Tag Archives: comic convention

InCON Adventures

April 24, 2017by karencomics Leave a comment

Driving north on Vancouver Island’s Island Highway is always a nostalgic experience for me — I’ve had so many wonderful adventures in the places along it over the last — oh […]

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comics conventions

Cons, Expos, and Festivals, Oh My!

April 13, 2017by karencomics 2 Comments

It’s Convention Season! What does that mean? It means I’m going to be spending the next month-and-a-half immersed in comic culture! Yippee! I’ll have a table or booth at each […]

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Comics, comics conventions

A VanCAF Adventure!

May 25, 2015by karencomics 2 Comments

I’m not sure you can really call something an adventure if everything goes like clockwork, but it was a great way to kick off the new book! After a bit of […]

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comics conventions, It's an artist's life

Camosun Comic Arts Festival!

March 20, 2015by karencomics 2 Comments

Yesterday, someone asked me why I had gotten into comics, and I found myself spinning the long tale of my somewhat winding journey. Today, while inviting everyone on my Facebook […]

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Comics, comics conventions, It's an artist's life

Comics Class: What Now?

February 22, 2015by karencomics 4 Comments

This is the grand finale to the comic class posts! Lots of words this time, as I’ve got a lot of information to impart! There are links scattered throughout, particularly […]

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Comics Class

VanCAF, Ho!

January 5, 2015by karencomics 10 Comments

I just found out today that I’ve been accepted for a table at VanCAF, Vancouver’s own Comic Arts Festival. I was on a waiting list, as space is very tight […]

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Comics

A-Kon — there and back again

June 15, 2014by karencomics 4 Comments

Home at last from a wonder-filled trip to A-Kon, an amazing anime-based convention in Dallas. I’m going to do a bit of a reversal of my social media here; I […]

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comics conventions, It's an artist's life, Spam & the Sasquatch

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Comics Class
Watercolour Basics
Watercolour Wizardry
Technique of the Week
Polymer Clay maquettes

Upcoming Appearances

Camosun Comic Arts Festival
(Click here for website)
April 13 Camosun College, Victoria BC

Curious Comicon
(Click here for website)
May 4 Country Club Centre, Nanaimo, BC

Van Isle Con
(Click here for website)
June 9 Mary Winspear Centre, Sidney, BC

Phenomacon
(Click here for website)
July 6 Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre, Victoria, BC

The Quadra Cats, a webcomic

When the neighbourhood cats meet a takeout-obsessed Alien Cat, they become impromptu ambassadors for Earth! Updates Mondays and Thursdays.

Mermaid Music, a webcomic!

Mermaid music is the story of a girl who accidentally runs away to sea, and finds herself in deep water indeed! Click the image to read the webcomic from the beginning.

All text and images © Karen Gillmore 2014 -2017

...except as otherwise noted. If you share, please link back to this blog — you'll feel a warm glow right in your karma!

Celtic Art

Wolf and the Stones (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Wolf and the Stones (pen & ink)

Eostre (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Eostre (pen & ink)

Celtic Green Man (pen & ink, watercolour)

Celtic Green Man (pen & ink)

Celtic Dragon (pen & ink, embellished version)

Celtic Dragon (pen & ink, outline version)

Elemental Steed: Air (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Water (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Fire (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Earth (acrylic)

Elemental Manifestations: Water (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Fire (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Air (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Earth (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Celtic Seahorses (linocut on banana paper)

Celtic Seahorses (pen and ink)

Celtic Seahorses (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Coloured Pencil

“Two Lips” — from a photo I snapped of a bunch of tulips someone had given me. As the petals started to fall away, they got more and more interesting. This one took quite a long time, lots of burnishing.

“White Rose” — I took a bunch of white silk roses into a class I was teaching one day, and we all had a good time trying to make them look natural, adding backgrounds and suggestions of colour.

“Sheltered” — a demonstration on doing an underpainting in dark grey pencil to establish the values turned into this.

“Broken Seashell” — I like to pick up broken seashells, because their curves are challenging and fun to draw. For this one, I used a technique I often use for figure drawing — woking on toned paper and just picking out the deepest shadow and the highlights with white and black pencils.

