Three quarters of this year were an unusable crawl, and the remaining quarter was working under an NDA, but for the holidays it’s personal program only, so the next* new years card is in progress–
I continue to work on a couple of stories after the new years one, and I continue to not want to share them before they are done — but I also get tired of only posting covers, so here’s a rough panel from one of them that doesn’t spoil anything.
Today’s small part of this year’s program of allowing myself to put in at least as much time and effort into personal work — off the clock, on my own time — as I would put in on work for others.
Or, since I can finally allow such a thought: more.
During the silence while I was finishing the A+M comic, I forgot to mark the occasion of the blog making it through a full year. Hooray. I still think it was a good idea.
So what now, in year two? More new pictures, hopefully, and maybe more personal stuff beyond the new years cards. But since new work doesn’t exist until it’s complete (I have by now finally learned not to announce anything except in retrospect), today a few more bits from the archive — one of the many obsolete versions of a next thing.
More impossible times lately, but trying to use the few OK minutes to work on the card. I missed pages. I only did two in all of 2023 (the previous card). Here’s to more than two in the new year, and I hope you’re all having a nice quiet time until then —
When I did the Inktober book back in 2017, I did some sketched-in copies, and then I colored a lot of those sketches for my own fun. There were enough of them for another book, but I don’t make sketchbooks. Yet I did do a mockup a couple of years ago [for redacted reasons], and I ran into that tonight while clearing out some shelves, and enjoyed seeing it again.
Today I did start the day with a “personal 30”, thirty minutes carved out of any viable work time, because I needed to draw something – anything – just for myself. What I draw for myself:
The other day I got really fed up again with only posting covers, them being the only new material to put up here.
I had this sketch around which seemed like an easy candidate to finish and make into a stand-alone picture: just two guys and a robot. You know, the sort of thing people post. Free-floating art on the internet. “Warmup” drawings. What ifs. Ads for more substantial things that don’t exist and probably never will.
I didn’t need it to mean anything, I didn’t even need to particularly like it. Just something small and sort of finished and new to put up1, a throwaway image.
This one could qualify as archival too, since it was drawn in 2021, but it’s personal work, and not out yet, so instead it’s a peek at the ongoing present, as I rework some of it this morning.
When I set up this new blog six months ago, I made a very conscious effort not to start with a big statement of intent. No manifesto about Why Blogs or I’m Leaving Social Media For Good or anything like that.
I just posted a current thing — a photo I took from the window of a moving car — and then posted a few quotes next, and didn’t make it a big deal in any way. No big plan, no attempts at comprehensiveness. I just needed it to exist without needing it to be anything in particular just yet.
What I was looking for was a better way of being online in some approximation of “real time.”1
Twitter is no longer an acceptable option, if it ever was. Its alternatives, even the good ones, all have the same problems — while they still serve some of the social functions, I need a better way of sharing work and pictures and thoughts in progress at my own pace, with more continuity, more permanence, and more depth (when needed)2.
The blog did already survive the threshold of “two posts, then a three year gap, then an apology for not posting, then death” that most blogs don’t, but now it feels like I do need to decide on -some- approach to it before it sort of peters out.
For artists and creative people, the easiest, go-to model for an “online presence” is to share “process.”
