Category: get your story straight

  • christmas 2016

    An illustration of my graphic novel characters, Henry (a trans man) Electra (a trans woman), and Cooper (a nonbinary person), in various stages of undress on the back verandah of a weatherboard house. It’s decorated for Christmas. Everyone is sweating, and Electra is holding a glass of water that’s dripping with condensation. Between you and me, I would describe the atmosphere as “lightly horny”
    christmas 2016: no aircon in the sharehouse (2021)

    Believe it or not, drawing sweaty trans people is the meaning of Christmas 🧑‍🎄

  • designing a big gay sharehouse

    a dark sharehouse full of queer friends cooling off after a hot day. A trans woman at the entrance says, "welcome!"
    the sharehouse cutaway that made it into my graphic novel pitch.

    Like most millennials, I love staring at floor plans on real estate websites and imagining “”owning”” a “”home.”” I can finally excuse the psychic damage: it turns out this is a really useful trait for a cartoonist to have.

    The sharehouse is a recurring setting that represents authenticity and safety for my characters, so I need to know where everything is and where everything goes. This also helped me get a feel for all the housemates, who at this point existed as dot points only.

    a floor plan for a messy sharehouse, based off several real estate photos of actual houses for sale. Some of the houses have been knocked down and turned into shitty gentrified apartments! Boo!
    thank you to real estate websites, as well as to everyone who hasn’t renovated their bathroom

    My notes called for:

    Henry, Electra, Anira, Corey and Nassim live in the same sharehouse. Their ageing weatherboard house has a grungy, welcoming, down to earth vibe. The sharehouse is full of light and activity…sandwiched between a super fancy gentrified apartment block, where a house just like it was sold and knocked down, and a house owned by an old Italian couple with a bountiful garden.

    Henry's sharehouse exterior, with notes saying it's weatherboard, flaking, a bit wonky. Henry's room is very small and has second hand furniture.
    It’s more or less impossible to rent a place like this in Footscray now. Pour one out for the fallen 🥲

    The floorplan of the house shows that Henry is in the smallest room in what is technically a four bedroom house; he’s tucked away in the lowest rent room, a small once-storeroom at the back. The house overall hasn’t been redecorated or renovated at all since the 70s, and it’s full of mismatched second-hand furniture, fairy lights, milk crates as chairs, and pride flags. Almost all the furniture in this home was rescued out of hard rubbish on the side of the road.

    the sharehouse kitchen/lounge is based off a sharehouse I lived in once, which had a weird 70’s arch and a lounge room… window? situation?

    I really did love sharehousing, but wow… I think my biggest challenge as an artist is going to be representing a realistic mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.