MONSTER & CHIPS had its first official outing at the Southbank last weekend, when I held a couple of workshops as part of this year’s Imagine Festival. The events took place just under the Queen Elizabeth Hall, probably better known as the place where the skate-boarders hang out. Part of the space has been walled in to create the Festival Village, which I was sharing with brilliant authors Sarwat Chadda and Clara Vulliamy.
It was my first solo event (although I’ve helped out at others) but there wasn’t any time to be nervous. Both workshops were sold out, so there were plenty of eager faces ready to get down to the serious business of drawing comics.
I started out with a bit of reading to get us into a monstrous mood:
Thank goodness for the microphone – it helps with the silly voices. [Photos pinched from the lovely HarperCollins team’s twitter feed.]
Then on with some character-making with suggestions from the crowd. This tweet pretty much summed it up:
Then it was comic-making time. It was so busy I forgot to take any photos of the comics that the audience made themselves – I really wish I had a record of the imagination, energy, complexity and colour that went into them. So brilliant!
After a bit of book-signing it was back to the writing desk for me: DEADLINES!!!! Thanks so much to everyone who came along – I hope you had fun! And thanks to Nicola, Lizz and the team at HarperCollins for their wonderful support.
MONSTER & CHIPS is officially out on Thursday! Woohoo! All the info here.