Cornish Coastline

For the first unit of my MA course back in 2011 I decided to make a twelve page comic set on the Cornish coastline. It was a ghost story that featured some newlyweds and the harrowing events that befell them. Events that resulted in the groom becoming a kind of terrifying sad scarecrow ghost with a sack on his head who stood on the clifftops staring out to sea "contemplating the life he almost had, and the life that is now lost to him - even though his eyeballs have long since rotten away."

It was a story that tried to incorporate the three moods I've since realised I try to shoehorn into all my work - sadness, horror and comedy. It's no surprise that the story veered wildly in tone like a drunken toddler on a Segway trying to navigate a line of traffic cones (I'm assuming the toddler is on stilts in order to reach the handlebars).

I had fun doing it though, and spent a month or so visiting different areas of the coast for reference photos to use. Three of the pictures that came about from this are above. The first is the massive rock head that stands on a beach at Carnewas and is accessible by walking down the National Trust maintained Bedruthan stone steps carved into the rock of the cliffs. The second and third are from some (less impressive) bits of coast. When I wasn't hungover in my room with the curtains closed all day, Falmouth was a really nice place to study. As usual with old bits of artwork, I have recoloured the living Hell out of them on Photoshop.

And then, below is the least bad page from the comic. I barely got it completed in time and just managed to hand in a plastic carrier bag full of crappy black & white laser printed sheets about five minutes before the deadline. The finished piece was as good as that makes it sound.

I've been meaning to come back to this at some point, I guess... But that's probably not going to happen now. So I thought I might as well get some use out of what I have.