Stone the crows, been a busy week! Here are some things that appear in this update that should be three or four posts.
Moss Fear for Colour Collective
Threadless art prints & tees
Fears for hire
Moss Fear for Colour Collective
Dem green eyes though! This week’s Colour Collective shade was Vert Pre. Bright green to most of us aye? I knew I wanted to use Moss for the image. I was debating green streaks or splodges. Accidentally filled the eyes vert pre and yup, I reckon that nailed it by mistake. I need to get Moss into some of the fears stories. In my postcards from the in-between series I had him towering over Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. He was blue back then because, Scotland.
Threadless art prints & tees
The long awaited and advertised overhaul has happened! Have a gander at the Little Fears new shop front.
New product photography, a smattering of new designs, and yes the tee with Fuen bang in the middle will be returning. I need to get the imagery done for it first. Art prints are available from $12, so that works out better for our American friends who had a starting price of £12 ordering from my Etsy store. A quick preview? Sure, why not!
Fears for hire
My lease extension just came through. Ten months of cock-up, three years too late. Thanks, Land Registry and E&M! Twits… So I can get my house sold (finally), and I now have oceans of free time until a buyer is forthcoming. Do you have any work for a freelance illustrator, writer, PR gremlin, computer repair guy who’s a legend at sourcing weird and wonderful things? Drop me an email to fears@gmx.co.uk, and we can talk!
There’s been a lot of blog posts on this usual non-bloggy website recently right? I certainly hope there’s not too many of them. If you feel your getting spammed by me, let me know in comments. Useful feedback is always appreciated.
This post goes back to the stuff I said I would post here four months ago and never did. As I have said in previous posts, I write six stories, draw six tiles and doodle one asset every working day. How many do you see? Barely a fraction makes it online. Mostly because I produce a lot of chaff (don’t we all), so I discard the worst. Some I save for a rainy day. Some I intend to give away to Patreons, both digital and physical copies. Some are for saleable artworks (see below).
I’ll confess, that’s just an excuse to show off some banging new product photography that’ll be arriving on my Threadless store soon.
Some of the pictures I doodle are intended to be drawn just for the sake of drawing them. Because I enjoy doodling them and would like to share them. Vulture is one such creature. I originally drew him in black and red. Then I saw Colour Collective were having a Timberwolf grey theme this week and DMStrachan’s Flickr group, Scribblers Cove, had a Second Life exhibition featuring whimsical art. A quick modification, decorate it a lil digitally and it would be rude not to join in right?
And hey, don’t be hating on him cause he looks a bit mean. Vultures provide a necessary environmental function. It’s not their fault there were at the back of the line when Creation was handing out good looks…
Some links for if you want to join in or nobble some of my wares.
The audio was recorded some months back and left on my hard drive. The sound quality isn’t as good as my current video works, so the Fears tossed a slideshow into the mix for me, and Bodom Bomp, a free course for you all on Skillshare. There’s a bit of rabbit about it below.
Hello, I am Peter, and I am the writer and illustrator of the little fears.
I was in the fortunate position of working from home a number of times for my old job, and have spent the last year writing, drawing, blogging and freelancing from home.
One of the major issues that we face as home workers staying productive. Keeping yourself productive can be difficult at home when there’s no manager breathing down your neck and a wealth of home comfort distractions to nobble your attention.
In this class, I will be covering how to manage your time for the most effective work output. Setting personal goals, coping with lack of direction and allowing yourself time for reflection. Tips for staying healthy, which have a huge impact on your productivity and finally how to deal with people as a positive and negative to your productivity.
Little Fears presents: Spiders – Free for 3 more days
Hey, there rabble you still have three more days to grab a free Kindle edition copy of spiders. Links are at the bottom of this post. The rest of this post will cover the closure a book can bring.
The Little Fears books give me closure on 3-4 month blocks of stories.
I had a comment from Phil Huston the other day, “Tell me. There is joy in putting a project on the shelf? “
Yes. For me there is. I like finishing projects. My end date moves all the time for every project, but generally, I like to conclude things. Finishing a project gives me a tremendous sense of freedom and excitement for the next project. The Little Fears as they currently stand have enough tales written to keep posting one new story a day until 2024’ish. About 2,000 stories left to publish. I’d like to get to get the Little Fears to 2027. A full ten year run of Fears daily tales!
