This is the illustration I did for the invite for my daughter’s upcoming 2nd birthday party. Someone is a little Elmo-obsessed. The blank area at the bottom is where the event information would go – didn’t seem right to post here. I’m actually not all that happy with the caricature of my daughter though. I did a much better job on last year’s invite which you can see here.
Recently, I was honored to be invited by the folks at Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find to appear at this month’s Charlotte Mini-Con as a creator. This will be my second convention ever and the second in the span of one month. I’ll be printing up new copies of the first “issue” of my graphic novel, Nathan Sorry, as well as some freebie postcards which I will preview here soon (or you can see them sooner by hopping on over to the Nathan Sorry Facebook page).
Also appearing at the convention will be considerably bigger local names than myself including Jason Latour, Andy Smith, Dustin Harbin and more.
All the pertinent info is in the flyer that appears above.
These are some sample images from my graphic novel, Nathan Sorry, which of course can be read here where I publish new pages weekly. These excerpts serve the purpose of giving you a sense of the style of the art and the plot of the story.
Click on any of the images to view them at full size.
Nathan Sorry homepage image
More images below:
So, my first appearance at a comics convention went pretty well. I only sold two copies of Nathan Sorry but more importantly I had a blast hanging out with my Sketch Charlotte buddies, Tom Davidson and Eraklis Petmezas. And I got a taste of what it’s like sitting on the other side of the table at one of these things. It’s tiring but in a good way.
The best part of the day though was when my two biggest fans showed up sporting surprise Nathan Sorry t-shirts.
This coming Sunday, December 27th, I’ll be making my first ever appearance at a comic convention as a creator. The Charlotte Comic-Con is a small local convention of which I’ve never attended but have heard good things about. I’ll be there with Tom Davidson and Eraklis Petmezas of the Sketch Charlotte crew and I’ll be signing and selling copies of my first printing of Nathan Sorry Part 1. It’s a little black and white number, printed in a no-frills, mini-comics style but I think it looks good.
It will be really interesting to see what it’s like being at a Con on the other side of the table. I’m looking forward to it.
If you’re in Charlotte over the Christmas weekend stop by and say hi. Here are the details: http://www.charlottecomicon.com/
Recently I ran my first ever ad campaign on the ad network Project Wonderful for my online graphic novel, Nathan Sorry. It was fairly successful, I guess. Didn’t bring in a ton of visitors or increase my regular traffic significantly but I know it brought in at least a couple of new readers and that’s what counts. I’m pretty happy with how they look. After years of doing ad banners for clients it was weird to finally do some for myself. I went for that popular movie poster approach of focusing each ad on a different character and an intriguing quote to go along with it. I might blow out this idea further by getting a bunch of business cards printed up soon with Moo. For an affordable price you can get 50 cards all with different images on the front. Perfect for this sort of thing (though I don’t have 50 different characters so I would probably do more like 10 different cards). More on that later.
I’ve been a little lax with updating this blog recently but it’s not that I haven’t been busy producing work. Just too busy to show any of it off. But I’ve vowed to start making the blog active again and I have a number of items of news to talk about in the coming weeks.
So, to start off I figured I would update my design portfolio on richbarrettdesign.com with some recent projects I’ve done. AAA Vacations and Wharton School of Business are the two new additions. Plus I updated the image for Minyanville.com. This is the third time I’ve updated this particular image because it is the third time I’ve redesigned their site in the past few years.
Jump over to richbarrettdesign.com to see larger images.
I was recently interviewed among a handful of other designers by the website ReadWriteWeb.com about designing web apps. It’s a really interesting read, especially I guess – since the article is aimed at them - if you’re a developer or an entrepeneur who may not think first about aesthetics. I’m introduced as the “veteran” creative director which I guess means I was the old guy in the group.
Give it a read here.
