universe ends that just left me in awe. Awesome work from William Hope Hodgeson and I can't wait to read more of his stories.

What I love about the Kindle is that all of the above were either available for free or entire collections of the authors work where under £3.00. Money well spent I think. Time to get my sci-fi on! :P

I'm a Confirmed Guest - woo!

I'm now a confirmed guest at the London Film and Comic Con at the end of this month along with my awesome boyfriend, JP. As well as selling paintings, stickers and prints, I'll be doing sketches on the day, with the option to be coloured by JP and printed off all swanky! I'm excited and nervous at the same time as I've already had people enquiring about sketches and need to do a couple of trial runs to see how long it takes me. I've already got a whole bunch of Star Wars characters planned to paint too and need to get on and make more stickers! It's an awesome con that I've gone to for the last two years and I'm really looking forward to being an actual exhibitor!

A couple of other things; my Super Massive Print Giveaway has one more week to go, so if you haven't entered, then you still have time!

Relating to cons and cool geeky stuff, the rather awesome James Eatock of Cereal:Geek has written an IMMENSE guide to the original He-Man series and needs pre-orders to get it published. I would highly recommend getting a copy if you were an '80's kid like me as James is an absolute authority on most animated series' and his insights are a pleasure to read!

What am I reading?

Like many of my fellow bloggers, I'm a bit of a bookophile, so I thought I'd do a post on a few of the books that are currently in my must-read pile at the moment. When I say pile, I mean the pile on my bed that slips off in the middle of the night and scares the crap out of me; the pile in the studio on my desk and the pile on my bedside table. I really wish I had enough space for a massive bookcase, preferably with a cool sliding ladder to whizz up and down the stacks on, possibly singing some kind of musical number. A girl can dream! But anyway, here are the pages of goodness filling my time at the moment:

I've read most of Lovecraft's work but this collection has a few of the longer stories I haven't gotten around to reading. I'm trawling through The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward at the moment, which I have to say, isn't one of his better stories. But I've started it and as soon that one is finished, I can move onto At The Mountains of Madness. Anyone looking for some awesome, truly creepy horror stories should definitely give Lovecraft a go; a lot of the stories centre around creatures from another dimension that make people insane when they break through to our world. Lovecraft's stories also heavily inspire one of my favourite comic book series, B.P.R.D.

There's nothing I love more than nosing through people's sketchbooks and this book is fantastic; illustrators from all over the world share pages from their (sickeningly stunning) sketchbooks and give you a look into their creative processes. Whenever I feel a bit stuck for inspiration, I always have a flick through this. Some of the sketchbook pages in here are absolutely amazing: gorgeous full-colour spreads, amazing life drawings etc. My sketchbooks are full of doodles of ill-proportioned cartoon animals, talking poo and notes that barely even make sense to me when I read them back!

This book an absolute gem; I'm an avid follower of this blog so when this book was released I couldn't wait to get hold of it. It's chock full of amazing surface designers, card and textile designers, you name it, and has been an invaluable source of inspiration for my own greetings card designs. In a very loose sense mind you, when you look at my stuff compared to what's in here!

Ah, Stephen King. He's been criticised a lot as of late for his "pulp speed" output, but I've found a lot of his latest books to be really good. I enjoyed Cell, even though it was yet another take on a society-falling-apart-due-to-virus theme (which I can never seem to get enough of for some reason) and while it was very schlocky, it was great for that very fact. This one is a bit more of a slow burner involving a chap who loses an arm in an accident and suddenly develops the ability to paint other people's presents and the future. So far, so King: troubled lead, wise sidekick, demented old lady, malevolent force manipulating people. I'm a stickler for the classics.

Video games have pretty much dominated my life since the age of about eight; I have a hazy memory of playing Pong at my cousin's house (the one you plugged straight into the TV!) and I've been lucky enough to have followed the evolution of video games first hand from my Spectrum ZX to my Nintendo DS. Sounds silly, but to know just how far video games have come in the last 20 years is still a very exciting thing for me. Whippersnappers these days will never know the anticipation of having to wait for a game to load from a cassette for 20 minutes! This book is an awesome (if slightly outdated) look at one of my favourite pass times.

Making Watchmen stickers this weekend meant getting out this hefty tome to check costumes for characters and I forgot how good it is. I'm still slightly awed at the amount of work that went into this graphic novel, even if it took me bloody years (even after working for 3 in a comic shop) to appreciate it for what it was. There's some gorgeous artwork in here as well as sketches, skematics, storyboards, thumbnails and character design. There's even a page of doodles contemplating Dr Manhatten's willy, which makes me feel a bit better whenever I have a little giggle drawing him in the nude!

I'm a huge fan of Rotovision; they've published some great books on digital illustration and video game art so I was slightly excited when I saw this. It's a really nice book with some outstanding illustration in it; not quite as good as Illustrating Children's Books or Play Pen but it has some good tutorials and looks at all aspects of the children's book market at the moment.

I heart books! :D

Rosemary's Baby

After much searching, I finally got hold of a copy of the novel, Rosemary's Baby. RB is one of my all time favourite films; the build-up of creeping horror and suspense is amazing and the ending is one of the bleakest in modern cinema! I have to say, so far it doesn't disappoint and reading the novel, I realise what a faithful adaptation the film is. Even Ira Levin was impressed that Roman Polanski pretty much filmed the movie scene-by-scene from the book. Even the dialogue is spot on.

I'm actually surprised at how hard it is to find the novel of Rosemary's Baby in the UK; Ira Levin is a staple of modern horror/thriller writers (he even has a street named after him in Silent Hill!), with books like The Stepford Wives, The Boys From Brazil and Sliver to his name. I'm a huge fan of his all-is-not-as-it-seems story-lines and Rosemary's Baby is one of the all-time greats of paranoid suspense. Highly recommended if you haven't read the book or seen the film; it was one of many movies in the late 1960's that changed the face of modern cinema.

Books, glorious books!

Now, let me explain why Twilight is on my reading list before I go any further. Curiosity has drawn me to this much-hyped drivel and I wanted to read it for myself and make an informed decision on whether it's actually any good or not. I've read about 3 chapters so far and the only word that can accurately describe this piece of "literature" is vapid. More on Twilight once I've forced myself through the whole thing...

I recently found Harlan Ellison's short story collection All The Sounds Of Fear in a second-hand bookshop and it's pretty awesome. I usually find sci-fi (well, hardcore sci-fi) a bit hard going but this book is fantastic. The first story of the book, I Have No Mouth, and I must Scream gave me bad dreams for a few nights after reading. I may might have to write a longer review of the story at some point, just because it's so weird and disturbing. Honestly, this guy is f**ked up! In a good way, though. I've been searching out some of his stuff ever since I bought the film A Boy and His Dog, based on one of Ellinson's novels.

Having never seen the film of Picnic at Hanging Rock but wanting to, I thought I'd read the book first and then get hold of the DVD. I haven't started this one yet but the premise sounds uber-creepy. It also sounds like one of those books that never explains why the major event has happens and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

And in keeping with my penchant for stories/films involving apocalyptic storylines, I finally picked up a copy of The Day of the Triffids for a mere £1.50. I've read Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos which I enjoyed and this one doesn't disappoint either. I love the whole "stiff upper-lip" British mentality that comes with sci-fi written in the '50's; it's strangely comforting as well as amusing!