Amber Carvan b. 1973

  • Artist (Cartoonist / Illustrator)
Sydney-based comic artist who began her first publication, Big Smoke, in 1995, Carvan has since worked as a producer with the Noise Festival and in 2002 she and Mandy Ord produced an autobiographical comic book called 'Brick Dog and Other Stories'. In 2007 Carvan started an online project called Comic Artist Rehab.
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Comic artist, artsworker and producer.

Amber started her first mini-comic, Big Smoke , in 1995 and went on to publish eight issues of the comic and a Big Smoke collection called Therapy: The least embarrassing comics from Big Smoke .
Carvan received significant attention through the 1998 Loud youth media arts festival. In November of that year her work appeared in the now defunct HQ magazine , she was profiled on radio station Triple J and appeared on the Saturday morning television show Recovery.
Amber was greatly inspired by the encouragement she received during and following Loud, and went on to work as a producer at the Noise festival (the successor to Loud). While at Noise she produced a range of books that profiled the work of young writers and artists including the women’s comic anthology How Comics Can Change the World .

Amber has also self-published a standalone mini-comic called Back in the Driver’s Seat (1996) and co-edited Milk Bar – The Australian Journal of Small Press with Richard Vogt.
Carvan’s comics have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Girlfrenzy , HQ Magazine , The Australian Journal of Career Development , How Comics Can Change the World , One , Nice , Pure Evil , Silent Army , Pantry , Circumstantial Evidence , Milk Bar, My Soiled Sample , Dee Vee and the French comic anthology Stereoscomic .
In 2002 she received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to produce an autobiographical comic book with Mandy Ord . The resulting work, Brick Dog and Other Stories , was published by Pluto Press in 2002.

Since 2002 Carvan has pursued an interest in rules-based autobiographical comics. In 2007 she started an online project called Comic Artist Rehab – a space where slack comic artists are encouraged to draw more often than they would otherwise. The program, which runs monthly, co-opts four artists to each draw a four-panel comic every four days for four weeks.

Carvan also draws a comic weekly and publishes it on her website.

Writers:
Carvan, Amber
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2008

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