When I created the first book, January, it was about 96 stories long. Three months of stories. It felt like a good length book. At the time it also allowed me to, well, literally close the book on the first three months worth of Little Fears. Mentally that enabled me to get on with putting together Capricorn and Spiders. The next book in the series will be Hydra. Self-contained as are the previous books, but with a running theme of Hydra seeking his identity. Imagine being told you only existed as a hope or a dream. Well, that’s all Hydra is. We can explore that idea of the unknown identity, even in classic Fears style. The following book, Grey Moon, centres entirely on our three favourite women, Fuen, Yuffie and Reala. All are working in a bar on the road to the afterlife. 90’ish stories that each flow into each other.
After that, we visit a post apocalyptic landscape, where we met a new rabble of Fears. Again, 90’ish tales forming a single story throughout now told from multiple perspectives. Lots of the usual Fears humour and along with it, some, drama flash fiction. After that another set of 90 tales, this time following a pun filled Little Fears murder mystery investigated by DCI Lily and Inspector Sally.
The point being in all this is that as the Little Fears move on on this site, the direction changes a few times. Always in 90’ish story blocks which take 3-4 months each to publish online as one story per day.
Ambling back to the original quote, with January, Capricorn and Spiders, they gave me closure on a 3-month block of stories. In the future, the Little Fears books will give me closure on a complete story arc. For someone who likes finishing projects and moving on, yes, putting those books on the shelf does bring me joy.
Have you got Spiders yet?
If you haven’t grabbed your free copy of Spiders yet, you have until Sunday! Take the links below. Want a copy on your local Amazon and can’t find or buy it? Let me know in comments. If you leave me a good review, please do let me know, as I cannot place Amazon reviewer names to blogs. Would be nice to give you an acknowledgement in a post here.
Hello followers, subscribers and assorted paid up members of the rabble. As the post title says, I am saying thank you. Again. Because y’all mean a lot right now.
You may have noticed my postings have gone from precise times (8 am GMT) to erratic and all over the shop. That’s because this is where I currently live.
Yup. No floor. Decorating the London home so I can sell up and move to Scotland. It’s rather disruptive! Not helped by a lack of internet. My land line is somehow so knackered I cannot power the phone from the phone line. Think my videos are uploading at funny times of day and night? That’s just me hitting upload, going to bed and hoping they are all done by the morning. But hey, it works! So let’s keep creating and putting it out there! It’s only temporary, as are most issues in life.
Amidst the DIY related carnage on my home, right now, the support of you all, however it comes, is more appreciated than ever.When your house looks like a shed, every bit of encouragement is that extra bit more effective. From buying prints, tee’s, books, supporting on Patreon to liking, commenting on sharing my tales. It’s all appreciated and motivates me more than usual.
I shall be releasing the third book (finally, haha, oh god that again…) next week. I’ll put the announcement out to all you lovely folk and for five days from release, the Amazon Kindle edition will be free. I don’t do sales once a book has been out for a while because I feel it’s disrespectful to the people who support me and pay full price for digital and paperback books. By offering new books nobody’s bought at full price yet for free for five days on release to subscribers, that’s a thank you where nobody loses.
Cheers for sticking with us. I shall endeavour to continue delivering the most awful, cheesy and groan inducing punch lines this side of the fearful universe.
I’m back! I got the missus and mutts up to her parents home. I now have an empty flat, mostly decorated, and soon to go up for sale. Trying to catch up with everyone in the blogosphere. Crikey, you guys, have been busy.
Next part of doodling the Little Fears. This time I want to give an outline of the individual illustrations I use for art prints, Threadless and logos.
I mentioned before I doodle six panels for stories and write six stories a day. For the stand alone illustrations, I doodle one to three a day, but I only aim to get one new character drawn per day.
I often draw a single character then scribble shapes around it. Recognize this lady?
I know almost nothing about what you are meant to do with digital art packages and proper art materials, so I stick to drawing with Posca paint pens and white paper. Regardless of what colours the characters end up, I try to stick to black, red and blue because they are easier for me to isolate on a computer.
I scan or photograph the doodles, get them onto my laptop when I isolate all the shapes and move them about until I am happy. I often soften the edges, but not so much they appear entirely smoothed. The texture is part of the appeal of my style, so I need to keep some lumps and bumps in there.
I use free software on my laptop, for those that are looking for a solid art package but cannot lay out the money for Photoshop try these.
Once on they look how I want them, I usually save them as PNG’s with transparent backgrounds. For the artists and designers, yes, I do know there are better file formats for me to use, but PNGs work for me.
I can then use these images for…
Book covers.
Art prints.
Logos.
Threadless T Shirts.
And YouTube and SkillShare videos.
Now there’s the magic. Not only can I draw from these images for future characters in the Little Fears, but six characters I have not posted here yet have an entire 90 tale story arc built around them. As I have been drawing one every day since January 2017, it also means I have a massive pool of characters to dip into when I want to introduce a new character to the Fears. Every character in the Little Fears was drawn on their own before being put into any of the tiles.
