the Wheeler Centre

I spent the weekend down in Melbourne at the Wheeler Centre
where they were having a conference of sorts on graphic novels. I couldn't tell you specifically what I learned but I heard some interesting ideas, saw some nice work I hadnt seen before, met some great people and above all came away completely inspired and fired up about my "Yallourn:Decommissioned" project.

So here are a few more Decommissioned images to celebrate that.

These are just attempts to work out how stuff might look....so do expect to see any of them exactly like this in the finished work.

At the moment I'm really just trying to get the story structure nailed so I've stopped making pretty pictures for the time being. I suspect my next Decommissioned post will be a bunch of rough sketches and footnotes.

Thank you for a good time Wheeler Centre... and great to see you getting behind graphic-novels/comics/etc as a valid form of literature.

Yallourn:Decommissioned

In other exciting, non-sheep/goat related news, Ive just received funding to make a graphic novel/picture book based on the town of Yallourn. The town was built in the 1920s grew in the 50s and 60s to become the cultural centre of its region and then was demolished in the 80s so that they could access the brown coal upon which it was built.

The idea is to build up all the images collage-style out of old paper documents that survived the town's destruction.

So thank you very much Australian Society of Authors. And to celebrate, here's a couple of images Ive done so far to try and establish the visual style of the book.