“Falling Apples” — When I teach a coloured pencil workshop, I often go buy a bag of apples and hand one out to everyone. Apples are excellent subjects for learning how to build up colour from light to dark. After my demo, he whole class goes back to their tables and becomes very quiet for a while — silence is the sound of creativity! One class I actually had time to draw my apple several times on the same page.

“El Morro” — the famous landmark fort at the mouth of Havana harbour. I got really caught up in the rocks on this one.

“Pink Rose” — One of the most burnished coloured pencil paintings I have ever produced. This little thing is the size of a greeting card, and it took me many hours.

“Bear Hangout” — from a photo I took in Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. There were no visible fences, and everyone wanted to know how I’d gotten so close to the bears! Usually I would just smile and look mysterious.

Woman in Blue — indigo and white Prismacolor pencils on toned paper

Relaxing Woman — burnt sienna and white coloured pencils on toned paper; a fifteen minute pose

The Blues — Indigo and white coloured pencils on toned paper _ ten minute pose

Man Forming a Triangle — coloured pencils on toned paper. Going through my sketches, I was amused to see how many similar poses I’ve drawn over the years — there are only so many ways the human body can fold up, after all. I thought this drawing made an interesting comparison with the previous one.

“Golden Retriever” — coloured pencil. I got the detail of the brush in the background by indenting the paper through a piece of tracing paper with a pencil. The tracing paper protected the working paper from the pencil, and I was able to lightly colour over the indented lines with my coloured pencils, building up layers of mixed colours. I eventually decided the white lines this left were too stark, and went in with very sharp pencils in different colours to tone them down.

Watercolours

“Mount Baker Dreams” — The ferry from Sidney BC to Anacortes , Washington puts in at one of the islands in between. This is what I saw from the dock.

“Sunshine” — funny how cats always find the warm spot in the house!

“Bones of the Earth” — a mountain in the Montana Mission Range that has an oddly shaped top above the treeline. It is not a volcano, but I suspect there is a hollow at the top with a lake. However, I did not climb up there to see.

Wickaninnish Wind — This tree stands by the parking lot at Wickaninnish Beach , in Pacific Rim National Park.

“One Perfect Rose” — an anniversary card I made for my husband some years ago.

“Willow Banks” — part of a large wetland park at the base of Montana’s Mission Mountains that I visited once.

“Rainbow Pebbles” — many of the techniques described here are used in this painting

“Winter Tree” — a Christmas card I did for a friend; the white was all masked off with masking fluid, after which I could paint freely, knowing all that lovely snow would be preserved in pristine white paper.

“Storm Building” — I used a paper towel to lift colour out of a solid sky wash for the clouds, then dripped in a bit of grey, then more water for the backwashes.

pebble sampler — I make samplers of many of the techniques during class, using pebble shapes.

Wildly blooming

“Haunted River” — painted over a saran-wrap texture in multiple glazes; an example of mixing paint on the paper.

“Night Lights” — the background nebula-like blooms of sky colour are salt; the individual stars are dots of white ink.

“Long Beach Sketch” — the backwashes created by dripping water into a wet wash created the clouds and the misty effects in the rocks on the right.

“Edge of the Woods” — I started with very light washes to build up the background and lighter tones of the foreground; the dark trees went in last.

Cuban Tree

The UFOs are coming! Or maybe they are flying hats. Suggested by one of the students, I thought it was a great idea. This demo used salt and gouache to make stars and the explosions (or maybe they are fireworks). The city is just simple brushstrokes with a flat brush.

This demo was to blend a nice sunset wash, and to show how to make very quick trees with brush scribbles.

This demo was to show lifting paint out of a blended wash (and add some more for shadows) to make clouds, and how to make aerial perspective by making distant things lighter and bluer. I wasn’t sure what the landscape was going to be, it sort of evolved as I went along.

Demo to show masking (I masked off the blue areas), and how to draw people in about ten seconds! This is kind of a bizarre picture because the blue areas look like holes in the sky, but I kind of like that effect.

