Filed under: breaker's end, comic artists, my comics | Tags: books, comics, competition, graphic novels
At next week’s Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds (15th & 16th November 2014) I’ll be at the awards night for the British Comic Awards, and I myself have been nominated for the Emerging Talent award. Specifically for Breaker’s End and my work on Dreams of a Low Carbon Future.
Looks like I’m up against some serious contenders though, such as the formidable Rachael Smith and Alison Sampson and… I think I might just be the underdog here.
I’ll be sure to keep all of my various digits and limbs firmly crossed for good luck until next Saturday, which will no doubt increase my chances significantly.
Filed under: breaker's end, my comics | Tags: art, books, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration, kickstarter
On Thursday the 22nd of August Off Life issue six comes out.
In it is my brand new four-page comic If Not Now then When?
Off Life is a really amazing comics periodical that’s featured such comics masters within its pages as Adrian Tomine and Tom Gauld. It’s available for free in London and Bristol if you find them in a hip coffee house or gallery, but I believe you can also buy them from Foyles on Charing Cross Road and London’s two best comics shops: Orbital and Gosh.
Off Life‘s slogan is ‘Comics for a lost generation’. I like to think I’ve captured that sentiment in my story. If Not Now then When is about a young woman who, with nothing going for her in life and her only friend moving away to Paris, skips town one day and lives out a pathetic little fantasy.
I’ll say no more.
The Breaker’s End Kickstarter campaign only made a quarter of its funding, unfortunately, but copies of the paperback book will still be available to anyone who’d like one.
In the meantime, go and buy Off Life issue six!
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For their generous help with the Kickstarter campaign, many many thank yous to: Paul Gravett, Alex Fitch, Mia Warren, Tom Lowenstein, Toby Litt, Daniel Humphry, Kenny Penman, Richard Bruton, Joe Gordon, and anyone else who helped in any way. Thank you!
Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, books, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration, kickstarter, writing
The Kickstarter to fund the printing of my graphic novel Breaker’s End has now begun.
It’s only £10 (or around $18 for US residents) to get a copy of the complete 200-page book, so what are you waiting for? Read chapter one here.
Breaker’s End is about an ageing couple who live their lives in a tent in a dingy forest somewhere in England. Chloe sells paintings and seashells for a bit of money. Isaac wiles away his days playing a tuneless upright piano someone dumped in the forest years before. It’s miserable, but it’s the only life they know. But then the government passes a bill authorising the sale of England’s remaining forests to private interests, and the simple little life they’ve managed to eke out is split apart…
Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration, writing
That’s right.
On Monday 22nd July, Breaker’s End goes live on Kickstarter, and then we’ve got 30 days to raise at least £5000 to fund the printing of the book for the backers.
This story of Chloe and Isaac living in their shabby forest with an old tent and a piano is one that’s come to mean a lot to me. The artwork is in brush and ink and in the tradition of artful black and white comics of Will Eisner and Craig Thompson. The completed project has come out beautifully. I can’t bear the thought of it sitting in a ring-binder for years to come and neither can you, I’m sure. So I’d like to share it with you, but I need you to get involved.
I worked on Breaker’s End over the course of two years and I really want you all to be able to read a beautifully printed copy of this story. As you’ll know from my earlier posts, the book is completely finished and about 200 pages long and 100% pretty good. All that we need now are your pre-orders so that it can be sent to print!
A printed copy will only be £10, and that includes postage. Once the project makes its funding, you’ll receive your copy within 6 weeks.
I’ll be posting the link for the Breaker’s End Kickstarter page as soon as it’s up. For now, why not read the first chapter of the book here.
Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
The title says it all. I’ve finished drawing my graphic novel; Breaker’s End. It’s ended up being just over 200 pages long and, even though it really doesn’t look like there are 200 there, you can see every single page in the image above.
Nice to get it done before Christmas and the end of the year. I have two big projects in mind that I want to do next; both very different from Breaker’s End and I want to get started on them as quickly as possible since I’m super-excited about both.
Onwards and upwards.
Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, competition, graphic novels, illustration
A long-belated blog-post thank-you to The Observer, Jonathan Cape and Comica for selecting But I Can’t as the winner of the 2012 Graphic Short Story Prize. I still can’t quite believe I won, actually. It’s incredibly flattering to be chosen in a competition with such great past prize-winners as Joff Winterhart and Stephen Collins. Many many thank yous to all the judges and everyone involved.
