I’m excited to announce that I’ll be part of Medway Open Studios this year, where you can buy my books, grab a piece of unique art, get a preview of a new comic, do a workshop, and have a chat (and maybe eat some gluten free cookies)! More info to follow, watch out on social media for announcements.
From ‘Three Instances Of Not Meeting Jarvis Cocker’
Just thought I’d do a little post about the various things I’ve drawn over the past few years since getting back into drawing and art.
I think it shows the development of my skills, and how much I enjoy trying out new art techniques.
(These are pictured in B+W but the originals are in colour.)
Above shows a spread from Cat Dreams (2021) – a small pamphlet (24 pages) about being a cat person. Drawn mostly in pencil and watercolours, scanned in then using filters in Photoshop.
A spread from My Mind Is Free (2023). My adaptation of my play of the same name about human trafficking and the book that started me on the journey back to drawing! 144 pages drawn mostly in pencil/pen, then scanned it to add colour and texture in Photoshop, then towards the end of the process I started using Procreate too, so if you use Photoshop or Procreate you might recognise some brushes/effects in the spread above.
Above shows my favourite spread from Three Instances Of Not Meeting Jarvis Cocker (2024) – an autobio-fictional memoir – set in London in the 1990s (60 pages). Whilst trying to get an interview with Pulp, a young journalist encounters love and loss. Drawn in Procreate, with a few preliminary sketches on paper, plus what you can’t see above as it’s in B+W is that I used gelli printed backgrounds throughout the story.
Finally – we have a few illustrations that I’ve done for Wordsmithery books.
My cover of Confluence magazine issue 14 (Feb 2023). Individual elements of the image are separated and illustrate the poems and stories throughout the magazine. This image and the bee one after it were created in Procreate.
Inspired by Nature and old buildings around the Medway and Thames estuaries.
And finally, here is a bee from the charity anthology A Commonwealth Of Wings.
You can order all these books from Wordsmithery. Confluence has its own website if you wish to order that issue.
Three Instances Of Not Meeting Jarvis Cocker is not really about not meeting Jarvis Cocker, it’s a story about loss and the loss of love of all kinds.
Some of it is based on things that happened adjacent to the author’s life. She did work in journalism in the 1990s. She did almost meet Jarvis Cocker on a number of occasions. She did have a flatmate who died, but the character of Hannah is entirely fictitious. She stands for all the people in the author’s life that are no longer in her life.
It’s about not only the loss through death, but also the loss of friends as you get older.
Printed in full colour on 120gsm recycled paper, with 250gsm recycled cover, Three Instances Of Not Meeting Jarvis Cocker, is a fictionalised memoir.
“A sprawling campsite consisting of beach huts, cabaňas, as far as the eye could see; palm trees; a bright turquoise ocean lapping; it was Playa del Carmen, Mexico, 1996.
I looked it up on Google, it’s nothing like that now. Though I don’t know why I expected that it would be.
...”
You can read the rest of the story on the Litro website
I have really gotten into drawing insects, it seems! These bees are from the illustrations for Wordsmithery’s charity poetry anthology in aid of The Bumblebee Conservation Trust. You can buy the book here. Profits go to the charity to help with their important work.
Poems by 24 poets, as there are 24 species of bumblebee in the UK.
The poets are: Patience Agbabi, Sean Alayo, Rachel Bower, Jane Burn, Mark Connors, Zack Davies, Sarah L Dixon, Barry Fentiman Hall, Sam Hall, Maggie Harris, Sarah Hehir, Pauline Holmes, Philip Kane, Knuckles, Bill Lewis, Maria C McCarthy, Rosemary McLeish, John McCullough, Jennifer A McGowan, Jessica Mookherjee, Bridget Nolan, Sue Proffitt, Sarah Tait, Jonathan Terranova.
I am very happy that my illustration ‘Estuary’ and details from it, have been used as the cover and illustrations throughout the book.
You can buy issue 14 of Confluence here
Working on various illustrations for a poetry book about bumblebees.
My graphic novel in progress My Mind Is Free was longlisted for the LDC Prize 2021.
My Mind Is Free is a graphic novel adaptation of my play of the same name, but with the opportunity to flesh out the characters and really explore their journeys and how they got into the situation they find themselves in. Its development began on my Arts Council England funded DYCP award. I am currently about half way through the first draft.
My Mind Is Free tells the story of four people who are thrown together (literally) in the back of a van, which is transporting them who knows where, for a dark and terrible reason. This is the first time I have drawn anything in almost 30 years, and it has been a real learning process – developing an understanding of how telling a story in pictures and words varies from telling a story in words alone.
I was creative from a young age. I always loved writing and art at school, but was persuaded art wasn’t a viable career path, then a job as editor of a magazine happened, and a number of other reasons conspired so that I ended up going headfirst into writing and not thinking at all about art apart from some tiny bits of doodling over the years. Journalism, editing, making small and large scale community literary projects (as Wordsmithery) and writing fiction and plays followed.
The pandemic and the enforced pause to face-to-face literary events gave me a chance to reflect on whether I needed to develop some different skills, or maybe reawaken the ones that might be dormant, and find a different way to communicate with people – that wasn’t so focused on face-to-face interactions. Could I make my play into a graphic novel? How might the language of telling stories vary between the two media?
It was so exciting to get the Arts Council funding to be able to spend a year immersed in graphic novels; researching, reading, talking about, learning how to put the story together with images, finding a style – which I am still exploring – but it is a format that I have fallen totally in love with and I have developed plans for several other books too.
I was delighted that the first 12 pages of the book I have been working on for the last year was longlisted for the LDC Prize – just got to finish the rest now!
You can find some other illustrated short stories – ‘Cat Dreams’, about my relationship with cats, and ‘Aground’, an illustrated team-up with Barry Fentiman Hall’s short story – in my new Etsy Shop SamHIllustrations.
My creative non fiction piece inspired by a friend’s experience of learning that her roots were not where she thought they were, can be found in this beautiful looking publication: which you can buy here.
Sam Hall... 