“The Sky’s the Limit” — a tiny painting, 4×6 inches, in which I demonstrated lifting wet paint to reveal the light.

“New Horizons” — watercolour, 4×6 inches

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A quick sketch of a Slow Loris - an incredibly cute little primate whose numbers are being decimated by the illegal pet trade. #slowloris #endangeredspecies #primate #loris #animalart #colouredpencil #animalillustration #wildlife #yyjartist

Managed to get a bit of time for a Zooly drawing today, trying to catch up a bit on the prompts. This was for “mashup” - I grabbed a few of my animal models from the shelf and just started drawing. I think he’d feel right at home in Wonderland! #zoolyweeklychallenge #mashup #animalmashup #impossible #wonderland #animals #creature #critter #art #artistsoninstagram #yyjartist #illustration #animalillustration #childrensbookillustrator

I had a great time at Van Isle Con yesterday (despite being a bit of a zombie from sleep deprivation)! I dusted off my kitty ears that I made for a long ago Halloween, which made me feel like I matched my display (boy do I have a lot of cat books and prints). Maybe one day I’ll get brave and do a full Quadra Cats #cosplay !!! #comics #comicon #comicsconvention #cats #books #vanislecon #vanislecon2019 #sellingcomics

Aw Mom, we wuz sleepin’! #cats #catsoﬁnstagram #cutecats #sleepycats #catsiblings

My table at @curious_comicon yesterday- I had great fun! I’ve never done a con in a mall before, and to my surprise it was a really good venue. The con staff took excellent care of us artists and I had some lovely conversations with folks on both sides of the tables.

Yesterday I was at @curious_comicon in Nanaimo and had the great fun of participating in their art battle! The theme was “May the 4th” so I tried a drawing of Alien Cat and his faithful ship computer MOLLY’s mobile unit with some Star-Wars-ish ships flying around (piloted by cats of course). We had 45 minutes to complete our drawings, so the markers were flying fast and furious! Afterwards, the drawings were given away to an audience member; the young woman who got mine seemed very happy!

I know I haven't uttered a peep in the last week or so about my 100 day/365 day project(s) — I've been just too too too busy to post! (Not to mention FB and Instagram being on the blink!) I'll be adding some more of the sketchbook pages I've pencilled for the Quadra Cats 4 book soon, as soon as I've got them processed; but in the meantime, here is what I did today. It's not officially in my sketchbook, but it IS to do with the QC4 book — 16 pages of thumbnails in preparation for doing the larger, more detailed sketches. I've discovered that this book is going to be way more than the 100 pages or so I was expecting (thus, my choice to do a 100 day project); I'm averaging 5 pages per page of script, and the script is 35 pages long. So, new estimate is 175 pages. That's going to be a very fat book, and I estimate a year to finish it! But once I start finishing the pages, it will go up on the webcomic site, so you don't have to wait that long to read it. I'm really pleased with how this is coming along; I'm really excited to be finally putting the script into visual form! #100dayproject #365daychallenge #thumbnails #thumbnailsketch #makingcomics #quadracats #catcomics #comics #yyjcomics #yyjarts #comicsartist

I’ve started writing out the script next to my layouts. Helps me to keep track of where I am, and somehow it makes it easier to imagine the expressions of the characters. Never mind that I’ve got the whole script right next to me, I’ve got to write it out by hand. Go figure. #100dayproject #100daysofquadracats #catcomic

Day three of my #100dayproject The Quadra Cats are coming in for a landing on their home turf! But Alien Cat’s spaceship, though fully equipped with catnip avoiding sensors, doesn’t recognize cabbage. #100daysofquadracats

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Monthly Archives

Lots of folks liked these posts!

Technique-of-the-Week — Combining Pen & Ink and Watercolour
Technique of the Week — Watercolour Pencils
Technique-of-the-Week — Watercolour Monotypes
Pen and Ink
Technique of the Week — Collage, beyond the Magazine
Paper for Comics
Technique of the Week — Celtic Knotwork
Practice, Practice, Practice! — Achieving right-brain bliss through figure drawing
Black Cat Evolution

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