Lucy Bellwood, an adventure cartoonist, remains an adventure-lover at heart, the reason why she penned ‘Baggywrinkles: A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea’, where she describes living and working on an 18th Century replica sailing vessel. She went on to write about rafting through the Grand Canyon, crossing the Pacific on an oceanographic research voyage, sailing aboard the last wooden whaling ship, and the like.
Lucy Bellwood 100 Demon Dialogues was a change of track from adventure comics. The book delves upon our secret fears. According to her, everybody has a small, scared person who just wants to make friends with inner demons. And the book is about cohabiting with an inner critic and accepting our flaws.
It would seem that Bellwood always wanted to be a cartoonist, but the truth is she never knew where her destiny would take her. As a kid, she felt uncomfortable with kids her own age and drawing pictures helped her avoid people. According to her, drawing pictures of people was her way of fitting into her social milieu. She thought if she drew people, they’ll like her.
Art and drawing were in Bellwood’s blood since her mother was a cartoonist and had made a business out of it. And she learned the ropes as a creator, simply by accompanying her mother and helping her by selling mugs, t-shirts and greeting cards printed with her cartoons.
Seeing Bellwood’s aptitude for drawing, her mother made her an apprentice of a family friend called Eben Matthews, who was into comics, illustration, web development and everything creative. When he saw her anime-influenced fan art, he didn’t criticize her but guided her away from it to start from a scratch. He so sharpened her technical skills that at the age of 10, she was already onto Elfwood and DeviantArt.
Bellwood’s inspiration were creators, such as Aaron Diaz, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, and many more. When she was a freshman at Reeds college, she attended her first comics convention – the Stumptown Comics Festival. She got serious about comics when she took a summer course at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Here she got to learn not only the technicalities of comic-making but also tracking her income and balancing deadlines.
Bellwood follows things that she’s curious about and that’s how her adventure comics came into being. However, it’s still a problem for her to distinguish between Lucy Bellwood artist and Lucy Bellwood demons of ‘100 Demon Dialogues’!
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