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Some Skillshare course, not mine, for you to browse this week. Maybe something to inspire or teach you to create something awesome.
GIMP is the free art package I use as a replacement for Photoshop. It’s a community run project has lots of free plugins and fancy brush packs on Deviant Art. This course is huge. About 6 hours long. It covers all the tools you need to know.
Angela is public domain and open source enthusiast. I took the course because it was a different way of creating comics. It turns out she’s GIMP user too.
Continuing the Creative Process blog posts. I am splitting the doodling the Little Fears into two parts. Part one is about the tiles you see posted here daily. Part two deals with assets I digitise, print and sell.
I touched on illustrating the tiles in the last post. I get the photos from Unsplash.com, a website that gives away Copyright Zero images. Meaning you can use most of them wherever you want, even for commercial purposes. I crop them to squares and create collages through the Pixlr App on Android by Autodesk, then print them off 6 to a page.
I always print them on basic 80gsm paper as I like the texture and as you all know, I love textures! I nearly always use Posca Paint Pens. They are pens, the ink is quite literally an acrylic paint.
I have on occasion mixed in Papermate Flairs, fine tipped felt pens. They lack texture and of course there’s no white, but they still look good and offer a different colour selection. See the black, teal and purple below.
And good grief, do I have a deep love of using Tipp-Ex for white! Would you look at the texture on this? Tell me that isn’t sexy!
The end result is a sheet of six images, which I then scan at 600dpi, crop into individual squares to post here.
It’s worth noting that when I finished the first book (Little Fears Presents – January), I realised I needed to draw the images so I could crop them into 1700 px by 1200 px images. Squares in a book look awful except for square books. I had a dilemma on the first book to crop the images or charge about £20 instead of £12 for the books. Yeowch. Life’s about compromise I guess.
I mentioned the chicken and egg scenario in the last post. Do I doodle first or write the accompanying tale first?
Well, when I started I wrote and doodle about the same time. Six per day, every day, matching the characters in doodles to the stories. I do a set of 120’ish doodles and tales per month, but I discard quite a few so I have sets of about 90. Each set works as its own book and later on, story arcs.
When I got the 4th set of 90 doodles, I sat down with all the photos I had printed not used and filled them all in, then wrote the stories around them. That didn’t work for me at all. I was able to write all 90 tales for the characters, but I just felt they all looked to samey. They lost their personality.
When I got onto the next 90 that would form Reala, I wrote the tales first and doodled after. That left me with a stronger visual theme throughout the images. It was such a stark contrast; I ended up going back and redrawing half of the previous 90 panels for Hydra.
Going forward, I now write the tales first and doodle after. Usually in batches of 6 or 12. The illustrations later this year are more specific to the story. Did you notice that about the horror stories and, for those that read it, Little Fears Presents – Capricorn? The stories and doodles tie together a little better than some of the humorous Fears. The horror tales and Capricorn were about the 5th or 6th book I originally wrote. It just came out better than I initially believed it would and slotted in quite nicely onto the website. So I put that before the second Little Fears humor book.
With that, I have a few course suggestions for the artistically minded readers of the Little Fears. As always, there’s a no obligations $0.99 fo a 3 month trial to Skillshare giving access to thousands of courses.
I keep getting asked about my creative process about the moment. Here on the blog, on social media and in real life. So for the next few weeks, I will post a wee bit about how I create the Fears and attached images.
First of all, the writing of the tales. I find doing something every day, even for a few minutes, can help maintain both quality and quantity of whatever I am creating. Simple daily practising. Part of my morning routine is to write six tales. I used to write whatever was in my head, so I got a mixed bag of stories each day. In the Fears future, the stories have themes and plots throughout, so now I write six separate stories per day, but to a theme or around a plot point.
I usually discard three of them and keep the three best. As I only post one story per day here and use the rest further down the line for books, this gets me miles ahead of where I need to be writing wise. I am currently writing tales that won’t be posted online until 2021. Compiling them into books, ninety at a time, also leaves me writing my 13th book today. I have so far only released two.
That does have a downside that I can barely remember what I have written. Further down the line in the Little Fears story, the books develop a plot throughout. So they consist of ninety or so flash fictions like you currently read here, all individual and they will be readable as a stand-alone story, but they have a strong theme or plot throughout.
An example of this would be Reala, the 5th book. She finds herself in a pub on the road mentioned in a few Fears tales. Serving drinks to wandering spirits. In one chapter of twelve gags, she has a troupe of penguins in the bar. All twelve stories can be read independently as jokes and dramas, but they form a single narrative of them arriving, causing havoc, then getting slung out.
