Networking at Thought Bubble

After the Nobrow portfolio visit I started to feel confident enough to do a little networking and spoke to a guy called Paul Fryer who has a little zine comic called Rockfall. What I liked about his work was that it was black and white and he used a considerable amount of cross-hatching. I asked him a few questions about his techniques and how he started out. He told me he had been working on his own comics for over 8 year and that he held down a normal job until he became established enough to leave that work behind and concentrate full time on his artwork. We spoke a little about technique and he told me he used the same pens that I use to make his work, but also said although he loves cross hatching it is very time consuming and may not be ideal if you need to produce something quick for a client. I had been worrying a little about my technique over the last few weeks and this kind of confirmed to me I need to ease off on the cross hatching a little or find a quicker way of working that’s not so laboured. I asked Paul if I could show him my work to get some feedback and he was happy to help. He was impressed with my character designs and said he liked the hand drawn sketches and thought my work would transfer well into either animation or children’s books. I asked him how I could go about getting my name out there and Paul suggested posting up work on DeviantArt as it’s a good start to getting your work seen by a global audience although one criticism he had about Deviant was "don’t expect to get any useful feedback on your work there". I bought a couple of Paul’s comics and he kindly sketched some of his characters inside the covers for me. He asked if I had a business card, epic fail on my behalf, but I jotted down my email address for him.

You can check out the work of Paul Fryer here