Corban Wilkin: Illustrator

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.