Apologies for uttering the cliched admonition of every person who’s ever written a blog, but it’s been very quiet on here lately and I apologise for not posting more frequently, but (there’s always a but) it’s only because I have been frantically working on Breaker’s End; the cartoon sweat beads have been flying out of my head as I’ve furiously scribbled my inky path towards finishing this 200-page book. All I can say is that the drawing will be finished very soon, perhaps in two weeks, and then I can maybe start getting things on paper for the other two, three, four long comics that have been brewing in my addled brain during this last year.
The image above is my collection of shells that I’ve gradually collected and bought whilst drawing Breaker’s End. I’ve got nearly a hundred, including ones I’ve collected on multiple expeditions in Folkestone and Clacton, including periwinkles, limpets, mussels, oysters, hermit crabs, cockles and really big scallops in the middle there. There were about a million of them covering the harbour in Folkestone in the summer, so I went down at low tide and helped myself to five or six. The shells in the basket on the left are much more exotic imported shells I bought from a shop, imaginatively named: Shell Shop.
Below are two of the model heads I made for reference purposes for Breaker’s End, allowing me to get all the difficult angles and to really figure out how the characters look in three dimensions. They are pretty creepy. It might be because they’re bald. Hair is hard to sculpt.
Filed under: breaker's end, illustrations, my comics | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
(Click the image for a larger version.) Just a recent scene from Breaker’s End. I thought this one would look nice with a splash of colour. I’m on chapter four of the finished art of the graphic novel now. It’s rather exciting.
Filed under: breaker's end, my comics | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
I’m working on several comics right now, with a mind to entering one of them in to the (deep breath) Observer/Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize 2012. This is the competition’s sixth year and the fourth that I will have entered. Last year my entry was an s.f. comic called Ripe which you can read here.
The simple little panel above is from the strip I’m puzzling over at the moment, titled But I Can’t, about two girls who have an obsession with ufos and alien abductions.
What I really love about this competition is that, giving them a real purpose and a definite deadline, it forces a lot of languishing cartoonists to force something out. I suspect that for a lot of entrants it’s the first comic they’ve ever completed, or the first after a long dry spell. It’s a good kick up the bum to start and (wonder of wonders) finish a comic, which is extremely easy to not do most of the time.
The graphic novel (Breaker’s End) is on a brief hiatus, but I’m tantalisingly close to finishing chapter three, and well over half way through drawing the thing. It’s been a heck of a learning experience, this one, and I can’t wait to see it finished two years after first dreaming it up and scribbling out the first draft. Still a way to go yet though, mustn’t jump the gun.
Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
It’s been quiet on this blog for some time now since I’ve been focusing all my attention on drawing Breaker’s End, which, after working on it for so long, has reached a sort of critical mass and is being propelled rapidly to completion.
After creating the first chapter for Myriad‘s First Graphic Novel competition last year, I had to spend a long time working on the story and producing a full rough pencil draft of the book, but now I’m fully in to the phase of producing final artwork and in a couple of months, it will be complete.
I’ve taken on a lot of influences for this book, studying other artists and writers closely for the effects and techniques they use, such as David Small’s extremely loose, ragged, and oh-so-powerful linework or the warm, heavy quality of light in paintings like A Philosopher by Lamplight by Joesph Wright of Derby.
I became particularly enamoured with a Monet painting; Towing of a Boat. Squint at the image and you’ll see how he’s created one big, very dark shape on the left which defines the whole image. No matter how much you squint you can still tell what’s going on in this painting, and I realised this should be used more in comics; figuring out what big shapes define the scene in each panel, and then using that to communicate what’s happening in the story.
You can read chapter two and chapter one and a bunch of other stuff in the comics section.
The above is a piece I call Mountains of Mars for a project called Vladimir which I can’t say too much about yet. The brief was simply an interpretation of the word ‘majesty’. An alternative version is shown below, with mountains from across the Solar System, however the artwork needed to be red, so this version remains unused, whilst an exaggeratedly red Mars was perfect for the project.
In other news, Breaker’s End is progressing to a very good point. I’m polishing off the ‘full-rough’ version and it’s actually shaping up to be quite close to how I envisioned it. I’m very excited about finally getting stuck in to the finished art so hopefully I will be uploading some soon.
One more thing: I’m to be a featured illustrator in How to Illustrate Children’s Books by Martin Ursell, published by Crowood Press. The book will show examples of my work and an interview with me about my working process and thoughts on illustrating novel-length books!
Corban Wilkin: Illustrator 