Past the 5th book, the stories run throughout entire books. Plot planning can be tricky when you are generating stories so fast your memory cannot keep up.
It’s worth saying as well, for each short story, I usually write with the punchline or twist in mind and steer the story towards it. That’s easy to do when your fiction is as short as mine. For the longer narrative, I have a vague idea of where I am heading, but rarely know if it’s the final destination until I get there. Occasionally I have a final scene in mind, but that’s always an epilogue scene, not a final encounter scene.
The last part of this is the chicken and egg question. Do I write the stories or do the accompanying doodle first? I used to write and doodle six of each a day and would mix and match using characters I had just drawn, or redraw a panel for a tale.
When I got the 4th set of 90 doodles, I sat down with all the photos I had printed not used and filled them all in, then wrote the stories around them. That didn’t work for me at all. I was able to write all 90 tales for the characters, but I just felt they all looked to samey. They lost their personality. When I got onto the next 90 that would form Reala, I wrote the tales first and doodled after. That left me with a stronger visual theme throughout the images. It was such a stark contrast; I ended up going back and redrawing half of the previous 90 panels for Hydra.
For anyone wanting to get into writing or brush up on some writing skills, I have a few course suggestions for you from Skillshare. As always, a 3-month premium subscription to Skillshare costs just $0.99 and lets you visit thousands of online classes in all sorts of subjects.
By Sarah Anderson. I reckon most of you have seen her comics somewhere online. I would go as far as saying she’s one of the most famous webcomic writers on the internet.
By Christine Nishiyama. Ignore the picture quality. The content of the class is good covering structure, character development, dealing with word counts (yep that appeals to me!) and coming up with story ideas.
By Susan Orlean of the New Yorker. Not aimed at us fiction writers, but, she covers everything in some depth for a 1-2 hour course. The course includes dialogue, descriptions and story elements. A lot of us subconsciously pull details of our real life into our writing, so I found this course pretty helpful.
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If you would like to purchase either of my currently released books, please visit the Amazon links below.
Something I have been playing with on social media this week. In all honesty, I think it works better as a square with my marks on and writing on. However, the below was for Twitter this week, during the UKs epic heatwave.
God above it’s been hot, but my old boss insisted on having the air con on full blast. It used to give me a headache it was so cold. May as well have been working in a refrigerator. A short 2 weeks later, I am back at home, trying to get back into the swing of freelance life.
I have an empty schedule work-wise, with an imminent move in a few weeks time. So if any of you fine folks have any work for me, from website logo design to book cover illustrations, give me a holla!
I am having quite the argument with Amazon about the release of my third book. I browsed quite a few self-publishing platforms a few months back. They are all notoriously bad when there’s a problem of their own doing. In this instance, they massively misprinted my third books demo copy. Getting them to confirm this isn’t going to happen on release has been a pain in the arse. Anyone waiting for the third book, sorry, it may not be released this month as intended.
If you want to purchase my first or second books, you can grab them at the links below.
As many of you know, I’m planning a house move in the coming months. I got offered a few weeks consultancy at my old firm and took the opportunity to boost my income for a few weeks. I’m actually enjoying it. With the knowledge that it’s temporary, I can relax more about my commute. I don’t start until 10 am and I leave at 5 pm. My relationship has changed with everyone there too. It’s easier stepping back in 6 months after leaving for a couple of weeks than it was seeing the same people in the daily grind.
Attack of the killer day job. A short life event where the hero will survive.
In the meantime, I have stopped pushing the Little Fears a touch and gone looking on Skillshare for some marketing courses to use a lil info from when I finish at the day job and get back into writing.
The first one I tried was a course by Stephanie Pereira from Kickstarter. This is a free course and it’s not bad. She discusses defining your audience and finding them on the net. Something I often forget. I certainly need to look out for reading and writing communities other than those on WordPress.
The second course I watched was by Tyson Wheatley, a well-known photographer on Instagram. It’s premium, but if you pay as little as $0.99 you get 3 months full access to every course on Skillshare. The guy knows his stuff. He covers apps to use to edit photos, creating a synergy between your images and growing your following.
Instagram is a bit of a sticking point for me. I have nearly 1300 followers there, but I do not post daily and I am always unsure of the best way to link posts there back to the LittleFears.co.uk home. Growing the community isn’t the problem for me there, it’s what to do with it when I have it. I shall be trying a few more courses before the week is out. Would be nice to have a fresh plan for when I return to the Fears next week.
Little Fears 