Lakes International Comic Art Festival

LICAF is one of my favourite events of the year. It's the only proper comic event in Cumbria and it's usually fantastic. It's in its third year now and is continuing to get better year-on-year. This year the guestlist was just fantastic. Scary Go Round's John Allsion; the writer and artist of one of my favourite webcomics was attending. As was Phillip Reeve, who wrote the phenomenal Mortal Engines book series, which is one of my biggest influences in art and design. And finally, there was Mattias Adolfsson. I've mentioned him on this blog before, but to meet him in person AND attend his art workshop was just fantastic.

LICAF is quite different to a lot of comic conventions around the country. Firstly, the venue is far smaller. Rather than the likes of Thought Bubble in Leeds, or MCM Manchester,LICAF takes place in the small town of Kendal, famous for its amazing Mint cake, and a music festival that no longer takes place there. But because of this it feels far more special. As there are no buildings big enough to house the whole event, it takes place across a number of buildings across town. Because of this a lot of the shops in town put
up displays and special events for the festival. It also differs from most in that there is a heavier focus on workshops  and talks. Sadly as a result there is no cosplay culture there. But it's not really that kind of event. It feels more like a celebration of artists and artwork than a convention for fans such as Thought Bubble. It's quite special.

John Allison

The first thing that attracted me to LICAF this Year was the announcement of John Allison, the writer and artist of Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, and the writer of Giant days. Bad machinery, his current project, is a supernatural mystery series set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Tackleford. The cast mostly consists or a group of six schoolchildren who start secondary school at the start of the comic's run. What's really nice about it is the way the characters have progressed. they're all progressing towards the end of school, and the series has matured with them. I think in essence it's a coming of age story. With ghosts. 

As it stands the Bad Machinery format is ending soon as the characters are finally outgrowing the setting. But from what John Allison has shown with his many side-stories over the years, the best is still yet to come. Above is a picture of himself, drawn by him, and below a page of Bad Machinery

Phillip Reeve

Phillip Reeve was a huge surprise for me in therms of Kendal. I'd already firmly decided I was going to be attending, and hadn't noticed his name anywhere about the festival. But it was thanks to a lucky coincidence that one of my friends on facebook (who I also saw at the festival, who also managed to
meet him) was reposting that his Mortal Engines series was getting a re-release with the original cover art. That led me to Phillip Reeve's website, where I learned that he had written a new sci-fi book recently called Railhead, and that as part of its publicity, along with the publicity for his younger childrens series Pugs Of the North, he would be visiting the festival. I have to say, out of all the guests of the festival, getting to meet Phillip Reeve was just amazing. 

Mortal Engines, the series he's most known for, was my favourite book series growing up, and still holds that place now. It's very dark in places, and has the highest body count of any 'children's book' I've read. But what really inspired me was the universe: a world of moving cities. If you've ever seen my artwork, there's some pretty big ties to the work of Reeve.

Mattias Adolfsson

I've already posted about him here before so I'll keep this fairly short. Adolfsson is a Swedish illustrator known for his surrealism and his level of detail. I first encountered his work on Deviantart after I'd begun to take my robot art more seriously. Finding someone that good was actually a little demoralising though. I'd just begun and seeing someone who was doing what I aspired to do to such a degree of success was a little scary at first. But as I progressed, I began to like his work more and more. I think it took a while to appreciate that we weren't both doing the same thing. Whilst I always aimed to keep a sense of realism in my work, Adolfsson always pulls in the other direction towards the surreal. His works are more satirical whilst mine are more sci fi. And while his works are far looser in construction, mine are far smoother, with an almost digital cleanness.

Okay I rambled a little there. One of the best parts about meeting Adolfsson in Kendal was that he did a workshop about spontaneous art and about creating fantastical worlds. We started with  an exercise in drawing faces, where we were told to draw one part of one person's face, and then to move to someone else and draw part of some else's face, until you had a face made entirely of other

people's faces. That was to teach us about not worrying if things don't turn out very realistic, as well as teaching us to work with what's there. Next we had to try and draw people without looking at5 the paper or lifting up the pen. Mine turned out...quite badly. That sort of thing is not my speciality. Next we had some quick drawing cues to sketch out. We had about a minute or two for each picture. The first cue was An Armed peanut. The second was A Polite Jellyfish. Then came Spilled Milk, Fourth was A Sad Robot. Then was Your Worst Fear. I actually went for my second worst fear there as I didn't have enough time to draw a dentist. Next we were told to draw three character facing different directions. But then halfway he told us that when we get bored to start drawing things in front of the characters, and that whenever we got bored, just draw something different. This was one of the biggest insights into his work, as he talked through a lot of the things he did when he was drawing like this. He tended to favour elephants when he's getting bored as they fill a lot of space very quickly. Finally came a challenge very similar to that of Rob's lecture a few weeks back. We each had one minute do draw something, then we had to pass the paper to the next person. We ended up with some pretty crazy stuff. Above is a piece called 'Crowded' and to the left is a self portrait. Below is my work from the session. And a bit of everyone else's too.

Wrapping Up

That's nowhere near the full account of the festival, but the rest of the time was taken up with me geeking out massively as lots of my favourite artists were everywhere. I also managed to meet Max Sarin, the new Giant Days artist, and almost managed to catch Kate Beaton, the amazing artist and writer of Hark! A Vagrant. I additionally bought far too many things. But I always do at these things.

So yeah. that about wraps it up til' next year. Thanks for reading if you made it this far.

(Left is Max Sarin's art. Below Is Kate Beaton's)