Tiny paintings! These are the ooooonly ones left from nearly twenty that I made for sale at conventions this year. They’re all 2.5×3.5” (artist trading card size) watercolor originals.
Wouldn’t one of them look nice on your desk? For under $20? Yes. Yes is the answer. They’re in my Etsy store now!
Finishing the website and putting together a book pitch have delayed me for another week. But that’s okay, because it gives me the opportunity to make some long overdue fan-art for the best ever webcomic set in Ancient Rome: SPQR Blues by Klio!
Yessir, that’s Vesuvius in the background. The volcano is to SPQR Blues what werewolves are to Family Man: you never know when it’s going to kick in.
SPQR Blues, beyond being a great ensemble soap opera, is also one of those rare works of historical fiction that make the time and place it depicts feel both cozily familiar…and completely foreign.
Klio’s delicate and conservative linework can be consumed in large doses with no dangerous side effects, and the obstacles and heartbreaks of daily life in a complicated society make for very tasty reading as well.
There’s an immense archive available for your reading pleasure, so shoo! Go read!
I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work. To heck with that! If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.
At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).
So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction. Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.
This week: Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.
What a wonderful character design! That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character. (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!) I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.
I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing. It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive. A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.