gosh! look at our nelson window!

This was the first part of the Gosh! London comics shop window project for Nelson Week, a scribble on a dinner napkin by our Nelson editor Woodrow Phoenix, after we had finished two full days in Leeds at Thought Bubble comics festival. (Well, Woodrow doesn’t really scribble, he draws quite carefully.)

And here’s an excellent video shot by Gosh’s Tom Crowley! You can read all about it over on the Gosh blog! And do come to Gosh tonight (1 Berwick Street in London’s Soho) at 6pm for our Nelson signing party, it’ll be good fun!

I’ll post a few more photos from our Monday painting session. Woodrow has posted a bunch more on Flickr here. I was just going to show up at the shop and paint something, but on the train ride in, I thought, hmm, I think I’d like to do a bit of pre-planning. So here’s what I sketched on the stretch between London Bridge and Charing Cross stations.


Woodrow was stuck on messy trains from out of town, so I had a chance to grab a muffin in the lovely coffee shop next to Gosh, Foxcroft & Ginger and work on my Nel sketch a bit more.

When Woodrow arrived and Tom at Gosh gave us our supplies, Posca pens, I remembered them well from my mural painting session at Game City (blog post about that here) and how much they need shaken to get the paint running. Shake, shake, shake. It turned into a sort of dance session, while Hayley Campbell tweeted this photo.

Then Will Morris arrived, with much more polished preparatory sketches. Will studied on the same MA course at Camberwell art college as I did, a few years later, under Janet Woolley, and we’re both big fans of her. Will’s work is lovely.

We decided the lettering had to come first, before the character paintings. And no one does lettering as well as Woodrow, he’s very exacting.

I asked him if ‘e’ was the hardest letter to draw, and he said, no, that ‘s’ is much trickier, getting the two curves just right.

We were painting on the inside of the window (so passers-by couldn’t pick it off) but I did a quick sketch in white on the outside of the window as a guide.

When JAKe arrived, here’s the sketch he made, drawing straight from the book:

Just like colouring Vern and Lettuce, I tackled the white bits first.

Here’s another view from inside the window. Dusk was encroaching, which made it harder to see the black paint. And the paint wasn’t always being kind to me, often when I’d lay it down, it would pick up the paint that was already there, giving the surface a kind of scratchy look when the light shone through it. For some reason, this didn’t seem to be happening to Will, his surface looked nice and matte. Ah, well.

Here’s Will, getting on with his grown-up Nel:

Woodrow pointed a visitor to some good books (including Nelson) while we were painting.

JAKe’s Nel:

Here’s a photo Woodrow took of Will and me:

Hope to see you at Gosh this evening!

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