Food Illustration

Moon Launch!

| rozihath

Good morning everybody!

It’s here! Moon has launched on Kickstarter, and since Wednesday is nearly 50% funded – wow! Thank you all so much!! If you don’t follow my escapades on social media, then let’s start again…

Let me introduce to you Moon: the comic, the Kickstarter, the newspaper.

Moon on Kickstarter
Moon on Kickstarter

Moon is an ethereal and enchanting original comic story about childhood, curiosity and love. In the usual Hathaway style, this comic is very light on words, with it aiming to be a comic more of tender experience than heavy literature. If successfully funded, Moon will be printed as a 24-page, full-colour newspaper comic, in a limited run of 200 copies, staple bound. The mini-tabloid newspapers are printed through Glasgow-based The Newspaper Club (check them out – really cool!), printed on 55gsm newsprint (super touchy-feely). It’ll also be bigger than my usual comics, at 160x280mm. Click here to check out the campaign on Kickstarter!

I came up with the idea from one of many conversations with my partner’s four-year-old son when we saw a large disc inside a storage container on a building site and he told me it looked a lot like the moon. As we all know, childhood fascination and discovery are something I will always enjoy making stories about, and this is no exception! It’s definitely been a fast-moving production as I spent weeks perfecting the story, then spending all-hours drawing up the roughs and artwork for the pages. But we all know I like a challenge.

It’s been just over two years since my Kickstarter for Njalla and it’s been a nerve-wracking experience to try and launch a new campaign. A lot has changed in two years, and the support from the comics community isn’t what it used to be. Although it’s somewhat terrifying to consider whether this project will still succeed or not, it’s also incredibly empowering to see how well it’s done up to now. And this is helped so much by everyone who has supported Moon – so thank you! You all are making this happen!

Here are some snippets below:
Preview1
Preview2
Preview3
You can find the Kickstarter campaign here, along with details of all the rewards. I really really REALLY wanted to include temporary tattoos of moons and storage units in each pledge, but I’ve had to put it as a stretch goal as sadly, I can’t afford to do it otherwise. So.. let’s aim for £1000 and we can all have the matching temporary tattoos, yeah‽
I decided to create this story because I think we all need some child-like fascination and magic in our lives. My wish is for someone to pick up Moon and be transported away from his/her/their troubles and become lost in a dream. There is always time to worry about school, work, money or relationships, and we all deserve to escape – and sometimes just looking at the moon in the night sky does that – but sometimes it takes a story too. If you believe that too, then you know what to do.
Recettes Sucrées 1859 – Illustrated postcards

In other exciting and unrelated news, my good friend and client Recettes Sucréees 1859 is off to the Hampton Court Palace Food Festivals this bank holiday weekend, with her fresh two gold stars from Good Food Awards and her illustrated postcards! More on this next time – but if you’re in the area or visiting the festival, be sure to check them out at stand R15 (and pick up a drunken squirrel brownie if you can – it’s delicious).

And that just about rounds it up! Until next time!

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All or Nothing

| rozihath

Good morning ladies and gents!

So, it’s officially done and dusted. On Friday I graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Northampton and I have a mass of sketchbooks, folders and one certificate to show for it. Although I’ve pretty much been finished up for a month now, but with the likes of D&AD dividing up the time before graduation it definitely feels over now. Onward and upwards, right?

With some good news to kick off my new career of post-graduate-struggling-illustrator, my short 4-page comic Sørgedag has been accepted in to the next Dirty Rotten Comics anthology! I mentioned my process and work on the comic a few weeks back, and I really enjoyed trying something a bit different. I created the comic in both colour and black and white, so the black and white version will be published in Dirty Rotten Comics #8 around mid-August with the colour version being released as part of a compilation I’m working on later in the year. With almost a year since Rejsen was published in Dirty Rotten Comics #5, I shall hopefully be part of the furniture in terms of the Dirty Rotten Comics anthology contributors soon..

Success! Sørgedag will be in Dirty Rotten Comics #8

Pre-orders for Dirty Rotten Comics will open within the next few weeks and I’ll be sure to let you delightful readers know when so you can go and support such a fantastic anthology. Read the Broken Frontier Small Press Spotlight on Dirty Rotten Comics from last year to find out all about the DRC philosophy and what makes it so special, and read all about Sørgedag on my portfolio page.

In other news, as a part of my mass of submissions I’m doing in the next month for various anthologies and collections, I ticked one off the list yesterday in the form of a single page illustration for the Illustrated Woman in History zine. It was a hard choice, with so many interesting stories of women in history, especially with stories like that of Jeanne Baré who is noted as the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, and did so disguised as a man. However, ultimately with my soft-spot for astronomy and space sciences I went with Valentina Tereshkova – the first woman in space. Here’s a peek!

Illustrated Women in History – Valentina Tereshkova

As the flight itself lasted three days from 16th June 1963 I went for a bit of a retro vibe, and I painted my first ever space scene which didn’t turn out to look like some slushy mess, which was kinda nice (I won’t tell you how many attempts it took yesterday, but let’s just say I have a pile of paper recycling). Submissions for the Illustrated Women in History zine are open until 31st August, and you can find out all the information from the website.

Finally, last week I also stretched my illustrative muscles into creating a recipe illustration for the first time. Whilst trying to expand my repertoire, it’s also been fun to try out these new things – also making things flow on a page in this way is pretty similar to how I approach comics. For this first attempt I drew up Chicken Tortilla Soup which is one of my firm-favourites; cheap to make, I can throw it in the slow cooker and forget about it for 6 hours, and then freeze vats of the stuff for meals throughout the month. Delicious! You can check out the recipe here if you’re interested, though I kinda tweaked it and made up the measurements (I’m English. Cup measurements make no sense); I obtained my cooking theories from my highly skilled mother – just chuck enough in until it looks about right.

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised as to how nice it is to paint a garlic clove. Who knew! So that ticks off another area of illustration that I’ve wanted to try for a while, and I’ll add it to the commissions pile in the hopes of getting some new work from it.

Anyway, that’s about it for now! I think this week is the most jumbled of blog posts I’ve had for a while – from comics, to vintage space, to soup. Next on my list of things to do is a 4-16 page comic story I need to write and script out for another upcoming anthology submission.. How exciting! Have a good week everyone, and I shall be back with all the gossip next week. Until then, over and out.

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