All sorts of familiar things making (re)appearances! It’s fun to draw circles.
Holiday shoppers! This is your last week to use the code SPINOZA in the store to get 20% of your order. If you’ve already got the delightfulness on offer there, keep on eye on my Etsy store today. Starting at 12pm Pacific, I’ll be posting over a dozen itty-bitty, one-of-a-kind watercolor paintings, most 2.5×3.5 inches, for sale throughout the day! I don’t sell art very often, and these paintings are fun because they’re way more affordable than bigger pieces.
Also! Last weekend I appeared on the 3rd annual Freelancer Roundtable, hosted by Katie Lane of Work Made For Hire and featuring fellow knuckleheads Bill Mudron and Erika Moen. We answered audience questions and said inappropriate things and just generally had a delightful time. You can listen to it in audio form or watch our antics on camera at the bottom of the Podcast page.
Lastly, there’s a new set of Notes up, for pages 210-219! Possibly the sauciest set of notes I’ve written yet.
Some of this might be starting to look familiar. I suggest you maybe reread the Prologue, if it’s been awhile. (Don’t let that five year-old art stop you! Agh, my eyes.) Also, man, bunnies just have no kind of luck in this comic, do they? I swear there’s no personal vendetta at work.
Portlanders! Please join me and everybody else who is cool at Comics Underground, next Saturday (11/17) at the Jack London bar, where the fantastic Everett Patterson and I will be doing a reading of Outfoxed. I’ll be sharing the stage with several irritatingly talented people, including my studiomate Ron Chan and friend Mike Russell! It’ll be swell.
In the meantime, I put up a series of 12 Western-themed illustrations I did for a roleplaying game this fall on my Flickr stream – I’m fond of how they turned out. Click on the preview below to visit:
We’re really getting somewhere now, aren’t we? Heavens have mercy. (They won’t.)
I’m a little wonky under the hood this week, so I won’t try to dredge a big blog post up out of my fuzzy brain. Enjoy the page, and I will see you all next week for more fun with the Nolte family.
Meanwhile, here is Mama Quilla, an Inca goddess – click to read a little more about her and see her full-size.
Rector Nolte is having a very, very bad day. It will probably not get any better. I never had any particular fondness in the past for drawing aggravated old dudes of post-boxer physique, but he honestly might be my favorite thing to draw. Go figure.
As my aside for this week, I thought I’d point out a nice article that Laura Hudson recently posted on ComicsAlliance. She asked nearly a dozen comics creators and editors – including at least four people I can personally confirm are awesome – to sound off about how superhero comics could do a better job at depicting female characters. I’m don’t follow many capes ‘n tights titles these days, but there are lots of good, thoughtful suggestions in there that apply to any storytelling genre. Well worth the read!
Lastly, I’ve been drawing goddesses from around the world as a warmup exercise. Here are the first two – click to find out who they are and which mythology they come from!
Taking the summer off of updating Family Man, and away from the internet in general, allowed me to do a lot of things. Foremost among them was getting married, which was fantastic. Workwise, I devoted a lot of time to hashing out plot details and writing new material for Family Man. And, in the category of “So Fun It Didn’t Feel Like Work” is Outfoxed.
Several years ago I wrote a script for a short comic – a cynical little fairytale about a girl and a fox. It’s probably the tidiest idea I’ve ever come up with for a story, and my original intent was to draw it in 14 pages and submit it to the Flight anthology. But paying work and personal life intervened every time the antho deadline came around. The constant scramble of a freelance career made it hard for me to justify spending time on “personal” projects other than Family Man.
Of course, I realize now this is a terrible attitude; the thing that keeps you alive as an artist is making new stuff, different stuff, and giving yourself the chance to remember why you enjoy what you do in the first place. You have to play. You have to force yourself to play, if necessary.
So I had three months of “break”, stretched before me. Realistically, I couldn’t spend it all in isolation at the writing room at the library; I’m the sort of person who starts having aggressive conversations with inanimate objects after six hours alone.
So I said what the hell, and decided to devote a month of studio time to finally drawing Outfoxed. To help break through my tendency to second-guess myself I asked a studiomate to be my “teacher”, giving me deadlines and offering critiques when I hit milestones. I expanded the comic to 20 pages to lower the panels-per-page count, designed everything in a drawing style that I find fun and easy, took up the missions of learning how to ink with a brush, letter with an Ames guide, tone with a single Pantone spot color, and draw to standard comics dimensions (big and tall). All sorts of big-kid stuff that I never gave myself the breathing room to learn.
And it was a blast.
I hope you enjoy it. it’s all online now:
