2011 challenger : Jay Faulkner

Jay - Headshot

Hi there everyone, as you will no doubt have already gathered from the subject my name is Jay.  I attempted this thing last year and even though I didn’t finish all 30 characters I LOVED Tyler’s concept for 30Characters so much that I have come back for more even though I am not an artist! 🙂

… I suppose, at best, I would be willing to call myself an enthusiastic sketcher who happens to have a degree in art but, being honest, never has (or makes) the time to draw in order to improve.

That could be because I work full-time as an IT Services Manager, teach two martial art classes, run two indy publishing ventures, write my own fiction and still try to at least let my wife and kids (two boys – Mackenzie who is 4 years old and Nathaniel who is 2 years old) remember who I am 😉

Excuses aside I fully intend to do better than last year and, to that end, will have a piece of creative fiction written for each of my 30 characters and (Flying Spaghetti Monster willing) also some artwork to go with each and everyone of them … that’s the plan, at least but I also planned to spend the last couple of weeks researching and plotting out my characters – instead I spent the last couple of weeks pretty ill with bronchitis and 10 days in hospital being helped to breathe.

Hey – plans, ey!? 😉

Anyhoo, same as last time the honest reason for taking part in 30Characters is pretty simple: to have fun. I don’t have a comic, I am not planning to pitch for a comic, I am not thinking about going back to art full-time. I’m just here to put some of the ideas spinning around in my head down onto paper and see what they look like. I am pretty sure that they will be (mostly, at least) super-hero based, though I ‘may’ attempt to sketch out some of the characters from current and upcoming stories too.

If you want you can find out more by visiting www.jayfaulkner.com

For now though, and try to put something ‘arty’ into this introduction (as well as steal a phrase from all good kid’s TV shows) you can see some of my artistic attempts here – http://jayfaulkner.com/gallery/ – and, to whet your appetite, here are some sketches that I made ‘earlier’ 🙂

The next two images were created for Martin Eden, creator/owner of Spandex (http://www.spandexcomic.com), for a month long theme he called ‘Japandex’. In his own words this was “To celebrate the Spandex team’s trip to Tokyo in issue 2, Spandex creator Martin organised ‘Japandex’, a very special online gallery of Japanese-related art – with a Spandex twist!! The artwork was provided by some of the UK’s top artistic talent and debuted in June 2010. You can see it all here: http://spandexcomic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/japandex-thank-you-copy-copy.jpg

My contribution was my ‘take’ on Neon and Glitter, inspired by traditional Japanese images:

Category: 2011, About, Challenge Info, Participants