Peptober Day 1: Reintroduction

My name is Anthony Woodward. I'm an Australian-born cartoonist who has been living in Canada since 2014. I have been drawing comics since around 1998, however, I didn't feel like I discovered my current comic sensibilities until I started art school around 2003. During my first year in art school, I started a free zine called 7 Pages. I started it after discovering a free photocopier and also inspiration from a fellow student who had started a weekly photocopied poster zine. I f=go by the name of awcomix online, which stands for my initials AW.

Seasons of my art practice

1998-2002: Pre art school I had been self-publishing comics. They’re are so different than what I'm doing now, it's almost like a different artist. I had a very limited idea of the comics world and had some contact with a few artists through picking up their books in zines stores.

2003-2006: Art school was enjoyable, but also tricky being a comic artist. I spent a lot of time trying to make that part of me fit into the Demands of art school. 2003-2005 felt like a fertile time for comics and zines. I started this blog and thanks to accessing university computers and the internet, I was able to discover new artists and ideas. Alternative comics were getting bigger than ever and a new trip to the comic store would yield some new books and artists that I wasn't familiar with before. 

After graduating, I started teaching drawing and digital art at the same university. However, wanting a more permanent and dependable career I studied further in Libraries. 

2007-2010: In 2008 My wife who is Canadian and our newly born son moved to Canada for just under a year. I had delays in getting my visa which delayed getting work. It was around this time that I started a daily comic diary process. This felt like an amazing new phase for me for personal artistic growth. Like when I did my '7 pages' zine, I felt I had found my voice and an audience to follow along. and we ultimately decided to move back to Australia.  I then decided to pursue a career in libraries and we also decided to expand our family. Our daughter was born in 2010.

2011-2013: The next few years were a high point in my personal life but a low point in my art life. I started working full-time in libraries and had two small children to keep me busy. I tried to keep up my art practice but drawing that used to takes a few days would end up taking months to complete. I started feeling more disconnected from the comics community as it was harder to get away to Melbourne for events and group projects. Despite this, I was able to attend three comics camps which would have to be some of my fondest comic artist memories. Then in 2014, we decided to give Canada another try.

2014-2017: This was a huge undertaking and for the first couple of years, we struggled to get by as newcomers in a completely new town and country! I thought that maybe I'd be able to connect with some local artists but each possibility withered up and disappeared. I sorely missed the comics community I was part of in Australia. I could fool myself that technically I was still part of it, but practically I was not. I couldn't go to the book launches, meetups, and workshops, etc. It was a bittersweet experience to watch from afar while new artists emerged and made successful strides in advancing comics in Australia. Slowly but surely as the kids were a little older and life settled a bit, my art practice started coming back to me. One big challenge I had to get past was my past work was sketchy and immediate, whereas now I had been trying a more polished approach. I think this was mostly born out of a false notion that if I could refine my art enough then perhaps I could get illustration works or be 'good enough' to get published. I later I realised this was killing the spirit of the art and I needed to find a balance between the two.

2018-2021: The next period was marked by two major events, moving again to a new town and discovering digital drawing. I dabbled a little in 2018, however it wasn't until I picked up an iPad Pro and Apple pencil and dove right into the app Procreate that things changed for me. I feel like in the past couple of years I have come back into my own with my art practice. I'm more confident about the art I make and what I want it to be, and I feel confident about the tools that I use. I have started a couple of new comic projects, some autobiographical and some fictional. I recently launched a new publishing initiative called Spare Parts Press and I'm excited about working with other artists from around the world.

I don't know what the next few years will bring. But I do know that I will be regularly publishing new work that feels like I'm creating the work of dreamt of for many years. looking back it appears that the period has mostly been around 3 years each. Which would suggest that I'm about to enter a new period if the trend holds up.

Note on my latest profile pic above: Over the years I've liked to change up my profile pic to represent my current work. The last time I made this change was after taking the advice from Andy.J.Pizza Creative Pep talk podcast to use a real image of yourself. At first, I was reluctant to do this as I much preferred using a drawing to immediately communicate that I was an artist. I then decided to combine the two together.

Comments

Thanks for reading...

Comments are always welcome. To subscribe via RSS, click here or sign up for my new publications' newsletter.

Popular Posts

Creating Screen tone effect in Photoshop

Making an ePub (Part One)

Making an ePub in Apple pages (Part Two)